Write title tags at around fifty to sixty characters, lead with the words the searcher typed, and make the rest a reason to choose you over the other nine results. Put the brand at the end, or leave it off entirely on pages where nobody is searching for your brand.
That is the whole formula. The details below are about the cases where it is not enough.
Length: what actually gets cut
Google truncates on pixel width, not character count, so there is no exact limit. Around sixty characters is the practical ceiling for most titles, and capital letters and wide characters eat into it faster.
Being cut off is not fatal if the important half survives. Front-loading exists for this reason: the first forty characters have to carry the meaning on their own.
The structure that works
The reliable pattern is the query, then the differentiator, then optionally the brand.
The query part earns the impression by matching what was typed. The differentiator earns the click by promising something the other results do not: a specific number, a limitation named honestly, a format, a year. The brand is only worth its characters when your name means something to that searcher.
So: what they searched, why yours, who you are, in that order, and drop the third when space is tight.
Why Google rewrote yours
Google replaces title tags on a meaningful share of results, and it usually does so for one of a few reasons.
- The title was stuffed with keywords, so it substituted something readable
- The title was too long and it found a shorter phrase on the page that fit
- The title was identical across many pages, so it used the h1 to differentiate
- The query did not match the title, and a heading on the page matched better
The rewrite that lifts an existing page
The highest return use of this whole subject is not writing new titles, it is fixing old ones.
Open Search Console, find pages with high impressions and low click-through, and read the query that generates most of those impressions. Then check whether that query's words appear in the title. Very often they do not, because the title was written before anyone knew what people would actually search.
Changing that one line changes clicks without changing rank, which is the fastest traffic available on a site that already has some.
Things that do not help
Repeating the keyword twice. Stuffing a list of variations separated by pipes. Ending every title with the same three brand words on a site nobody searches by name. Writing a clever title that does not contain what anyone typed.
And matching your title to your h1 exactly. They have different jobs: the title competes on a results page against nine rivals, the h1 confirms to someone who already arrived that they are in the right place. Writing one and pasting it into the other wastes the harder of the two.
Common questions
- How long should a title tag be?
- Around fifty to sixty characters. Google truncates on pixel width rather than character count, so there is no exact limit, and the first forty characters have to carry the meaning on their own.
- Why did Google rewrite my title tag?
- Usually because it was keyword stuffed, too long, identical across many pages, or did not match the query as well as a heading on the page did. Google replaces titles on a meaningful share of results.
- Should the title tag match the H1?
- No. They do different jobs. The title competes against nine rivals on a results page; the h1 confirms to someone who already arrived that they are in the right place. Writing one and pasting it into the other wastes the harder of the two.
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