Meta titles and descriptions: what an audit of 12 of our own sites found

A title and meta description audit across twelve sites we build and run found problems on ten of them, and almost none of those problems were written by hand. They came from the template that builds the tag. One blog layout that adds a brand suffix to every headline, or one generator that never trims a long summary, produces the same fault on dozens of pages at once. So the fix is usually one change in one file, not a page-by-page rewrite.

What we checked

On 12 October we ran our audit tool, squirrelscan, over twelve of our own sites. Its rules flag a title shorter than 30 or longer than 75 characters, and a description shorter than 120 or longer than 160. Those are the tool's thresholds, not Google's. Google does not publish a character limit, and it rewrites snippets when it thinks another part of the page answers the search better. The thresholds are still a reasonable proxy for "this will probably be cut off or wasted".

Three more sites were queued in the same batch and had not started when we pulled the results, so this is twelve sites with data, not fifteen.

What came back

The long descriptions were the biggest group:

• One builder site had 48 descriptions over 160 characters, with some blog posts at 225 to 229.
• pagecog.com.au had 36 over, including the home page at 181.
• A pest control site had 22 over, and a carpentry site had 18.
• A legal services site had 20 over, plus three pages sharing one identical description.
• An appliance repair site had 9 over, and a building information site had 7.

Titles were a smaller problem but more instructive. On the appliance repair site, seven news posts had titles of 78 to 115 characters. The 115 character one repeated the brand name twice, because the headline already ended in the business name and the template added it again.

The opposite fault showed up on the builder site's www host, where suburb pages had titles like "Granny Flats" plus a suburb name at 18 characters, with no service qualifier and no brand. On a second appliance repair site two pages shared one title. A swimwear label's privacy page title was 25 characters.

Two sites came back clean on both titles and descriptions: a workwear supplier site we had just rebuilt, and a food business site.

Our own site was in the list. pagecog.com.au had 37 description problems, nearly all blog posts and the home page.

How Google treats the tags you write

Neither tag is a command. Google builds the title it shows from your title tag, your headline and other signals, and it often replaces a description with a passage from the page that matches the search. A clean tag raises the odds that what appears is what you intended. It does not guarantee it. The practical way to see the result for your own site is to search for a few of your pages by name and read what actually shows up, then compare it with what you wrote.

Duplicates matter for a different reason. Three pages on the legal services site shared one description, and two pages on an appliance repair site shared a title. When pages describe themselves identically, nothing in the result tells a searcher which one to open.

Why a template is usually the cause

When one fault appears on 48 pages with similar wording, nobody typed it 48 times. Typically one of three things is happening:

1. The description is generated from the opening paragraph or an excerpt field, and nothing trims it.
2. The title is the headline plus a fixed suffix, and the suffix pushes long headlines over.
3. A fallback value, such as the site description, fills in wherever a page has none, so several pages share it.

Writing 48 better descriptions by hand fixes today's pages and leaves the generator producing the next 48 problems. The audit's recommendation was to cap length in the code that writes the tag, at about 155 characters, and to drop the brand suffix when the headline is already long. That is a change you make once.

A worked check you can repeat

You do not need an audit tool for a first pass on a small site.

1. Open the page source for your home page, one service page and one blog post, and search for <title> and name="description".
2. Count the characters. Paste each into a character counter if you like.
3. Check that the three are different from each other, and that none of them is blank or a leftover from the theme.
4. Look at how the brand appears. If it shows up twice, or the title is mostly brand, the template needs a look.

If all three look right, check a few more pages from the same template. A fault in the blog template will not show on your home page.

What not to expect

Fixing these tags will not by itself move a page up the results. A description affects whether someone clicks your listing, and a title does the same job plus signals what the page covers. Neither is where a page stuck on page five gets rescued.

They are still worth fixing, because they are cheap, and because a snippet that ends mid-sentence reads as careless to someone choosing between six similar results.

How this fits a monthly plan

A fault that lives in a template is a good example of work that belongs inside an ongoing arrangement. Nobody notices it on launch day, it shows up months later when the blog has grown, and it gets fixed in minutes once someone is looking. On our base plan the site and its upkeep are covered by the monthly fee, and the SEO add-on is where ongoing checks like this sit. If you would like to see how your own site's tags look, our free website audit covers titles and descriptions among other things.

For the related question of what the structured data on those same pages should say, see declaring your business once in schema markup.