How Do I Change My Website Page Content That Shows Up On Google Search?

Hello! When searched on google, the different pages on my website show up with subtext that I do not want to be presented as it is.  When Harvest film co" is searched on google, you should see in the search results my business with its website pages underneath it like this: 

Attached is an image with the search results as well*

"ABOUT," "— · MEET THE TEAM · JAY-J SCHUSTER · ALEXANDER ..."

"CONTACT," "Skip to Content. HARVEST FILM COMPANY. HOME · WORK ..."

"WORK," "Skip to Content. HARVEST FILM COMPANY. HOME · WORK ..."

I want to know how I can locate to change this text underneath each page title and whether it is directly through google somewhere or a place in my websites settings on squarespace. I know some of that text is being taken from my website but is there a way I can tell google to use something different? I'd love to clean up this text and make it more presentable when my business is searched online.

Hey @harvestfilmco,

To do this, you need to fill out your SEO title and SEO description on your web pages. These are the things that display on search results when your website shows up - Squarespace makes it super easy to edit them.

I've added some tutorials below, plus some guidance:

• SEO title: This should be 50-60 characters long and include the main keyword you want to rank for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbsIAOqU1qw
• SEO description: This should be 150-160 characters long and include the main keyword you want to rank for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeweiQFqGWs

You can also put your site through SEOSpace to see all the other pages you need to fix the above 👌

The above info about character length might mislead or confuse beginners:

• Titles: A page title can be shorter or longer than 50-60 characters as needed. If longer, it is more likely to show an ellipsis...but this is not necessarily a negative. If you want the entire title to show in SERPs, Moz has a helpful testing tool: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
• Descriptions: Similarly, the length of meta descriptions is not limited to 150-160 characters. Shorter or sometimes longer meta descriptions can be appropriate. And it is important to understand that including the “main keyword you want to rank for” in a description has no impact on Google ranking.

Google info on best practices:

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet

Okay great thanks for the feedback! It looks like I've already gone in and updated titles and descriptions a few weeks ago, and have yet to see any changes show up in Google search results. Do you know how long it could take for the changes to be reflected?

On 4/29/2024 at 7:56 PM, harvestfilmco said:

Okay great thanks for the feedback! It looks like I've already gone in and updated titles and descriptions a few weeks ago, and have yet to see any changes show up in Google search results. Do you know how long it could take for the changes to be reflected?

You could wait for Google to crawl your site and see the new changes (it could take weeks!), or you could request Google to crawl the pages you have made changes to. This might be quicker, but it's up to Google. You can do this via URL inspection -> Request Indexing. Good luck!

On 4/28/2024 at 11:02 PM, Collaborada said:

The above info about character length might mislead or confuse beginners:

• Titles: A page title can be shorter or longer than 50-60 characters as needed. If longer, it is more likely to show an ellipsis...but this is not necessarily a negative. If you want the entire title to show in SERPs, Moz has a helpful testing tool: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
• Descriptions: Similarly, the length of meta descriptions is not limited to 150-160 characters. Shorter or sometimes longer meta descriptions can be appropriate. And it is important to understand that including the “main keyword you want to rank for” in a description has no impact on Google ranking.

Google info on best practices:

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link
• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet

Thanks for your response @Collaborada!

The videos I shared are aimed at beginners—in fact, thousands of Squarespace users, from beginners to experts, have followed the advice.

This advice is built into SEOSpace - proven to boost website traffic for beginners by 68% in 2 months (check out the report here if you like: https://www.fusion-analytics.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/RWM-SEO-scanning-impact-202308221-FINAL.pdf).

Pretty good for "misleading or confusing beginners", in my opinion.

Sharing developer documentation directly from Google is much more likely to confuse people - most Squarespace users won't know what a <title> element is.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback and appreciate all the great advice you share 🙌

Hi there! Thanks for your response. We always aim to support beginners, which is why we recommend consulting Google's own documentation on their ranking systems and best practices - they provide clear insights on <title> elements: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide

Just a friendly note: while some resources suggest specific character counts, it's important to understand that these are guidelines rather than strict rules. Many factors influence how many characters of a page's title appear in Google search, including desktop, mobile, featured snippet, SGE links, and more. 

Feel free to reach out if you need further assistance! 😊