How do I write a good page title?
The short answer
Put the specific thing the page is about first, add your location or business name second, and keep it under about sixty characters so it is not cut off. The title is the largest text in a search result and often the only thing someone reads before deciding — which makes it the highest-leverage sentence on the whole page.
On this page
What a title actually is
Every page has a title that does not appear on the page itself. It shows up in the browser tab, as the large blue line in search results, and as the headline when someone shares your link.
For most visitors, the title is the first thing they read about you and often the only thing they read before deciding whether to click. That makes it the highest-leverage sentence you will write, and it is routinely left as whatever the platform generated.
The formula
Specific thing first, context second, under about sixty characters.
Good:
Set lunch menu and prices — [Restaurant], [Area]Emergency plumber in [Town] — 24 hour calloutClass timetable — [Studio], [Area]
Bad:
Home— says nothingWelcome to our website— says less than nothing[Business Name]on every page — identical titles compete with each otherBest cheap plumber London plumber near me emergency plumber— keyword stuffing, reads as spam
The reason specific-first works: search results are scanned, not read. Whatever is at the start is what registers before someone's eye moves on.
Length
Around sixty characters is where most results get truncated. Beyond that your title gets cut with an ellipsis, and anything important at the end is lost.
This is not a hard rule — the actual limit is in pixels, so wide characters take more space. Sixty is a safe working number, and the practical version of the rule is: put the important part first, so truncation costs you the least valuable words.
Every page needs its own
The most common failure is one title reused across a whole site.
If every page is titled with your business name, then every page is competing to answer every query, and none of them is clearly about anything. Search engines and people both need to know which page is which.
Menu page, hours page, service page, location page — each gets a title describing that specific thing.
The related fields
The meta description — the grey text under the title — does not directly affect ranking, but it does affect whether anyone clicks. Two sentences, specific, and it should read as a reason to click rather than a summary of the page.
The h1, the visible heading, can differ from the title and often should. The title is written for a search result; the h1 is written for someone who has already arrived. There is no rule that they must match.
Being able to change them
Titles are only useful if you can edit them, and this is where many platforms quietly fail — the title is either generated from your page name or buried behind a paid tier.
Helm treats SEO as one of its modules: titles and descriptions are editable per page from the same dashboard as your content. So rewriting a weak title is a two-minute job rather than a support request.
How to check yours
Search site:yourdomain.com and read the titles that come back, as a stranger would.
Ask of each: does this tell me what the page is about, and does it tell me before the text gets cut off? Anything titled "Home", anything duplicated across pages, and anything that starts with your business name rather than the subject is worth rewriting.
That is usually an hour of work across a small site, and it changes the one thing everybody sees before they see anything else.