Almost Every Seattle Website Has a Line Nobody Wrote
99.5% of the Seattle sites I opened carry a title tag, more than any other city I check. Almost none of them say anything, and that is the part costing you work.
“My last web guy told me the Google side of my site was broken and I’d have to start over.”
Four minutes into a call with a Seattle owner, before I’d asked him a single question about the business he actually runs.
I get some version of it most weeks. What is my website missing? What did the last person leave out? Am I broken?
And I’ve usually got about thirty seconds to answer before we’re on to what a new site costs and whether I can start in March.
The thirty second answer is almost always no, you’re not broken. The longer answer is more useful than that, and it starts with one line of writing that has never once come up on any of those calls.
The line he’d had for three years
A man I built for last spring had spent three years turning up in Google as Untitled Document.
His site went up in 2014, the field was left empty when it did, and the software quietly filled it in with the two words it falls back on whenever nobody types anything at all.
Nobody told him. You don’t get told.
The people who read Untitled Document and tapped the company underneath his were never going to write in and explain themselves, so the only evidence he ever had was a phone that rang slightly less than he thought it should.
That line is called the title tag, and it’s the only writing you own that does its job while nobody is on your website.
Your photos wait. Your colors wait. The paragraph about your team has been sitting there patiently since 2018, and it will keep sitting there until a customer decides to arrive and read it.
The title line doesn’t wait for anybody. It goes out and works the results page on its own, every day, whether a person wrote it or a piece of software guessed.
I put the cities in order one night
So I compared all twenty four cities on that one check, and Seattle sat at the very top. 99.5% of the sites I opened here have a title tag, 1 of 24.
Everywhere else I audit the same check comes back at 99.1%, which should tell you something about who has been doing this particular job all these years.
Not you. Not the last web guy. The software.
Ticks you didn’t earn
Every builder on the market writes a title tag into your page whether you ask for it or not. WordPress does it. Squarespace does it. The nephew who put your site together on a borrowed laptop over one weekend did it without ever knowing that he had.
So when an audit report hands you a green tick beside those two words, keep a hand on your wallet, because passing that particular check has never cost anybody a dollar or an afternoon. A surgeon I know nodded along to an invoice line like that for three years before the two of us worked out what he was paying for.
What the software can’t do is write the thing.
It’ll drop in your company name, or the word Home, or whatever you happened to type into a settings screen during the week you signed up, and then it will never think about that field again for as long as the site is up.
Mine said Home for eight months in 2019. I found it myself, on my own phone, sitting at a red light on the way to a meeting about someone else’s website.
The three I keep meeting
Home. Just that, sometimes printed twice, sometimes with the name of a theme the owner never chose still attached to the end of it.
The company name on its own, which reads perfectly well until you remember the circumstances it’s being read in.
And the long one, where every service the owner has ever offered is crammed in and separated by little vertical bars, running off the edge of the screen somewhere after the second word.
All three of those pass my check without any trouble. All three of them tell a stranger nothing whatsoever.
Read yours out loud
Search your own company name right now, on your phone, and read the top line of your own result out loud. The blue one you can tap.
Did it say what you do? Did it say where? Did it hand a stranger one reason to pick you over the two results sitting directly above you?
Most of the lines I read manage exactly one of those three jobs, and the job they manage is announcing the company name, which the person searching had already typed in herself a second earlier.
She knows your name. She’s staring at a screen with three names on it.
So what is yours supposed to be doing for her that the other two names aren’t already doing just as well?
The uncomfortable part is that you are the last person in the world who ever reads that line, because you arrive at your own website by typing the address or clicking a bookmark, and both of those routes skip the results page entirely.
Everyone deciding whether to bother with you takes the other route, the one that puts your one sentence directly alongside a competitor’s one sentence, and then compares them for about as long as it takes to blink.
What goes in mine
Three things, in this order. What the business does. The part of town it does it in. One thing a competitor can’t copy by Friday afternoon.
Saturday callouts. Twenty two years on the same block. A van that turns up inside the window it promised.
Keep it short enough that the end of it survives on a phone, and put the useful part at the front, because the end is the bit that gets cut off.
Then read it back the way a stranger would meet it, standing at a bus stop with a cracked screen and a bus already coming. Those are the honest reading conditions, and they’re a good deal rougher than anything you picture while sitting at your desk with the thing open in a tab.
It’s the cheapest writing job in your entire business. One sentence, no designer, no meeting, no invoice at the end of it. Assisted living homes are the proof, since they write that line better than anyone I audit and not one of the habits behind it costs a dollar.
What I’d leave alone for now
Add my ten checks up and this city lands on 73 out of 100, 9 of 24, which is an ordinary sort of place to sit and not the reason your phone is quiet.
Most of what I could sell you off the back of that report would be honest work that changes absolutely nothing for you this month.
When I take on a website around here, the title line is the first thing I rewrite and the last thing I read on the list I work through before a site goes live, because it costs the client nothing and it’s the single change some of them ever notice happening on their own.
The man with Untitled Document didn’t need a new website. He needed eleven words and an afternoon that nobody had to bill him for. Dave, a few miles north of him, needed four small changes and no rebuild at all, and his phone had been quiet for longer.
One thing, tonight
Open your site, find the page settings for your homepage, and write one true sentence into the title field. If a stranger at that bus stop can’t tell your trade, your neighborhood and one thing you’d back yourself on, it isn’t done yet.
Then close the laptop.
Ignore the rest of this post. Ignore the ranking, ignore my ten checks, and ignore the part where I told you my own homepage said Home for the better part of a year.
If the top line of your own result reads better tomorrow than it does tonight, you’ve had a better week than most of the people who paid someone for a whole new website.
