When your website is finally up and running; when you’ve finished with wireframes and sketches and agonising decisions over the size of call to action buttons; when you’ve finally bid farewell to the designer and thanked them for a job well done; all that remains is to constantly publish a stream of amazing content that attracts links and visitors and grows your brand on the internet.
Easier said than done? Quite so. Having to come up with an award winning content strategy that not only grows your visitor numbers but also your revenue is a daunting task which needs to be broken down into easily manageable – and less intimidating – pieces.
The number of visits your site attracts depends heavily on a number of factors which include how well your site ranks for the search terms you’re targeting and the click through rate on those results. Both of these factors in turn depend heavily on your page titles: the title tag of a web page is still one of the strongest signals that Google uses to determine the relevancy of your web page to a particular search term; and a well written title can entice searchers to click through to your site in expectation of the information they’re searching for.
But great page titles don’t just fall out of the sky – at least not with the kind of regularity you can depend upon – which is why I recommend the following systematic approach.
1. Keyword Research
Some search terms are obviously going to garner more traffic than others – but how do you find out which ones?
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great place to start. Imagine we’re setting up a website selling organic, fair-trade footwear. What terms should our home page title focus on?
By inputting a selection of terms we think might be popular we get the actual average monthly traffic for those terms and the tool offers up some related suggestions too.
Now you know which terms attract the most traffic in your niche and can compose your page titles (and other on-page elements like H-tags) accordingly.
In this example we’d want to make sure we include the term ‘ethical shoes’ in our homepage title.
2. Engage Your Audience Emotionally
Writing a great title is much more than just a case of nailing down your keywords. If you’re going to attract searchers to your page you’ll need to capture their attention and promise the content that they’ve been looking for.
Going back to our ethical shoe website example ‘Ethical Shoes | Buy Fairtrade and Organic Footwear’ covers a lot of bases in terms of popular search terms but is also pretty boring.
A much better title for attracting clicks would be ‘Look Great and Feel Good with Ethical Shoes from Brandname.com’. Here you’re making the promise that shoppers can buy ethical without compromising on style – which is presumably exactly what people looking for ethical shoes are after.
If you can find the right balance between covering several keywords and providing an emotional hook then all the better.
How about ‘Fashionable Fairtrade Footwear and Ethical Shoes | Brandname.com’?
NB: Curiosity is a great emotion to invoke and nothing does it better than numbers (e.g. ‘Top 5 Ways to…’) and questions (e.g. ‘Why is Google…?)
3. Keep it Concise
Most search engines cut off titles after between 60 and 70 characters so don’t waffle on. You might feel like you need to cram every possible keyword combination into your titles in order to rank but you really don’t. Google is getting better at recognising which terms actually refer to the same things.
For example, in a search for ‘ethical shoes’ the second result actually has ‘footwear’ highlighted.
Besides which, you can always create other pages which target keywords for other, different ‘things’ (e.g. organic shoelaces)
(On an ecommerce site this is pretty straightforward as each product page will target its own terms).
However, it’s also worth bearing in mind that ‘exact match’ results often get a higher click through rate than similar terms.
So once again it’s a question of balance – get your key terms in but not at the expense of a snappy title.
4. Big Up Your Brand
For a new online business in the age of Google’s spam-fighting algorithm updates building your brand should always be a higher priority than simply optimising your website. The strength of your brand will determine how many return visitors (and customers) your website attract, how big a splash you can make in social media (another factor which will make your site rank highly) and how much clout your online PR efforts will garner (leading to more links, more traffic and better rankings).
For this reason you should always try to include your brand name in your page titles: for those already familiar with your brand it will improve their trust of the link; for those unfamiliar it will make that vital first impression.
There’s also another important reason for including brand terms in your titles: when people link to you they’ll often use all or part of the page title as the ‘anchor text’ (i.e. the text that carries the link). Recent Google algorithm updates have been prejudiced against sites with large numbers of links with commercial terms in the anchor text and for those which contain brand terms.
5. Never Stop Optimising Your Titles
Once you’ve come up with what you think is a great title for a page it’s tempting to move on and forget all about it. But without reviewing how that page is actually performing how will you ever know you made the right choice?
Every once in a while you should review all your pages in Google Analytics (or similar analytics tool) to see how much traffic they’re getting, how many conversions they’re attracting and other indicators of what visitors are doing after they’ve clicked on your link.
A high bounce rate or low average time on page could mean that your title is promising something that the page isn’t delivering and that you need to review the content on that page. Low traffic could mean that you’re chasing the wrong keyword terms.
To check, in the Content>Site Content>Landing Pages section of GA download all the search terms that have led to visits to a particular page (by drilling down to that page and setting the secondary dimension to ‘Keyword’), separate out the visits that are of most value to you (e.g. those that led to conversions) and put the results into a word cloud generator like TagCrowd.
It should then be pretty obvious if you’ve left any valuable related terms out of your title.
In this example, maybe the word ‘trainers’ deserves a place in your page title? It’s obviously driving a lot of valuable traffic.
Jamie Griffiths writes for Approved Index – a leading UK B2B directory and marketplace and great source for quotes on search engine optimisation and online marketing.