Google SERP snippet preview

Why pixels and not characters

Google renders the title in Arial at 20px on desktop and gives it a fixed amount of room. A capital W eats far more of that room than a lowercase i, so two titles with the same character count can behave very differently. Wide words, capitals and em-heavy fonts push you over sooner.

The widths this tool uses are the ones Google's results have held at for a while now:

• Desktop title: about 580px before the cut
• Mobile title: about 920px, wrapping over two lines
• Desktop description: about 920px, roughly two lines
• Mobile description: about 1300px, roughly three lines

Treat them as a guide. Google moves these around, and it rewrites titles on something like a third of results anyway.

Getting the title right

Put the thing people search for at the front. "Boiler repair in Leeds" works. "Leeds based heating specialists offering a full range of services" wastes the part of the line that gets read.

The brand goes last, after a pipe or a dash, and only if there is room. On a page that already ranks well you can drop the brand entirely and spend those pixels on something useful.

One more habit worth keeping: write the title for the search, write the H1 for the person who has already landed. They do not have to match word for word.

Getting the description right

The description does nothing for rankings directly. It decides whether the click happens, which is why it is worth the five minutes.

Answer the question the searcher has, include the detail that makes you the obvious choice (price, speed, area covered, the fact you answer the phone), and put a verb in it. Google bolds words from the search, so repeating the search term naturally once helps the snippet catch the eye.

Leave the description out entirely and Google writes one from your page content. Sometimes that is better than what you would have written. On service pages it usually is not.

When Google rewrites your title anyway

It happens most when the title is stuffed with locations, when it repeats the brand twice, or when it has nothing to do with the content on the page. If you see a rewritten title in Search Console, check the H1 first, because Google often pulls from there.

Check the real thing afterwards

A preview shows you the cut. It cannot show you whether the new title earns more clicks. Change one page, wait a fortnight, then compare the click-through rate in Search Console for the same set of queries.