Hey, Nick Ponte here, coming to you from Maui. I hope you’re having a fantastic start to the new year.
I own a digital marketing agency here in Hawaii, and I help small business owners stay up-to-date on marketing trends and strategies. Lately, we’ve talked about specific ways to increase website traffic that lead to valuable conversions. Today, I want to give some advice about a topic that makes a visual difference for your website, increasing the number of clicks through your pages.
Title tags essentially refer to the content of the headers and subheaders on your website. This includes the clickable headlines at the top of each page, and all the smaller ones throughout. You’ll see headers of each type on this page, for example. They also show up as the title of a tab when you have a website open. You see a title tag on each page of my website, just like you see at the top of this blog post.
You’ve probably grown accustomed to clicking them on all the sites you regularly visit or when you click on a search result. What you might not know is they’re an especially important tool when it comes to SEO, getting better results for your business in search engines.
So how do you optimize your own title tags to get the best outcomes, increase your traffic, and gain quality leads? Keep reading.
Also Read: How New Changes to Google’s Search Engine Affect SEO Rankings for Hawaii Businesses
What’s the Big Deal about a Little Title Tag?
Title tags give a quick overview of what to expect on the webpage below it. It’s prime real estate in a list of search results! You want yours to give an appropriate idea of the theme and the content on that page, and they should tie together with the themes of the entire website.
What kind of impact do title tags have on rankings? Users look at titles of pages before anything else, and the title also pops up under the initial link within search results. This will reveal whether or not the page has the desired content someone searches for.
Because of this, you need to have attractive, well-crafted title tags so they won’t mislead or cause someone to overlook your page. A good tag will help to increase the number of clicks you get from organic searches.
In addition to the human element, Google will notice your headers when it “crawls” your website to assign it a search rank. It’s one of the main ways that their algorithm learns the topic of your site and pages. So, you want to make it easy for Google to do its job.
I’ve got a few quick tips to share with you about how to make the best use of these tags to increase your traffic!
Also Read: The Definitive Guide to Organic SEO Methods
3 Tips to Create Attention-Grabbing Title Tags
To get started, you’ll just check out the wording in your HTML (or have your web designer do it for you). You can see how it looks just by checking out search results and your website in an internet browser. From there, follow these three tips to optimize this part of your content:
- Choose Unique Wording for Each Page’s Tag
Pay attention to the topical relevance of each webpage. Cater the tag’s wording to the specific context of individual pages. It doesn’t mean the titles can’t resemble one another, but the title tag for your homepage should read differently than the tag for pages within your blog or for various products. You want the title tag to accurately reflect the content found below it so users can efficiently find what they want.
Google has updated their technology over the years so that it can pull pages into search results even when titles don’t match exact keywords. If you use strategic keywords throughout your page, you can get a little more creative with the title tag—as long as it still conveys an accurate message about the content.
Periodically work with your web developer to run an audit on your tags and make sure they still look good and don’t have any errors in the coding. Tags can be easy to overlook by the business, but your customers will see them. You want to keep up your good impressions!
- Use Strategic, Natural Language
Write a title in a way that sounds natural to speak. Use keywords strategically by placing them at the beginning of phrases. Don’t forget to include important details like your business name and primary products or services.
Keep titles short and to-the-point. If a title tag gets too long, search engine results pages (SERPs) will cut it off and show only the first few hundred characters. Plus, a shorter, attention-grabbing title will give a user more of what they want to know in less time—which is what they want. They won’t put much effort into discerning your meaning when they have a bunch of options in front of them. If something gets too wordy and hard to read, you risk a potential customer scrolling right past it… even if you do have the product they need.
- Answer Your Customers’ Questions
When you brainstorm the wording for your title tags, keep in mind the actual questions that you get from customers. What are they looking for? How are you going to help them?
Since these tags form the first impression users get when they look through a list of results, you need to focus on giving them the reasons to click through to your site over others. Evaluating your pages’ content and keeping that content within some boundaries will work in your favor. Then, base the title tags on the overall theme. For example, consider basing this information on the main call-to-action (CTA) for that page.
If you take these initial steps to create informative and catchy title tags, you’ll already have a leg up on your competition when it comes to attracting users through search engine results.
Every day, we help businesses optimize their websites to give them the BEST chances of increasing revenue in the digital marketplace. If you want to learn more about how to do this or want help, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: 3 Ways to Improve Engagement on Your Website
Photo Courtesy of Pascal Debrunner