Optimal Page Titles to avoid cannibalization
-
Hi there Moz community
I spent today researching optimal "page titles" to avoid cannibalization of keyword. Why? Because when i set up my site previously for another industry I obviously well and truly stuffed it up with page titles that were different, but still too similar ie field marketing project setup, field marketing saas, field marketing reporting. I never ranked once for that term. Consequently, we nearly went broke in the process.
Hence my research, which led me to Rands video and other information about choosing the best page title. However, I came across two opposing name theories. So, before i make a colossal error again, could someone please clearly clarify which would be the best way for me to proceed.
First option(according to Rand's video about the snowboard website)
Main page title - Field reporting and mobile data collection (same keywords as site title?)
Subsequent pages - titles - (p1) Field reporting for construction (2) field reporting for medical (p3) field reporting for retail
(or is that cannibalizing "field reporting"?)
Second option
Main landing page - Field reporting Solutions for your business, for your industry
Subsequent page titles - (p1) defect inspection & reporting for construction (p2) incident reporting for medical
But my quandary is that I wanted to rank for mobile data collection and field reporting for these industries. So how do I write the page titles without firstly keyword stuffing, secondly avoid cannibalization and lastly, not too long?
Any explanation that specifically says yes or no would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance and happy friday.
Sharon
-
Those two options aren't as opposing as you might think. The first option deals with having a highly specialized task/item/service that works for multiple industries. The second option expands on services more. Either one can work depending on what exactly you are offering as an industry and what people in those industries are searching for.
Take into account the fact that relevancy is a thing. Just because you don't use the exact word you thought you needed to use, that doesn't mean you can't be found for it. Also remember that everyone searches differently. Just because you believe people should find you for a certain set of terms doesn't mean that they will all always be entering in those terms that exact way every time into Google. So its usually best to expand the way you talk about your industry, make sure to use not only corporate buzz words but also more generic terms that are related, dig deeper into your analytics to see other ways of how people are finding your site, and take a look at Search Console to see what other terms are out there that you have impressions on but poor Click through rate.
Overall, this is part science and part creative writing. You need to find the right terms for the most qualified traffic for the right page for your site... but you need to make it sound good and look good without seeming stuffed, spammy, or deceptive. There is no easy formula for word placement that will function 100% of the time. You might find that **[field reporting] **is a better term in general so might want to use that in your homepage but then [incident reporting] might have better clickthroughs when paired with [medical] and [defect inspection] could convert better when paired with [construction]. Or you could find that the search volume isn't that different between most of them and that **[field reporting] **is the main way that all people are looking for your services.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Duplicate Pages #!
Hi guys, Currently have duplicate pages accross a website e.g. https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart**#!** https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart The only difference is the URL 1 has a hashtag and exclamation tag. Everything else is the same. We were thinking of adding rel canonical tags on the #! versions of the page to the correct URLs. But Google doens't seem to be indexing the #! versions anyway. Does anyone know why this is the case? If Google is not indexing them, is there any point adding rel canonical tags? Cheers, Chris https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart#!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Many pages small unique content vs 1 page with big content
Dear all, I am redesigning some areas of our website, eurasmus.com and we do not have clear what is the best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
option to follow. In our site, we have a city area i.e: www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla which we are going
to redesign and a guide area where we explain about the city, etc...http://eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla/guide/
all with unique content. The thing is that at this point due to lack of resources, our guide is not really deep and we believe like this it does not
add extra value for users creating a page with 500 characters text for every area (transport...). It is not also really user friendly.
On the other hand, this pages, in long tail are getting some results though is not our keyword target (i.e. transport in sevilla)
our keyword target would be (erasmus sevilla). When redesigning the city, we have to choose between:
a)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> with all the content one one page about 2500 characters unique.
b)www.eurasmus.com/en/erasmus-sevilla -> With better amount of content and a nice redesign but keeping
the guide pages. What would you choose? Let me know what you think. Thanks!0 -
PDF or HTML Page?
One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page. The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents. My thoughts were why not make it a pdf? Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page? If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well? The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Changing title tags in well established site - should I do this gradually to avoid risk of penalty?
Hi, I'm altering title tags in a well established site (many of which are duplicates) and was wondering whether there's a risk associated with adjusting them all in one go? Should I just make gradual changes instead in case I flag anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Similar page titles but not quite duplicate
Howdy Mozzers, I have a problem with the way Google now tries not to show more than one search result per site on the first page. As in it is a lot harder to be ranked number 1 - 10 twice with different pages. Some of my pages have similar yet different page titles so they use the same first two keywords and then a variable such as '(keyword) (keyword) installations' '(keyword) (keyword) surveys'. Then when I search for '(keyword) (keyword)' they all appear at the start of page two with only ever one of them moving onto the end of page one. Now, it could just be that they are not quite optimised for page 1 but I think it would be more holding back of pages so they don't flood page 1. Any help on this? And also is there a problem with having similar page titles for pages? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
No equivalent page to re-direct to for highly trafficked pages, what should we do?
We have several old pages on our site that we want to get rid of, but we don't want to 404 them since they have decent traffic numbers. Would it be fine to set up a 301 re-direct from all of these pages to our home page? I know the best option is to find an equivalent page to re-direct to, but there isn't a great equivalent.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0