The previous posts covered how to check things: check the number of indexed pages, check what rank you’re in, check whether crawlers have shown up. After checking, the most common question is — “I know I’m on page 2, so what exactly should I change?”
Today we’ll cover the first thing to change, and the one with the best return: the page title.
Its traits: the cost of changing it is extremely low (a few minutes), it affects both search rankings and AI trust, and most companies get it wrong. We just found out we had it wrong too — we fixed it today while we were at it, and turned what we found into this post.
First, why start with the title
The page title (the line shown on the browser tab, and the blue line in search results) serves two purposes:
For search engines: it’s one of the strongest signals for judging “what keywords this page is about”.
For AI: the first line it reads in a search result is the title — if the title isn’t clear, it will very likely skip right past yours.
And changing the title requires no rebuilding of the page and no new content — it’s the fastest-acting and lowest-cost of all SEO actions.
We compared a dozen-plus top-ranking sites: the commonalities are strikingly consistent
I copied down and went through the titles on the first two pages of search results for an industry term. Nearly all of those at the top follow the same pattern:
Lay out the words customers actually search for, and put the company name last. The structure is roughly:
core business keyword_related keyword_niche keyword-company name
For example, it leads with “city + industry”, followed by two or three related service keywords, and only then the company name. There’s hardly a wasted character in the whole line.
By contrast, the ones ranking lower mostly look like this: “XX Technology Co., Ltd. Official Site – Integrity, Focus, Innovation”. The company name comes first, followed by value-statement slogans.
There’s a gap in perception here: putting the company name first is for people who already know you, while search and AI are dealing with people who don’t know you yet. They search for “Beijing XX services”, not your company name. If you give the most valuable opening position to a word they’ll never search, you’re giving up on purpose.
Four common mistakes in title writing
| The mistake | The problem | How to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| Company name only “XX Co., Ltd. Official Site” |
No business keywords at all; only people searching your company name can find you | Add “city + what you do” at the front |
| Slogans and values “Professional · Integrity · Innovation” |
Nobody searches these words; they’re pure wasted space | Replace them with service keywords customers actually search |
| Keyword stuffing the same word stuffed in ten times with different phrasings |
It may be judged as manipulation, and it reads so awkwardly that people don’t want to click | A title carrying 2–3 related keywords is enough |
| Nearly identical titles across all pages | Search engines can’t tell which page matches which need, and the pages compete with each other internally | Target a different keyword on each page |
Two problems we found on our own site (you may have them too)
Before writing this post, I went through the titles on our own site and found two problems we hadn’t been aware of. Both are very typical — we suggest checking your own site against them.
Problem 1: The site-name suffix is too long, squeezing out the main keywords.
Many website builders automatically append the “site name” to the end of every page title. If that site name is long, it eats up a large share of the character budget — search results show only a limited title length, and anything beyond it gets truncated into an ellipsis.
One of our pages was truncated: the second half showed part of the site name, while the actual business information was cut off. And since this suffix exists on nearly every page, the whole site is wasting space.
The fix: replace the auto-appended site name with a shorter version (for example, keep only the brand name). After we made the change, the titles that used to be overlong and truncated now display in full.
Problem 2: Functional pages open with a “catch-all word”.
On our services page, the title opened with “Products & Services”; on the contact page, it was “Contact Us”.
The problem with these two words: they’d fit on any company’s website, so they carry no information, and nobody searches “products and services” to find a vendor.
The fix: replace them with specific business content. On the services page, list the three core services directly; on the contact page, put in “city + industry + consulting” along with the phone number — so that someone searching a business keyword, even if they land on the contact page, still knows what you do.
Four principles for writing titles
- Put the most important words first. Both search results and AI read from left to right; the earlier a word appears, the more weight it carries, and the better it survives truncation.
- Keep it to roughly thirty-plus Chinese characters. Too long and it gets truncated — no matter how well the rest is written, it won’t be seen. After writing, count it yourself, or search your own page to see whether it displays in full.
- Target one need per page. Don’t let two pages compete for the same keyword, and don’t make one title try to cover everything.
- Write for people who don’t know you yet. This is the most fundamental one — and the test is simple: cover up the company name. Can others still tell what you do?
By the way, about the description: it plays a different role from the title
That gray line of explanatory text beneath the title (the description) is something many people assume doesn’t matter. Its direct effect on rankings really is small, but it heavily influences two things:
- Whether people click after they see it — ranked fifth either way, the listing with the clearer description gets clicked more.
- What AI quotes — this one matters more. When summarizing, AI often quotes sentences straight from the description.
So don’t write the description as a marketing slogan; write it as a one-sentence “fact summary”: full company name, founding date, location, core services, credentials, service scope, contact details — pack as much of it as you can into that single sentence. So that when AI wants to introduce you, there is a ready-made, accurate sentence it can use directly.
⚠️ One more thing that’s easy to overlook: when the page body changes, the description has to change with it. When the body and the description disagree, AI usually quotes the description — it has no idea about the new services you added.
Don’t forget this step once you’ve made the changes
Changing a title won’t show up in search results right away. Search engines have to re-crawl before they update, which usually takes weeks to a month.
So after you’re done: go to the webmaster platform and submit those URLs, requesting a re-crawl, then search for yourself a week or two later to see whether the new title is showing. If it’s still the old one a month later, that search engine simply hasn’t updated your record — which is itself a problem worth addressing.
A few common questions
Q: Where do I change the title?
A: Usually in the SEO settings of your website builder, filled in separately for each page. If you can’t find it, ask your website provider or IT support to help — this is a very routine operation.
Q: Will changing the title hurt my existing rankings?
A: Short-term fluctuation is possible. So don’t change everything at once — start with a few that are clearly problematic (for example, ones that only contain the company name, or ones that get truncated), watch for two weeks, then continue. Pages that already rank well shouldn’t be touched lightly.
Q: Should the company name go in at all?
A: Yes, but put it last. Its job is to reassure people who already know you that they’ve found the right place, not to bring in new traffic.
Q: Do I need to change every page?
A: No. Prioritize three types: the homepage, the company profile page, and the few service pages you most want to be found for. The rest are usually article pages where the title is the content anyway, so there’s little problem.
Not sure whether your page titles are written the right way?
Siwenlide provides website plus SEO/GEO content-driven lead generation operations for small and medium-sized businesses in Beijing and the surrounding area: we check your titles and descriptions line by line against the competitors ranking ahead of you, find the ones that are truncated, the ones using generic buzzwords, and the ones where the body was updated but the description wasn’t, then submit them for re-crawling and track the results. The two issues mentioned in this article were ones we found while auditing our own site and fixed the same day. Visit siwenlide.com (or take a look at our company profile) or call 400-686-2011 to talk.
