How to write SEO page titles that rank

Most "page title best practices" articles treat the title as one thing: a slot you stuff a keyword into. It is actually two things at once. It is the heaviest on-page relevance signal Google reads (still, in 2026), and it is the headline a human scrolls past in a list of ten search results. Optimize for one and you tank the other. The art is writing one sentence that does both jobs.

This guide skips the basic "what is a page title" framing (the tool below covers that) and goes straight to the writing playbook: the truncation rules that actually fire, the brand-prefix decision, the rewrite workflow, and what to do when Google rewrites your title for you.

Check any title right now

Paste any URL below. The tool extracts the live <title>, shows the character count and a SERP preview, and flags titles that will get truncated on Google's mobile or desktop SERP - the single fastest way to triage a 50-page site for title issues.

Why titles still carry more on-page weight than anything else

Google has been telling SEOs for a decade that titles matter less than they used to. The data has not caught up with the announcement. In any large-site rewrite test, the single change that produces the most reliable lift is the title rewrite, not the body, not the headers, not the schema. The reasons are mechanical:

• Title text gets the highest term-weight in Google's relevance scoring. A keyword in the title is "heavier" than the same keyword in an H2, which is heavier than the same keyword in body copy. This has been true since the original BM25 ranking days and the latest leaked ranking documents confirm it is still true.
• The title is the SERP click bait. CTR is the highest-leverage user-engagement signal Google has, full stop. Two pages tied on relevance will sort by which one users click. Title rewrites move CTR more than any other on-page change.
• The title sets the SERP snippet's narrative frame. Google's snippet algorithm pulls from body copy, but it pulls in service of the title. A vague title produces a vague snippet; a specific title produces a specific one.

This is why a one-line title rewrite, deployed across a 200-page site over a weekend, regularly moves the whole site's organic traffic by double-digit percent. It is the single biggest on-page lever you have.

The truncation cliff: pixels, not characters

Most title tutorials repeat the "60 character" rule and stop. The actual rule is pixel-width, not character-count. Google's desktop SERP truncates at roughly 580 pixels; mobile at roughly 920 pixels because the mobile font is denser. The character count is just a rough proxy because letters are not the same width: a title of 70 narrow letters fits, a title of 55 wide letters does not.

Practical rules of thumb:

• Aim for 50-60 characters. This is the safe zone for the average mix of letter widths and survives most brand-prefix variants.
• Below 30 characters is too short - you are leaving SERP real estate (and keyword opportunity) on the table.
• Above 70 characters is a coin flip. The middle of the title might survive truncation, but the end almost certainly will not. The end is also where most authors put the brand prefix - which is why brand prefixes are usually the wrong way round.
• Wide letters (W, M, capital letters, em dashes) eat pixel budget faster than narrow ones. A 65-character title in mostly lowercase narrow letters fits; a 65-character title in Title Case with brackets does not.

The audit move: do not character-count your titles. Run them through the embedded tool, which calculates the actual rendered pixel width and shows the desktop and mobile SERP preview side by side. Anything that gets cut is a title you are paying SEO for and not collecting clicks on.

The brand-prefix decision (and why most sites get it backwards)

The default WordPress / Yoast / RankMath template appends the site name to every title:

How to write SEO page titles - SEOGraphy

This pattern is correct on a brand-name search ("SEOGraphy"). It is wrong on every other query. For non-brand queries the brand prefix burns 8-15 characters of pixel budget that should be carrying keyword or value-prop language, then gets truncated off entirely on long titles. So you are paying for it on the homepage and losing it on the deep pages where it would have helped.

The decision rule:

• Keep the brand prefix on the homepage, the contact page, the about page, and any page that ranks for branded queries. There it is genuinely earning rank.
• Drop the brand prefix on every deep page targeting non-brand queries (blog posts, product pages, learn articles, tool pages, category pages). Use those characters for keyword-rich, click-worthy language.
• Or put the brand at the start, not the end - this only works for established brands where the brand IS the value prop ("Nike Air Max review"). For a lesser-known brand, prefixing the brand is a CTR own-goal.

