Page Title SEO: Why 'Home' Is the Worst Thing to Put There

Open a new browser tab, go to your website, and look at the text on the tab itself. That small line is your page title, and on a lot of small business sites it just says “Home”. Page title SEO is the practice of writing that line on purpose, and it is one of the few parts of your site you control completely.

Most owners never touch it. The theme set it once, years ago, and nobody looked again. That is a wasted asset. The page title is the blue clickable headline Google shows in the results, and it is also one of the oldest ranking signals on the page. A Thirsk plumber whose homepage title reads “Home” is handing both of those jobs to a default setting.

Page title SEO is the headline you write for Google

The title is doing two things at once. It is the link a person reads in the search results before deciding whether to tap. And it is a direct signal Google uses to work out what the page is about.

Write “Home” and you have told Google nothing and given the searcher no reason to click. Write “Emergency Plumber in Thirsk and Northallerton” and you have said what you do, where you do it, and why the result is worth picking over the one above it.

What a good title actually contains

A useful title has three parts: what you do, where you do it, and your name. For a Malton accountant that might read “Accountant in Malton, Self Assessment and Small Business”. For a cafe it might be the kind of place plus the town.

Keep it under about sixty characters, because Google trims longer titles in the results. Put the words that matter first. The phrase a customer would actually type, something like “accountant Malton”, should sit near the front, not buried after your business name.

This is the same thinking behind good internal links, where the words you use as anchor text tell Google what the page you are pointing at is about. We wrote the longer version of that idea in internal linking for small business websites.

The mistake almost every template makes

Most site builders give every page the same title pattern, or leave half of them blank. The services page says “Services”, the about page says “About”, the homepage says “Home”. None of them earns a click.

Fix the homepage first, then the page that brings in the work, usually a single service page. Write each title for the search someone would type to find it. A good SEO title tag is not clever. It is specific.

Before you pay anyone for keywords or links, read your own page titles back to yourself. If the most valuable line of copy on your site says “Home”, you have an easy win sitting in plain sight.