Two plumbers sit next to each other in the results for "emergency plumber Leeds". The first reads "Home | Smith & Sons" above a description Google scraped from the cookie banner. The second reads "Emergency plumber in Leeds, at your door within the hour", and its description names the areas covered and says there's no call-out fee. Same position, and the second one gets the calls.
Your URL, title and meta description are the only parts of a page a searcher sees before deciding whether to visit, and they're among the first things Google reads to work out what the page is. Get them right once and they keep paying; get them wrong and a page that ranks still goes unvisited.
What each one does, and which ones Google actually uses
The title tag is the <title> element in the page's HTML. Google uses it to understand what the page is about, and it's the main candidate for the blue link in results, which Google calls the title link. Google's title-link documentation says it may rewrite that link when the title tag is missing, repeated across many pages, stuffed with keywords, or too long for the space, drawing the replacement from your headings and the text of links pointing at the page.
The meta description is a short summary in the page's <head>. Google has said it doesn't use it for ranking, and its snippet documentation says it replaces your description with text from the page whenever that text answers the search better. So the description doesn't move your position; it moves the share of people who click once they see it.
The URL is the address. Google's URL structure guidance asks for descriptive words so people can read it; whatever ranking weight those words carry is small, and the real value is that people can tell what's behind it and that it never changes.
Write the title for the search first, then for the click
Start with the primary keyword the page owns (decided in Mapping keywords to pages), in the words searchers use, near the front. Follow it with the one thing that makes this page the right answer: the area you cover, the speed, the price, the specific problem solved. Put the brand at the end if there's room.
Every page needs its own title. Duplicate titles are one of the triggers Google names for rewriting, and they mean two pages are telling Google they're about the same thing: a keyword mapping problem wearing a title problem's clothes.
Keep the title and the page's main heading saying the same thing; when they disagree, Google tends to show the heading instead.
Length is a display question, not a rule. Google's documentation sets no character limit; what matters is whether the title fits a phone's result width before it's cut off, and the free SERP snippet preview shows where that cut lands. Any character count you read elsewhere is a tool's rule of thumb, not something Google publishes.
Write the description as the reason to click
The description is a pitch. In one or two sentences, say what the page delivers, who it's for, and one specific thing the competitor's snippet won't say: the price, the turnaround, the area served. Specifics get clicks; "professional plumbing services for all your needs" gets scrolled past.
Include the words people search for, because Google often bolds matching terms in the snippet, and that's where the eye lands. Don't reuse one description across pages; a missing description gets generated from page text, which beats a duplicate.
Length works the same way as for titles: Google truncates at a pixel width that changes by device and rewrites a large share of descriptions regardless. Write the pitch, check it in the preview, and accept that Google will sometimes swap it for a sentence from the page, which is a reason to make the page's first paragraph a good pitch too.
Keep URLs short, readable and stable
Google's URL structure guidance is short: use descriptive words, separate them with hyphens rather than underscores, and avoid long ID strings and stacks of parameters. /services/boiler-repair/ says what's there; /page.php?id=8841&cat=3 says nothing, and spawns a new URL every time a parameter changes.
Web servers treat /Shoes and /shoes as different addresses, and Google does too, so use lowercase everywhere and redirect the other form. Let the folders mirror the pyramid from Site architecture and internal links: the hub's path, then the page, which also produces the breadcrumb Google can show in place of the raw URL.
The rule that matters most is the boring one: don't change a URL once it's live. Every link pointing at it breaks unless you redirect the old address to the new one, and even then some signal and crawl time go to the hop. A better keyword in the URL is never worth that; if you must move a page, redirect the old URL permanently and update every internal link to the new one.
What to take away
- The title tag tells Google what a page is and usually becomes the link searchers click, so put the primary keyword near the front and make every title unique.
- The meta description doesn't affect ranking, but it decides whether a ranking turns into a visit, so write it as a pitch with one specific in it.
- Google rewrites titles and descriptions it finds weak, duplicated or mismatched; the fix is a title that agrees with the heading and the page, not a trick.
- URLs should use descriptive words with hyphens, consistent lowercase and a path that mirrors the site's hierarchy, and they should never change without a redirect.
Next
With the page describing itself properly, make sure Google is allowed to find it and keep it, in Sitemaps, robots.txt and indexing.