How Google uses your title tags and meta descriptions
“Why’s Google showing the wrong headline for our page?” It comes up more often than you’d think. A roofer writes a careful page title, checks the results a week later and finds Google has swapped it for a line from halfway down the page. Nothing’s broken. Google treats your title tag and meta description as suggestions and makes its own mind up about what to show. Once you know how it makes that call, you can write ones it’ll actually use. And ones people want to click.
In brief
- The headline in a Google result often comes from your title tag, but Google can and does pick something else.
- Keep titles short, specific and different on every page. Repeated words and copy-paste templates can get rewritten.
- The grey text underneath mostly comes from your page copy, so a meta description just hands Google another option.
- Search Console shows which pages get seen and then skipped. Start there.
What Google shows in a search result
A normal result has three parts. At the top is the site name, which Google works out for your whole site, largely from your home page and how other sites refer to you. Under that sits the clickable headline, which Google calls a ‘title link’. Then there’s a couple of lines of grey text, known as the snippet.
Your title tag is the bit of code meant to feed that headline. Visitors don’t see it on the page itself. It turns up in the browser tab and in search results. Your meta description is meant to feed the snippet. Neither is an order Google has to follow. They’re hints, and Google weighs them up against everything else it can see. If you want the wider picture of how pages get found and ranked in the first place, our plain-English guide to SEO for business websites walks through it.
Where the headline comes from
Picking a title link is a fully automated job at Google. Your title tag is one source among several. Google also looks at things like the main visible title on the page, headings like the H1, any ‘og:title’ tag set up for social sharing, other large or styled text, the rest of the page copy and the wording of links that point to the page. So if your title tag says one thing and the rest of the page says another, don’t be surprised when Google sides with the page.
There’s no fixed character limit for a title tag, either. Google trims the headline as needed, usually to fit whatever screen it’s showing on. That’s why a title can look complete on a laptop and get chopped off on a phone. Put the words that matter first and it rarely bites.
Why Google rewrites titles
Rewrites often come down to ordinary, everyday slips. Google’s own documentation on title links runs through them, and you’ll probably recognise a few.
The half-empty title is a classic. A page called ‘| Your Firm Name’ tells nobody anything. Out-of-date titles get swapped too. Think of a holiday let’s ‘Summer 2025 prices’ page, where the heading now says 2026 and the title tag never got the memo. Then there’s the title that doesn’t match the page at all, usually because someone rewrote the copy and forgot the tag.
Templates cause trouble on bigger sites. Picture a fabrication firm with three hundred product pages, all titled ‘Steel fabrication | Product | Company name’ with only a part number changing. Google calls that sort of repeated wording boilerplate, and it’s a common reason a title gets rewritten. It also struggles when a page has no obvious main heading. Several lines of text, all the same size and weight. Which one’s the real title? Google may simply take the first.
How to write a title Google keeps
Say what the page is. Google asks for titles that are descriptive and concise, so ‘Home’ or ‘Services’ won’t cut it. ‘Boiler servicing and repairs’ tells a searcher exactly what they’ll get. Put your business name at the start or end, split off with a hyphen, colon or pipe. Keep the longer brand line for the home page. Repeated on every page, it looks samey when several of your pages turn up for one search.
Don’t stuff it. Cramming ‘plumber’ into a title four times is the sort of repetition Google warns can make a result look spammy. And make every title different, so a physio clinic’s back pain page and its sports injury page don’t both end up called ‘Physiotherapy’. A clear title that describes the page is also one of the basic requirements in WCAG 2.2, the web’s accessibility standard, so it helps people using screen readers as well.
Check the H1 agrees with the title. They needn’t match word for word. They should obviously be about the same thing. If you’re planning a new site, put a working title for each key page into your website brief so it’s settled before anyone opens a design file.
Meta descriptions and why Google often ignores them
The snippet is mostly built from the page itself. Google sometimes uses your meta description when it might give a more accurate summary than anything it can lift from the copy. Snippets can also change with the search. Someone searching for a restaurant’s gluten-free options might see a line about allergens taken straight from the menu page, while someone typing the restaurant’s name might see the description.
So why bother writing one? Because when Google does use it, it’s your pitch, in your words. There’s no length limit on a meta description, though the snippet gets trimmed to fit the device. A couple of sentences that sum up the page is plenty.
Google’s own example makes the point well. A bare list like ‘Sewing supplies, yarn, colored pencils, sewing machines’ is the weak version. The better one says what you can buy, when the shop’s open and where it is. For product pages Google suggests details like price, age or manufacturer. On a service page the equivalent might be the area you cover or how quickly you reply to enquiries.
Give every important page its own description. One description copied across the whole site defeats the point. A shop with thousands of products can generate them from its product data, and Google encourages that on big database-driven sites. What it doesn’t want is long strings of keywords dressed up as a description.
There are controls if you ever need them. A ‘nosnippet’ rule stops a snippet showing at all, ‘max-snippet’ caps how long it can be, and ‘data-nosnippet’ hides one section of a page. Most businesses will never touch them.
Checking which titles earn the click
Open the Performance report in Google Search Console and click the Pages tab. For each page you’ll see impressions, which is how often it appeared in results, and clicks, which is how often someone chose it. Click-through rate is simply clicks divided by impressions. Average position tells you roughly where it sat. Seeing more impressions and fewer clicks than you used to? AI Overviews may be part of the reason, and our piece on what AI Overviews mean for your traffic explains how Search Console counts them.
Look for pages with lots of impressions and hardly any clicks. Google already thinks they’re relevant. People are just picking someone else. Check the average position too, mind. If the page sits well down the results, the title may not be the problem. Filter to that page and switch to the Queries tab to see what they were actually typing. If it’s ’emergency electrician’ and your title says ‘Electrical services’, you’ve found your fix. Running Google Ads as well? The paid side has its own version of this list, and our guide to negative keywords and the search terms report shows how to stop paying for the wrong ones.
Change a handful of titles, note the date, then leave them alone for a few weeks before you judge. Tweaking every other day tells you nothing. The wording of the links between your own pages feeds into this as well, since Google reads link text when it builds title links.
Sometimes a page gets the clicks and still no enquiries. That’s a different problem, and it’s where conversion rate optimisation takes over.
Getting your titles and descriptions sorted
On a small site, this is an afternoon with Search Console open beside you. On a site with hundreds of pages it needs doing properly, page by page, starting with the ones that bring in work. An accountant’s site, a guest house’s, an engineering firm’s. The fixes are usually small once someone’s spotted them.
If you’d rather hand it over, titles, descriptions and the pages behind them are all part of our SEO services for business websites. Get in touch and we’ll tell you how your pages are showing up in Google right now.
Keep reading
- SEO for Business Websites
- Core Web Vitals Explained for Business Owners
- Getting More Enquiries From Your Website
