What is the best practice for creating page titles for a local business? Especially for homepage

[Matt Chauhan]

We have a client who has an office in Carlsbad, California but he serves the entire San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles. For the meta title of the homepage, shall we use, city+state per GMB guidelines or can we use his target locations? And what about other service pages? I am really confused about this and I will appreciate the help. If there are any articles on the same, please share.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Matt Chauhan, it's a case-by-case question, but in general I would suggest cramming the main target locations into that homepage title tag (e.g. LA County, Orange County, SD County). Likewise on the service pages. Those pages and the homepage (especially the homepage) are usually much more likely to rank for competitive search terms than even good "city" or "county" pages are. Sometimes that's just a matter of getting the simple stuff right.

So often Google "rewrites" the title tags dynamically, based on the query, which is one reason it just doesn't hurt to use plump title tags.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi Matt, I recall you had posted a real similar question not too long ago which most of the replies are still appropriate: What should be the meta title for homepage when a business has multiple locations?

Totally agree with @Phil Rozek response. As Phil stated and others mentioned in your earlier post, Google is rewriting the title tags, so make sure you optimize the Meta Title but you shouldn't expect Google to use it. Make sure your H1 for your home page and individual location pages are as close to the top of the each page as possible. It is highly likely for new pages that the H1 and the paragraph below will be used by Google to dynamically create the SERP Title and Description, instead of using the Meta Title and Meta Description. Also, I would suggest also focusing on your H2, at least any that are real close on the page to the initial H1.

I'd also encourage you to have descriptive anchor text links from your home page to the individual location pages.

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