The title tag and meta description are the only thing someone reads before deciding whether to open your site or the one below it. They take ten minutes per page and almost nobody touches them.
What the title tag and meta description are
When you search for something, each result shows two things: one large clickable line and two lines of text underneath. The first comes from the page title; the two lines come from the meta description.
Both live in the code, in the head of each page, and they are not the same as the headline you read inside. A page can have a beautiful headline on screen and a browser tab that says «Home». Google uses the one in the head, not the other.
The detail almost nobody knows: they are written one per page. There is no single title for the whole site. There is one for the home page, one for each service, one for each article.
How to see your own title tag and meta description
From the search box
Type your business name into Google and read what comes up. That blue line and those two grey lines are yours. Repeat with an inner page, a service page for instance, searching for it by name. If both show the same thing, you have already found a problem.
From your website manager
Nearly every content manager has a section per page, usually called SEO or «metadata», with two fields: title and description. If they are empty, the system invents the title from the page name and the description simply does not exist. You can also see them in the browser tab: whatever it says up there is the title.
How to write a good title tag
Length: around 60 characters
Google does not cut by letter count but by how wide the text is on screen, so the number is a guide. Around 60 characters works; past that the end turns into an ellipsis and the useful part disappears. On a phone the cut comes sooner.
Order: what you do first, your name after
The structure that works best for us is simple: service, town and brand, in that order. «Blind repairs in Palamós | Company name» tells someone exactly what they will find. The other way round, starting with the brand, that person reads your name and cannot tell whether you are who they are after. Your brand is searched for by people who already know you, and they will find you anyway.
Which exact word goes at the front is a different question, and we cover it in how to choose your keywords. The short rule: the one a customer would use on the phone, not the one in your internal catalogue.
What does not work
- «Home», «Start» or «Main page». Nobody searches for it and it is what content managers put in by default.
- Repeating the brand across twenty pages and little else.
- Piling up words separated by dashes. It reads badly and Google usually replaces it.
- Promising what is not there. If the title says «from 9 €» and the page never mentions it, that person leaves and the click was worth nothing.
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How to write the meta description
There is room for around 155 characters, and it helps to see them for what they are: an advert you do not pay for. The rule is to say something concrete that the site next to you is not saying. A ballpark price, a lead time, the area you cover, a guarantee, whether you take emergencies. Google's documentation on snippets puts it differently: it should genuinely summarise that page.
One point worth being clear about: the meta description does not rank a page on its own. It does not push you up or down. What it does is decide whether, out of everyone showing up, they pick you — and that shows up in the end anyway.
And one thing that always gets forgotten: write each description for that specific page, not for the business as a whole. The one on the pricing page talks about prices. The one on contact gives opening hours and the neighbourhood.
One per page, and what happens when they repeat
Twenty pages with the same title is close to having no title at all. Google cannot tell which one to show and ends up choosing for you, or stitching together bits of the text. If you have one page per service — which you should — each one carries its own, with its own word and its own town.
It happens a lot on bilingual sites: the content gets translated and the metadata stays in the original language, or empty. We go into it in a website in Catalan and Spanish.
Why Google changes what you wrote
It happens, and it is not your fault. Google rewrites the title when it is very long, when it repeats words, when it does not describe the page, or when it finds text inside that fits the search better. It explains this on its page about title links.
The practical conclusion is not to give up: it is that it starts from whatever you write. A short, clear title that describes the page is respected almost every time. A hundred-and-twenty-character one with the brand in it three times, almost never.
How to tell whether it worked
This can be measured, for free. The Search Console performance report gives you, page by page, how often you appeared and how many clicks you got. Note the numbers for the three or four pages you care about, change their titles and descriptions, and look again four weeks later.
What you want is clicks going up without appearances going up. That means the same people who used to scroll past are now coming in. If everything rises at once, congratulations, but then the credit belongs to something else. That is what knowing where your customers come from is about.
Title tag and meta description mistakes we see every week
- A whole site with one title: the business name and nothing more.
- Empty descriptions on every page except the home page.
- The template's own title: «My WordPress site» is alive on more websites than you would think.
- Metadata written six years ago, with an old phone number or a service you no longer offer.
- Descriptions that are just the first paragraph copied over, cut off mid-sentence.
What we check when we build a site
- That every page has its own title and description, written by hand.
- That none of them repeats across two pages.
- That the title fits by width, checked on a phone.
- That the description says something concrete rather than stacking adjectives.
- That both exist in both languages if the site is bilingual.
What having this in order costs
Writing the metadata is included when we build the site, within the published plans: 100 € a month for a one-page landing and 200 € for a site of up to ten pages. The presence plans at 400, 750 and 1,500 € add monthly articles, the Google listing and campaigns. All excluding VAT, with no lock-in and migration included.
If you already have a site and only want this part, it falls under SEO work: we go through it page by page and leave it written. It is not a months-long project.
The five-minute check
- Search for your business on Google and read the title. Does it say what you do?
- Now search for an inner page. Does it show the same thing as the home page?
- Look at the browser tab on three different pages. Does each one say something different?
- Read the two grey lines. Did somebody write them, or are they a chunk cut out of the text?
If any of that fails, you know where to start on Monday. And if you would rather we looked at it, send us your website address over WhatsApp: we will tell you which pages are unwritten and what we would put there, with no commitment.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.