Title tag and meta description: the characters that win the click

Before ever visiting your store, the searcher reads two things: your title tag and your meta description. They win or lose the click against the neighboring results, and they deserve better than default values.

The title tag: about sixty characters to convince

This is the blue link in the search result. The rules that matter:

• About sixty characters: Google sets no limit but truncates the title to fit the screen width, and in Zyppy's study of 80,959 titles, titles over 70 characters were rewritten 99.9% of the time.
• Target keyword first, precision second: "Honda Civic cold air intake kit, stainless steel, 30-min fit".
• A concrete promise rather than a pile of keywords: stuffing shows, and Google rewrites the titles it judges artificial.
• Unique per page: two pages with the same title cannibalize each other.

By default, PrestaShop uses the product name. That is fine, rarely optimal: the name describes, the title has to make someone want to click.

The meta description: your free ad

It does not influence ranking directly, it influences the click-through rate, which does count. 160 characters to:

1. Restate the search intent ("Looking for a 45 L pack for three days unsupported?");
2. Give the differentiating argument (material, warranty, shipping);
3. Call to action, without a forced exclamation mark.

An empty meta does not display emptiness: Google grabs an extract from the page, rarely the right one. Write it and you choose your own pitch.

The mistakes that cost clicks

• The same text duplicated across dozens of product pages.
• A title that repeats the meta word for word: two slots, two messages.
• Capitals everywhere and "BEST PRICE!!!": filtered, rewritten, ignored.
• Plain omission: most catalogs have no meta description written at all. That is a bonus for whoever starts first.

Doing it across a whole catalog

Writing a title and a description per product is a jeweler's job, multiplied by hundreds of references. That is the use case for Publium's product description generation: for each product it proposes a title tag and a meta description at the recommended formats, built around your target keyword, with a Google preview before publishing, as in PrestaShop's own SEO panel. Checks verify length and keyword presence; you review, you publish, the page is up to date in the store.

To take up even more room in that shop window, the next step is Product schema markup: price and stars appear underneath your 230 characters.

Two tags, 230 characters, and the effect is measured in weeks. Want us to handle it? Let's talk.