Try it yourself
Somebody two towns over searches for a plumber. Four title tags, and the town is the first thing their eye is looking for.
Which title works?
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Accurate and placeless. Someone scanning a page of results has no reason to believe this business is anywhere near them.
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This is the one. Service, then town, then business — in the order a searcher reads and decides. The town appears early enough to survive being cut short on a narrow phone screen.
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A list of towns is the local version of keyword stuffing. It gets truncated in results, reads as spam to a person, and serves each of those towns worse than one honest sentence would.
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The town and nothing else. The searcher knows where you are and still has no idea what you do.
Pick a line. Every one of them has an answer.
Show me the answer
<title>Emergency Plumber in Ashford | Fenwick Plumbing</title>
This is the one. Service, then town, then business — in the order a searcher reads and decides. The town appears early enough to survive being cut short on a narrow phone screen.
The written version
The town, where people read it first →
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