Most CMS title templates default to %title% - %sitename% and leave it alone forever. Override the template per content type so blog posts and product pages get a clean title and the homepage keeps the brand suffix.

The biggest mistake: writing the title last

Most teams treat the title as the after-thought - the writer drafts the body, the editor fixes the H1, then someone copy-pastes the H1 into the title field at the end. The result is a title that reads like a heading, not a SERP CTA. Headings make sense in context (the reader is already on the page); titles do not have that context (the reader is scrolling a list of ten options and decides in 0.3 seconds).

The audit move: write the title FIRST, before the body, before the H1. Force the title to be the most click-worthy framing of the topic you can think of. Then write the body to match the promise the title made. The title and the H1 do not need to be identical - in fact they usually should not be:

• Title (SERP context): "How to write SEO page titles that rank" - intent-forward, includes the head term, frames the deliverable.
• H1 (on-page context): "Page titles, end to end: writing, truncation, brand prefix, rewrites" - more descriptive, scoped to the page contents.

If you find yourself reaching for the H1 as a fallback title, that is the symptom: you are letting the page-context heading do SERP work it was never designed for.

What to do when Google rewrites your title

Google rewrites about 60% of titles in the SERP. Most of the time the rewrite is harmless - it is replacing a missing brand suffix, or trimming a long title down. Sometimes the rewrite is hostile: Google replaces your carefully-tuned title with the H1, or worse, with arbitrary text from the body or anchor text from internal links.

The audit move when Google is rewriting:

1. In Search Console, open the Performance report and pull the top-impression queries for the URL. Compare the live title (your <title>) with what is actually showing in the SERP for those queries. Run the query in an incognito window if Search Console does not show the rendered title.
2. If Google is using the H1 instead of your title, your title is almost certainly too long, too keyword-stuffed, or too disconnected from the page content. Fix the title, not the H1.
3. If Google is using anchor text from internal links, the consistent anchor text on inbound internal links has out-weighted your title. Audit your internal-link anchor text and align it with the title intent.
4. If Google is using arbitrary body copy, the title is probably misaligned with what the page actually delivers. Rewrite the title to describe the body, or rewrite the body to deliver on the title.

What a clean title audit looks like

Run this quarterly on the top 20% of your pages by impressions. The fix is usually mechanical and the lift is fast (Google re-evaluates titles within a single crawl).

1. Pull the top 50 pages by impressions from Search Console (last 90 days). These are the pages where a 1-percentage-point CTR lift is real traffic. Do this list first; the long tail can wait.
2. Run each title through the page-title checker. Flag any that are over 580 desktop pixels or under 30 characters. Both are bleeding SERP real estate; both are mechanical fixes.
3. Audit brand-prefix usage. On the deep pages (anything that is not the homepage / about / contact), is the brand suffix taking up 12+ characters? Strip it from the template for that content type.
4. Check title vs H1 alignment. If they are identical on every deep page, your title template is using %title% for both - rewrite the deep-page titles to be SERP-led, not heading-led.
5. Spot-check Google's rendered title against your <title> in incognito. Disagreement is a flag, not always an emergency - read the rewrite, decide whether it is friendly or hostile, then act.
6. Re-test 2-4 weeks after publishing rewrites. CTR moves within days; rank moves within weeks. Compare the same 90-day window before and after to keep seasonality out of the read.

Quick quiz: are you ready to rewrite your own titles?

Five questions, takes two minutes. We'll show you the right answer and a one-line explanation after each one.

Next up in On-Page SEO

Titles get the click; the rest of the on-page work decides whether the click converts and whether the page keeps ranking. From here, the rest of the On-Page SEO pillar covers:

• Meta descriptions - the SERP CTA below the title. Not a ranking factor, hugely a CTR one.
• Header tags hierarchy - structuring H1-H6 so Google parses the page's outline correctly.
• Canonical tags - when to use them, when not to, and what happens when Google overrides yours.
• Open Graph and social previews - the off-Google CTR work most teams ignore.