How to Write Product Titles That Rank and Convert: A Melbourne Online Store’s Guide

A Melbourne homewares store we looked at recently had a product called simply “Vase” on its category page. Type “ceramic vase Melbourne” into Google and that product was nowhere to be found, not because the vase was wrong for the search, but because the title never told Google, or the shopper, what made it worth clicking.

A product title has to do two jobs at once: tell Google exactly what the product is so it matches the right searches, and tell a shopper enough in the first few words to make them click instead of scrolling past. Get both right and the same product starts showing up for searches it was invisible to before. This guide covers what actually goes into a title that does both.

Most Melbourne stores never touch product titles after the initial site build, because the platform generates something reasonable by default and nobody thinks to revisit it. That default is rarely wrong, but it is rarely optimised either, and the gap between reasonable and optimised is exactly where the extra traffic sits.

What Google actually needs from a product title

There are two different “titles” worth knowing about. The page title (or SEO title) is what shows as the blue link in ordinary Google search results. The product title is a separate field used in Google Shopping and Merchant Center listings, and it has its own rules. Google’s own product data specification allows up to 150 characters, but only around the first 70 characters reliably show on a Shopping ad or free listing, so the most important words need to come first. Google also strictly disallows promotional language in the title itself, phrases like “sale” or “free shipping” belong in a different field, not the title, or the product risks disapproval.

Google also asks for the distinguishing detail of each variant, colour, size, material, to sit inside the title itself rather than being left to the product description. Two t-shirts that differ only by colour need two different titles, not one generic title covering both, otherwise Google struggles to tell shoppers apart and may treat the listings as duplicates of each other.

Not sure whether your own product titles are working against you? Our free 30-minute consultation includes a live look at how your current titles are performing, even if you never become a client.

What the best product titles actually do differently

Store Growers analysed 151 product titles from 120 advertisers who were already ranking in the top 5–10 results for competitive search terms, giving a genuinely useful picture of what “good” looks like in practice rather than theory. The original research found the average title length among top performers was 70 characters, with the sweet spot sitting between 75 and 100. Just as tellingly, 81% of these advertisers used a different title in their product feed to the one shown on the actual product page, meaning the “set and forget” approach most Melbourne stores default to leaves real performance on the table.

The research also found that titles longer than 70 characters, while less visible in full, still helped: Google reads the entire 150-character field even when a shopper only sees the front portion, so the extra words widen the range of searches a product can match without ever being seen directly. This is why a title built purely to “look nice” at 40 characters often underperforms one that runs longer but stays readable throughout.

Title element	How many top advertisers use it	Why it matters
Capitalise Each Word	97%	Reads as a proper product name rather than a sentence fragment
Digits instead of spelled-out numbers	97%	Saves characters and matches how people actually search (“3 pack”, not “three pack”)
Symbols to separate details (– / |)	70%	Breaks the title into scannable chunks instead of one dense phrase
Brand name included	44%	Useful when shoppers search by brand, less useful for unbranded generic products
Extra descriptive keywords beyond the core name	32%	Widens the net of searches the product can match without misrepresenting it

This is exactly the kind of detail our e-commerce SEO service works through product-by-product for Melbourne Shopify and WooCommerce stores, because a formula that works for one category rarely transfers cleanly to another.

Results like that will not carry over automatically. If your titles are already close to best practice, our client results show the bigger gains usually come from combining title fixes with the category and internal linking structure around them.

What this costs, how long it takes, and what goes wrong

Rewriting product titles is one of the lowest-cost SEO jobs available to a Melbourne online store, because it touches existing content rather than requiring new pages, images or design work. A store with under 100 products can usually have titles rewritten and tested within a week. Larger catalogues need a formula and a feed rule rather than manual edits product by product, which is a short technical setup rather than an ongoing cost, similar to the structure we cover in our Shopify SEO checklist for Melbourne retailers. If your catalogue runs into the thousands of products, talk to our team about setting up feed rules rather than trying to rewrite each one by hand.

Movement in Google Shopping and organic search can appear within days of a title change, since product feeds refresh far more often than a page needs to be re-crawled, though a fuller picture of organic ranking movement usually takes three to six weeks, in line with what we walk through during our audit and strategy process.

The most common mistake is stuffing every possible keyword into the title until it reads like a list rather than a product name; Google’s own guidance is to describe the product clearly, not maximise keyword count. The second is leaving every product in a range with an identical title except for a colour swapped at the very end, buried past the 70-character cut-off where nobody sees it. The third is copying the on-page product title straight into the Shopping feed without checking whether it still fits the 150-character limit once modifiers are added, which causes the listing to be truncated mid-word. A fourth, less obvious mistake is changing titles constantly to chase small ranking shifts; Google needs time to re-evaluate a listing after a change, so testing one meaningful version for a few weeks beats rewriting a title every few days.

Common questions

Should my Shopify product title and my Google Shopping title be identical?
Not necessarily. Store Growers found 81% of top advertisers use a different title in their Shopping feed than on the product page itself, usually because the feed title is built for search matching first.

How long should a product title actually be?
Aim for 75–100 characters as a sweet spot; the front 70 characters are what most shoppers actually see, so the most important words need to sit there.

Will better titles alone fix poor product page rankings?
They help significantly, but titles work best alongside solid internal linking between related products and clean category structure; see our FAQ for the full picture on e-commerce SEO scope and pricing.

Do I need special software to manage product titles at scale?
Not for a small catalogue; Merchant Center’s built-in attribute rules handle most formula-based changes. Larger stores with thousands of SKUs often benefit from a dedicated feed management tool once manual edits become impractical.

Getting product titles working harder

A product title is one of the few pieces of SEO copy a Melbourne store owner can rewrite this afternoon and plausibly see movement within days. Lead with the brand and product name, add the attributes a shopper actually filters by, keep the important words inside the first 70 characters, and resist the urge to stuff in every keyword a product could theoretically match.

Book a free, no-obligation consultation with a Melbourne SEO expert. We will review your product titles alongside the rest of your store and give you an honest picture of what is worth fixing first. Get a free consultation, or browse more guides on the Best SEO Agency Melbourne blog.