The title and meta description are your advert in the search results. You can rank third and still lose every click to the site ranking fifth, purely because their listing reads better.
This is also the cheapest SEO work there is. No new pages, no links, no waiting — a rewrite can change traffic within days of Google recrawling.
- 1
Find the pages losing clicks first
In Search Console, look at pages ranking in the top ten with a click-through rate under about two per cent. Those are pages Google already rates that people are choosing not to click. Fixing those beats writing anything new, because the visibility is already paid for.
- 2
Put the actual subject at the front
Titles are truncated around 60 characters and read left to right. Lead with what the page is about, not your business name. "Resin Driveways in Eastbourne | EDP" works; "EDP — Quality You Can Trust" tells a searcher nothing about whether this page answers their question.
- 3
Match the searcher’s words, not your internal ones
If people search "driveway cost", the title should contain "cost", not "investment" or "pricing structure". Google bolds matching terms in the results, which draws the eye. This is not keyword stuffing — it is answering in the language the question was asked in.
- 4
Write the description as a promise, not a summary
Around 155 characters. Say what the reader will get and why this page is worth their click. Include the thing they are anxious about: the price range, the timescale, the area you cover. A description that resolves the doubt gets the click.
- 5
Make every title on the site distinct
Duplicate titles across pages confuse both searchers and Google, which has to guess which page to show. Search Console flags duplicates under the Pages report. Templated titles across many similar pages are the usual culprit.
- 6
Add the differentiator that survives a scan
A searcher compares ten near-identical listings in about three seconds. One concrete detail — the area, a guarantee, a timescale, "family run since 1998" — is what breaks the tie. Vague quality claims appear in every competing listing and so distinguish nothing.
- 7
Check what Google actually shows
Google rewrites titles and descriptions when it thinks it can do better, which is often. Search your target term after a couple of weeks and see what appears. A rewritten title is usually a sign yours did not match what people were searching for.
What good looks like
A useful benchmark: a page ranking in the top three should typically see click-through rates well into double figures. Sitting at three or four per cent in position two almost always means the listing is not selling the click.
Where to change them
Most content management systems have dedicated SEO title and meta description fields. Use those rather than relying on the page heading — the heading and the search listing have different jobs and rarely want identical wording.
Frequently asked questions
Not directly. It affects whether people click, which is what you actually want. A page nobody clicks earns nothing from ranking well.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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