6 Tips for Tweaking Your Title Tags to Increase Website Traffic & Rankings
When it comes to the web and search results, your title tag is everything for capturing the attention of your potential clients. Title tags are still extremely important for SEO (search engine optimization) and by tweaking your titles you can increase website traffic and in turn your rankings. When you increase your click-through rate, we mean the number of people who see you in search results and actually click through to your website and spend time on it – this, in turn, increases your rankings, moving you up in search results. So here are just a few ways for you to get your titles in tip-top shape to get more eyes on your website and move you up the ranks:
Numbers have a way of standing out. Especially when a search engine results page is littered with various titles that use only words, titles that contain numbers capture our attention. Whether it’s a list of 10 reasons why… or a title that says that 70% of people do this…our brains respond and gravitate towards these articles because they look different.
In the same way that a lime stands out amongst a group full of lemons, by using numbers in your title tags you can draw attention to your article by switching things up with some digits.
Using dates in title tags is a wonderful way to distinguish that the article web visitors will be reading is relevant and contains timely information. As an example, for a web visitor perusing testimonials of a business or a product, they may search for “<insert product/business> reviews in 2017” to filter out older reviews and results because they want to hear about your most recent service or product quality.
In the same way, by leveraging dates you can indicate to those searching the web, that your article/web page and the information contained therein has information that is up-to-date. For certain keyword queries this technique can be super effective, for example 5 best patios in Calgary to visit in May 2017.
Titles cannot be too short that they fail to contain the necessary information, nor too long such that they try to stuff every targeted keyword in imaginable. When too short, there is too much ambiguity in what the page/article contains. As an example, a title for an article about planting a vegetable garden that is too short would be “Vegetable Gardening”. Whereas a too long title for the same article would be “Planting a vegetable garden containing carrots, peas, cucumbers and zucchinis in Calgary.” The latter is clearly excessive, the former doesn’t contain enough info. It’s a matter of finding the right balance. 50 – 60 characters is often cited as the optimal length for title tags.
The beautiful thing about people is that we’re all different. Which means we also search for things on the web using different words. Hence, the need to think about synonyms and phrases that your web visitors may use to search for your products or services online. It’s a matter of doing the research regarding what kind of language and keywords your customers and potential clients use when referring to your offerings.
While one person may use the term, “low-cost flowers” to find a local florist in search engines, others may use the terms “affordable flowers”, “economic flowers”, and “cheap flowers” to try and find the same thing. Or in our case, as a web development company, some people use the terms “web design company,” “website design firm,” “company website builders”, etc., in an effort to find our services.
To ensure your title tags resonate with your desired customers, be sure to anticipate the multiple terms that your users may use to find you. You want to capture the breadth of potential words and phrases that may be used when someone is scoping out the web to find you in both your title tags and throughout your website’s copy.
Action words and verbs inspire people to click through and complete an action, and this is important for those creating titles because, well, you want people to come to your website. By getting people to click on your titles, you, in turn, get more traffic to your website, which search engines see as a great thing, and well, this helps in moving your website up the ranks. Incorporating call-to-action words in your titles like, buy now, find out now, download, learn, access, etc., incites those perusing the web to do something and, ideally, click on your web page instead of your competitions.
Search engines answer questions, so why not use questions as your titles? By using questions as the title tags of your articles, you are anticipating what words your potential clients may use to find you. Oftentimes people will directly type a question into the Google search bar, so why not make use of this technique to capture that traffic!
Need more answers to your questions? Contact Blue Ocean today!
