Your page titles get cut off. That costs you clicks.

Google's own guidance is plain on this. There's no fixed length limit on a title, but it's cut off in the results to fit the device, which on a phone lands at about 60 characters. Everything after that is gone. If your title is 'Home | Example Physiotherapy and Sports Injury Clinic Adelaide', the person sees 'Home | Example Physiotherapy and Sports Injury Clinic Ad' and a lot of nothing.

Google also says it will write its own title when it thinks yours doesn't describe the page, pulling from your headings, the text on the page, and the words other sites use when they link to you. So a title that's missing, or the same on every page, or stuffed with every suburb you serve, doesn't just get cut. It gets replaced, and you don't get a say in what with.

Descriptions work the same way with a bit more room, about 155 characters before the cut. Google mostly writes the snippet from the page itself and only uses your description when it reckons yours is the better summary. Identical descriptions on every page, in Google's own words, aren't helpful. That's the default on more clinic sites than you'd think.

In September we went through an Adelaide neuro rehab clinic's site. 56 titles were over 60 characters. 53 descriptions were over 160. 14 pages had no description at all. That's not a sloppy site, it's a normal one, and the owner had no idea, because nothing on a site tells you.

The usual culprit is the clinic name. The theme glues it onto the end of every title, and a clinic name with a suburb in it can eat 40 characters before the page gets to say what it is. On the pages that matter most, the service pages, the service is the first thing to go.

Say what the page is, in the words a patient would type. Service first, then the place, then the clinic name if there's room. 'Knee physio in Glenelg | Your Clinic' beats 'Glenelg | Your Clinic', and it beats 'Your Clinic Glenelg Adelaide Knee Hip Back Sports' by a mile.

One title per page. If two pages share a title, Google has two pages to pick from and you've started a fight. The description is the second line of the ad: what's on the page and why this one, under 155 characters, ending in a full stop so it never looks cut off.

And screen every one against the AHPRA advertising rules before it goes live. No superlatives, no outcome promises, no titles you don't hold. A page title gets more eyes than anything else on your site, and it's the first thing a complaint would quote.

Fixing titles and descriptions doesn't move your ranking on its own, and I'm not going to tell you it does. Google has said for years the description isn't a ranking signal. What it changes is whether the person who already sees you clicks you, which on the 58 page one searches with no clicks from the last article is the whole problem.

It's also the fix that shows up fastest. Google picks up the new title the next time it crawls the page, usually inside a couple of weeks on a clinic site. So of everything on the list, this is the one where you'll see your own work in a Google result before the month's out.

If you'd rather not do it page by page, it's the first thing we do in the setup. Every title and description on your site, written from your own wording, screened against AHPRA, sent to you as a list with five business days to change or knock back any of them. Then they go live.