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Hot take: Add localities to your title tags
Posted by on October 1, 2025 at 5:34 pmIf you don’t already do this, I highly recommend adding localities (adding a bunch of neighborhood names to the end) to your title tags.
For example:
BEFORE: Chandler Truck Accident Lawyer | Truck Accident Attorneys Chandler | Brand Name
AFTER: Chandler Truck Accident Lawyer | Truck Accident Attorneys Chandler | Sun Lakes, Sun Groves, Copper Commons, Twelve Oaks, Galveston, Ocotillo, Amberwood II, etc
Yes, I know this looks very keyword stuffed, but hear me out. Research by Joel Headley showed a 16% increase in Google Business Profile insights actions after adding localities to title tags across hundreds of pages.
But isn’t it bad if your title tag is too long?
No. Google doesn't care if your title tags are 20 characters or 2000. This has been confirmed by Google and John Mueller: “The length doesn’t matter. If we show something shorter or if we show something slightly different that’s just kind of how we display it in the search results, it doesn’t mean the ranking changes.”
Also, humans will never see all these extra words in the search results because Google only displays the first X characters (it depends on device, browser, screen space). Everything after the "…" isn't shown.
It's like hiding a bunch of extra location names at the end of the title to get ranking benefits with no downsides. And no, your title tag won’t look stupid in the SERP. Google loves to rewrite long title tags and that can work in your favor.
I know some people don’t agree with this, but I will die on this hill. Come at me 👇
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1 Reply
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On another groundbreaking news, research shows white text on white background is a no-go.
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16% on what metric ? GBP Interaction or something else ? The title length it’s not a ranking factor, but lower clicks because of a bad title maybe it’s a problem. Did you examine any other metrics except GBP?
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If I was your client, and this was your recommendation… I wouldn’t be your client for much longer.
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Should have moved on from this about 7yrs ago mate. Still might work to some extent, but a good way to have your titles re-writen from page content headings or worse.. you are on the right path though, you just need to think broader and what would an AI think and do with this, what would a user think?
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Add “areaserved” to your schema with the neighbourhoods or areas within your main city.
Then add an icon list without icons that contains your area names at the bottom of that page.
Done.
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We all know how much Google loves keyword stuffing…
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This is something I’ve been thinking about for some time but haven’t given it a go yet. Get a decent spread of terms in the Title and let Google rewrite it anyway….
Although that being said, anecdotally it seems like top ranking pages are featuring shorter raw Titles (uk, ecomm retail), and I’ve seen a few others on LinkedIn pick up on it as well. So I’m not sure what I think just yet.
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>Research by Joel Headley showed a 16% increase in Google Business Profile insights actions after adding localities to title tags across hundreds of pages.
Okay. So, literally NOTHING else was done?
* GBPs didn’t get new reviews?
* No backlinks came in?
* No CTR boost from a general ranking increase, successful paid ads campaign, or other efforts? -
Hi – I’ve been in the industry for over 12 years now…
Aside from ridiculous keyword stuffing that others have already pointed out, John Mueller is lying about the length of meta titles fyi.
Length absolutely does matter.
Meta titles over ~60 characters (google measures in pixels, I know) are truncated.
Truncated SERP listings lower CTR.
Try some A/B testing.
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I love this just because it doesnt fit in the stupid narrative by SEMRush of having 65 char page titles – what an absolutely stupid, OCD conjuring piece of nonsense – taking urban legends and turning them into binary facts.
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I’m of two minds on this issue.
1. For pages that target multiple intents or multiple areas, this is great because it’s creates more opportunities for the title to be relevant to more keywords. The example above is a service page, which serves multiple locational intents.
2. For pages that are targeting only one specific intent (where there are many different pages, like if you were a big programmatic site like yelp or angi’s list), I think having a title that is as close to the exact match of the search query is more ideal, because of how relevance is calculated (the simplest model is # of matching words in title). Adding more words can dilute that, and can bring the page away from its targeted intent. Like if there were pages for truck accident lawyer for each of those localities you might have the title of the twelve oaks service location page be: “Truck Accident Lawyer in Twelve Oaks”
For most sites, option 1 makes sense since a page is often serving multiple intents.
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Adding localities can help signal relevance to multiple areas, but I’d test it carefully sometimes simpler, clear titles work better for CTR and user experience. u/darrenshaw_
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