One of the perks of our job is the ability to work with so many dealers on a regular basis. It’s so nice getting to build relationships and your questions make us better! Over the past few months we have noticed that we sometimes get asked similar questions from a variety of dealers. We decided to create a “Frequently Asked Questions” column in our Monthly Advisor so that if other dealers have the same question, we can help to answer it here!
FAQ: What can Title Tags do for my website?
What is a Title Tag?
A title tag is a title element that is important for SEO. A title tag is used to describe the content and/or outline an online document. Content (for as far as we can tell) will always be the most important factor for on-page SEO, but title tags are probably the second most important. Title tags appear in three places:
1. Browsers
2. Search Engine Results Pages
3. External Websites
Best Practices for Title Tag use
Title tags should not contain more than 70 characters. This is the limit that Google will display in search results; if there are more characters listed Google will simply disregard them and they will serve little to no purpose.
Title tags are meant to describe the content of the page in a concise, descriptive way. Title tags provide an opportunity for websites to build keywords to help achieve search engine results. When creating title tags, place the most important keywords first. Google will read the keywords in order of significance, so if there are specific keywords that help to describe the page, be sure to place those first.
Creating relevant title tags will also help to encourage user clicks because it will help to describe the content that they will find when they click on the link. It’s really important to think about how the user will search in engines such as Google. Title tags are the first opportunity that a user has to interact with your brand, they should convey a positive message. As you can see from the search engine picture above, Google bolds title tags which gives your keywords greater visibility, which generally means you will have a higher click rate.
A very common request that we receive is customers wanting to place additional locations into title tags. This may be because a dealer has multiple locations or because a dealer wants to identify surrounding towns and cities where customers may live in (outside of where the location is). Best practice for creating title tags, when mentioning a location, would be one location per page. If you start to get competing locations on a page Google will not make the connection between the search term and several locations listed. For example if your title tags say “pool installation” New Berlin, Norwich, Ithaca, Hamilton, New Hartford, Oxford”, Google will have a very tough time making a connection between “pool installation” with any city past Norwich in the list.
What does all of this mean for me?
Take a look at your website and identify the keywords that are important for each page. Keep in mind, Google ranks specific pages on your website, not your website as a whole. Think of this as each page being its own website, completely independent of one another (for search results only, this obviously is not the case once a user visits your website). Let’s use an example, let’s say that pool installation is a very important part of your business. You have a specific page on your website built to talk about your pool installation services. To create title tags for this you may want to use ‘Pool Installation, Pool Maintenance, Above Ground & Inground Pool’. The most important keyword should be placed first, in this case, this would be ‘pool installation’.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to target too any terms on one page. Each page should be specific about its own topic, this will help in search engine results and help to encourage clicks. If you have too many varying title tags it will confuse both the search engine and the user.