Writing title tags for a local business, with before and after

Your title tag is the blue clickable line in the search results. For most people who ever encounter your business, it is the only sentence about you they will read, and it is competing against nine others on the same screen.

Here are six real patterns, rewritten, with the reasoning. Read the reasoning rather than copying the format, because the format that works depends on what your competitors are doing.

The working limit

Titles are cut by pixel width, not character count, so there is no exact number. Around 60 characters is where most titles start being truncated, and it is a useful working limit precisely because it forces a decision about what matters. The title is also the field Google's local algorithm reads first when deciding what a page is about.

One thing worth knowing: Google will replace your title with something else if it decides yours is a poor description of the page. It says so openly. A title stuffed with repeated keywords is one of the reliable ways to get yours discarded, which means the effort spent stuffing it produces a title you did not write.

Six rewrites

1. The one that says nothing

Home | Mill Road Plumbing

Emergency Plumber in Chermside | Mill Road Plumbing

"Home" describes the file, not the business. Every character before the brand name is now doing work: what you do, where you do it, and the fact that you handle emergencies, which is the search that pays best.

2. The one that stuffs

Plumber Brisbane | Plumbing Brisbane | Brisbane Plumbers | Best Plumber

Brisbane Plumber, Same Day Callouts | Mill Road Plumbing

The first version is 71 characters of repetition, most of it cut off before anyone sees it, and it is a strong candidate for being rewritten by Google. The second says the same thing once and spends the space it saved on a reason to click.

3. The one where every page is identical

Mill Road Plumbing | Brisbane's Trusted Plumbers Since 2009

Hot Water System Repairs & Replacement | Mill Road Plumbing

The before was the title on all fourteen pages of the site. Identical titles tell a search engine your pages are interchangeable, and they tell a searcher nothing about which of your fourteen pages answers their question.

4. The one that leads with the brand

Mill Road Plumbing and Gas Services Pty Ltd - Blocked Drains

Blocked Drain Clearing, Northside Brisbane | Mill Road

Unless people already search for you by name, your brand is the least useful thing you can put in the first five words. The service goes first because that is what was searched for and that is what the eye is scanning for.

5. The one that is too clever

When Things Go Wrong, We Make Them Right | Mill Road

Burst Pipe Repairs, 24/7 | Mill Road Plumbing, Brisbane

A slogan works on a billboard because the reader has nothing else to look at. In a list of ten results it is the one that does not answer the question.

6. The one that misses the qualifier

Plumbing Services | Mill Road Plumbing

Licensed Plumber, No Callout Fee | Mill Road, Brisbane

Two qualifiers, both of which are decision criteria for the reader. Licence answers a trust question; no callout fee answers a money question. If either is untrue, do not write it, and find one that is. The same rule governs the schema you put behind the page: never claim in markup what the page cannot show.

The order to put things in

1. 01What you do, in the words the customer used.
2. 02Where, if location is part of the decision, which for local businesses it usually is. Use the areas you actually work in, the same ones declared on your listing, not the ones you wish you did.
3. 03One qualifier that separates you: a licence, an availability, a speed, an absence of a fee.
4. 04Your business name, at the end, unless you are already known by it.

The description underneath the title does a different job and is worth writing separately. Both sit inside the wider on-page work, and if you are writing titles for a set of location pages, read this first.