I changed my title and Google still shows the old one. Why?

Google has to recrawl the page first, which can take days or weeks; URL Inspection in Search Console lets you ask for one page. If the old title survives a recrawl, check that the page's main heading matches the new title.

Should every title include my city?

Use it where it is true and useful: the homepage, the about page, and pages about work you do locally. Adding it to every project title makes each one longer without telling Google anything new about that page.

How long should a title be?

Google sets no limit but cuts long titles to fit the screen. Squarespace caps its field at 100 characters and suggests 70 or fewer. Lead with the words that matter and stop once the page is described.

Why Google Shows the Wrong Title for Your Site

You search your own name and there is your site, except the headline above it says "Home". Or "Page 2". Or IMG_4821.jpg. The page is fine. What you are seeing is its title: one line of text most visitors never notice, which many builders fill in for you, and which Google starts from when it writes your result.

Here is where it comes from and how to fix it.

What a page title is, and why yours says "Home"

Every page carries a <title> element in its code. It shows in the browser tab, and it is the first source Google lists for the headline of a search result, which Google calls the title link. Crawlers that feed AI assistants read it too.

Leave the SEO title empty and many builders fall back to the name you gave the page. Wix documents its default as the page name followed by your home page title; Squarespace falls back to the page title. So a page called Home in your menu goes out as "Home", and a working name like "Page 2" goes out as exactly that. A file name usually means the title field holds one, or the result is a PDF, which keeps its own title in its document properties.

Where your builder keeps the field

Labels move by plan and editor version, so treat these as what to look for, not exact menu paths.

Squarespace. In a page's settings (the gear in the Pages panel), look for the SEO tab and its SEO Title field. The homepage has no field of its own: its title comes from the site-wide SEO settings, where the Home tab under Search Appearance holds a format that defaults to your site title. Make sure the site title is your name.
Wix. In the pages panel, open the page's More Actions menu and look for SEO basics and the Title tag field. The homepage defaults to your site name, so check that too.
Showit. Select the page in the left panel and look for the SEO Settings tab on the right, with Page Title and Meta Description fields.
Format. Look for an SEO section in each page's settings, and for the site-wide title under SEO in your site Settings.
WordPress with Yoast SEO. Look for the Yoast SEO box below the editor or in the sidebar. Its SEO title field holds a template of variables (typically title, separator, site title) that you can type over. A homepage that lists your latest posts is set in Yoast's settings, under the Homepage content type.

When Google uses something else

Google writes title links automatically and does not always use your <title>. It can also draw on the main visible title, headings such as the <h1>, the og:title tag, other prominent text, link text pointing at the page, and WebSite structured data. Its documentation names the common reasons it looks elsewhere: titles that are half-empty, out of date, inaccurate, or boilerplate repeated across pages, and pages where more than one large heading competes to be the main title. It also says, in so many words, to avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page.

So the fix has two halves: a title that says what the page is, and a main heading that says the same thing. That is what Google's guidance asks; the final choice is still Google's. It has to recrawl a page before a new title can show, which its documentation says can take from a few days to a few weeks. To ask for one page sooner, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.

A name-first pattern, and the homepage description

Google's guidance is to keep titles descriptive, concise and distinct, with your site name at the start or the end. For a creative business your name is the brand, and the words people search are usually your name, your craft and your city:

Homepage:        Your Name | Commercial Photographer in Your City
Portfolio page:  Your Name | Food and Product Photography
Project page:    Your Name | Project Title, Food Photography
About page:      Your Name | About the Photographer, Your City
Contact page:    Your Name | Contact and Booking

Put the words that matter first, because Google cuts long titles to fit the screen, and write each one by hand: twenty galleries all called "Your Name | Portfolio" tell Google nothing about any one of them.

The meta description is the short summary under the title link. Google uses it when it thinks it describes the page better than text pulled from the page, so it is a suggestion, not a guarantee. If you are short on time, Google's advice is to start with the home page. One or two plain sentences: who you are, what you make, where, and for whom.

Your Name is a commercial photographer in Your City, making food and
product images for restaurants, brands and agencies.

It sits beside the title field in each builder (on Squarespace, the SEO site description on the Home tab). Give every page its own; Google notes that identical descriptions across a site do not help.

Print every title on your site

Your sitemap lists the pages your builder publishes, usually at /sitemap.xml; if not, curl -sL https://YOURDOMAIN.com/robots.txt | grep -i sitemap prints its address. Open Terminal on a Mac, paste this, and swap in your domain. It reads the sitemap, and any sitemaps it lists, then prints each page with the title search engines receive:

curl -sL https://YOURDOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml | grep -o '<loc>[^<]*' | sed 's/<loc>//' \
  | while read -r u; do case "$u" in *.xml) curl -sL "$u" | grep -o '<loc>[^<]*' | sed 's/<loc>//' ;; *) echo "$u" ;; esac; done \
  | while read -r u; do printf '%s\n  ' "$u"; curl -sL "$u" | perl -0777 -ne 'print /<title[^>]*>\s*(.*?)\s*<\/title>/si ? "$1\n" : "(no title)\n"'; done

It fetches one page at a time, so a large site takes a minute, and & in the output is how HTML writes an ampersand. Trouble looks like this:

https://YOURDOMAIN.com/
  Home
https://YOURDOMAIN.com/page-2/
  Page 2 | Your Name Photography
https://YOURDOMAIN.com/copy-of-portfolio/
  Copy of Portfolio | Your Name Photography

Look for Home, Page, Copy, Untitled, a file name, "(no title)", or the same title twice. Each one is a field to fill in.

If the list is long, or titles, headings and structured data need to agree across the whole site, that is part of Get Found, from $3,000, on the site you already have. Not sure what yours is telling you? Book a call below.

Why Google shows "Home", "Page 2" or a file name instead of your name, and how to fix your page titles