Rankwell

Titles and descriptions that earn clicks

How to write the two pieces of text that decide whether anyone visits your page, with lengths, patterns and the mistakes that repeat across whole sites.

17 September 2026 · 2 min read

Your title and description are your advert in the results page. They are also the cheapest thing on your site to improve: no design work, no developers, minutes per page.

Titles

Length: aim for 30 to 60 characters. Longer titles are cut off, and the cut usually falls on the part that would have convinced someone.

Order: put the specific words first. Search results are scanned, not read.

  • Weak: Acme Ltd | Quality Products for Every Home and Garden Since 1998
  • Better: Hand-forged garden tools, made in Tunis | Acme

Uniqueness: every page needs its own title. Duplicate titles are the most common problem on shops and blogs, where a template adds the site name and nothing else. If two pages share a title, search engines must guess which to show, and they often pick the wrong one.

Patterns that work

Page type Pattern Example
Product Product, key detail, brand `Chemex 6-cup pour over, glass handle
Category Category, qualifier, brand `Pour over coffee makers, from 40 DT
Guide What the reader gets How to brew pour over coffee: ratios and timing
Local Service, place Online maths tutoring for bac students in Tunisia

Avoid stuffing keywords. Garden tools, tools for garden, gardening tools Tunis reads as spam to people and is treated as such by search engines.

Descriptions

Length: 70 to 160 characters. Shorter says too little; longer gets cut.

Content: say what the page offers and give a reason to choose it. Prices, delivery, guarantees and specifics beat adjectives.

  • Weak: We offer the best products with great quality and excellent service.
  • Better: Hand-forged tools with a 10-year guarantee, shipped across Tunisia in 48 hours. Free returns within 30 days.

One per page. A description repeated across 200 pages makes every one of your results look interchangeable.

If you leave it empty, the search engine writes one from the page. Sometimes that is fine. Often it grabs the cookie banner, the menu, or the first sentence of a filter list.

The mistakes that repeat across whole sites

These are template problems, not page problems, which is why they appear hundreds of times at once:

  • The site name at the start of every title, eating the visible characters.
  • Category pages with a generic description for every filter combination.
  • Blog posts with the site tagline as the description.
  • Titles built from a product code rather than its name.

Fix the template, and hundreds of pages improve in one change.

Check yours

Search site:yoursite.com in Google and read your results as a stranger. Cut-off titles and odd snippets show up immediately.

For a full list, Rankwell's site audit reports every page with a missing, duplicate, too long or too short title or description, grouped so you can see whether it is a template problem or a page problem. Once the pages are right, keyword research tells you which words belong in them.

Common questions

Does Google always show my title?
No. It rewrites titles when it thinks another wording matches the search better, often using your H1. A clear, specific title is rewritten less often.
Do meta descriptions affect rankings?
Not directly. They affect how many people click your result, which is worth just as much.

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