Ask ten small business owners what "SEO" means and you'll get ten different answers, most involving keywords they think they need to cram into every sentence. The boring truth is that two of the biggest levers on any page are small text fields most people fill in once and never touch again: the page title and the meta description.
Here's the part that surprises people. Your page title affects your ranking. Your meta description does not.
Google has said this plainly for years: the meta description isn't a ranking factor. It won't help you show up higher for a search. What it does is show up as the paragraph of text under your link in the results, and that paragraph decides whether someone clicks your result instead of the one above it. Its job is the click, not the rank.
The title works differently. It's a signal Google uses to understand what the page is about, and it's the bold text people see in the results and the tab in their browser. Get it wrong and two things go badly at once: you rank for the wrong searches, and even when you do show up, nobody recognizes what they're clicking on.
On Cantrip, every page has its own meta title and meta description field in page settings. Leave them blank and the page falls back to your site's default title and description. Leave those blank too, and the page just uses its plain title. When your site first gets built, we generate a reasonable default title and description for you automatically, based on your site's content, so nobody starts from a totally empty field. A reasonable default isn't the same as something written for that specific page, though, and that gap is worth closing on the pages that matter most: your homepage, your contact page, and whichever service or product page you most want people finding.
Good ones are short and honest. A title under about 60 characters, since anything longer gets cut off in the results anyway. A description somewhere around 120 to 160 characters that says, in plain language, what the page is and why someone would want it. One real sentence written for the person reading it, not a pile of keywords aimed at a machine.
Two smaller fields live in the same settings most people will never need. Canonical URL tells Google which version of a page is the "real" one, useful if you've posted the same content in more than one place and don't want to compete with yourself in search. Noindex tells Google to skip a page entirely, handy for a thank-you page or anything else that has no business showing up in search results. Most pages on most sites need neither. Know they're there and move on.
None of this replaces having a page that actually answers what someone searched for. A perfectly written title on a page that doesn't deliver gets you a bounce, not a customer. But writing real titles and descriptions for your handful of most important pages takes maybe twenty minutes, and it's twenty minutes most small business sites never spend. The auto-generated defaults exist so you're never stuck with a blank field, not so you can leave every page on autopilot forever.