Keyword and Branded Title Tags Site Wide
-
I have a client who is using a structure like this for site wide title tags:
Page specific keyword | Brand Name | Industry specific keyword + locations
So in an example it'd look like:
Drupal Development | BrandName | Web Services for Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York
I've researched this structure pretty thoroughly to be able to make a case for or against doing this site wide.
However, I've received many mixed signals on many things. My questions are as follows:- Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful?
- Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword?
- Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral
It seems like all these things could go either way to me, but I don't want to tell them one way or another without having some more detailed explanations to give them.
Thanks for your help!
-
Thanks so much! This is very helpful
-
First, the correct answer for each page is to test different title tags over time to see which version gives you the best rankings for a handful of phrases that are mapped to that page along with the best click through rate.
Second, don't be scared of testing longer title tags. Google still reads everything after the ellipsis.
Third, I'm a fan of putting more keywords in a title tag wherever possible (or at least testing it). So for example, on a page that talks about drupal development services, I would test a title tag like, "Experienced Drupal Developers - Drupal Development Company & Services for Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York - Brand Name".
Now to answer your questions specifically:
- Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful?
- I always push to put brand name last because it doesn't help rankings or CTR (in most cases) to list it earlier. If a client is adamant about it, then I let them have their way.
- Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword?
-
I believe it is a waste of precious title tag space to include these words on all pages because there is only one page you are trying to rank for "Web Services", for example. It's better to include more focused keywords that are relevant to that specific page in the title tag than these generic terms. In my example title tag above, that page is now going to rank better for all of the following keywords:
-
drupal developers
-
drupal developer
-
experienced drupal developers
-
experienced drupal developer
-
drupal development
-
drupal development company
-
drupal development services
-
experienced drupal development
-
experienced drupal development company
-
experienced drupal development services
-
and all these phrases with those city names attached as well
- Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral
- It's probably neutral. I would suggest testing with and without them and monitor your rankings for the local terms to see if it makes a difference. Typically if it's only 1-3 locations, I don't have a problem throwing them in at the end to where they won't even be seen by a human because it'll be truncated. But again, test, test, test.
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
-
Brand Name Importance in SERPS
I have a client who we will call "A&Ahomes.com" who has a competitor moving into their area who we will call "ArnoldHomes.com." My client's actual business name includes Arnold and the concern is when "Arnold" is googled that their competition is at the top of the SERP'S. Would it be beneficial from an SEO standpoint to adjust their current domain name to include their full brand name?
Local SEO | | moliver10220 -
Duplicate site with same content
Hi All, I hope someone can assist, We have 2 brands that sell the exact same products. We have a main and an off brand. We just redeveloped the main brands site and now have to do the off brand (was owned by another company and we acquired them, we then changed their products to match ours). Am I able to pretty much clone the site and just change the branding and rel canonical each page to its original on the main brand? Granted I will lose rankings but will it be something that will affect anything else? I want to do this so it saves us time in updating products on both sites (and avoids errors in incorrect pricing). Would appreciate some guidance with this one 🙂 Cheers Dave
Local SEO | | CFCU1 -
Multi location strategy - tracking keywords
I have very recently taken on a local business to manage and quite new to all of this. Your posts on the subject of multi-location SEO have been incredibly useful and the original blogpost on Local landing pages by Miriam Ellis is in my reading list and I am sure will be revisited regularly. I have another question on this obviously complex subject, what to do about tracking your keywords in MOZ Pro? I have subscribed and set up my main keywords and linked each to the 40 different service locations for our business, which is based in a single location but services a wide area, however this now gives me 400 keywords to track, which seems way too much and unmanageable. Can you give me some advice on how to make this much more effective? Many thanks, Sarah
Local SEO | | Mutatio_Digital0 -
Linkbuilding for Medical-Industry Sites
Hey Mozzers, I currently have a client in the medical industry who I'm trying to build some keyword rankings for, but I'm having a hard-time finding low-/no- cost link partners. The client specializes in 'breast augmentation procedures' (ex. breast reduction, breast enhancement, reconstruction, etc.), however, a lot of the sites I've been finding throughout my link prospecting efforts are either low-quality or haven't published content in at least several years. My question to you all is: Have you found any SEO strategies to be particularly successful for medical industry-based sites or plastic surgeon sites? Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this! I'm looking forward to reading your responses!
Local SEO | | maxcarnage0 -
PPC keywords and locations help
Hi. I have a client who is looking to target locations. In their PPC campaigns they have generic keywords such as web design but the campaigns are location based so Surrey, Kent etc... Would they be better to target UK wide but use localised keywords such as Web design surrey? Also in your view, is the Display Network worth it for a small business competing against cheaper/bigger services/companies? Any views be great. Thanks
Local SEO | | YNWA0 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0 -
Duplicate site content and setting up country specific domains
We look after a website which was originally just hosted on mysite.co.uk. We expanded to the European markets creating mysite.de and mysite.fr getting each product and page translated properly into German and French respectively. We have really good success on google.de and google.fr for these sites. We want to do the same with google.ie and create mysite.ie for the Irish market but as they speak English there will be no translation required. The only thing we will change is the base currency from GBP to EUR. From a duplication point of view will this be bad for both businesses mysite.co.uk and mysite.ie or will the .ie site be seen as the 'copier' and the .co.uk as the authority? Has anyone got any advice over best practice here and what would be the best thing for us to consider? We absolutely cannot risk the .co.uk site ranking wise. It's unrealistic for us to rewrite each product description and page so it means the same thing but is worded differently to avoid the duplication issue.
Local SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Mobile Options for indexing mobile sites and live sites.
Our development team has noindexed our mobile versions of desktop pages in Wordpress. I am wondering if there is a negative impact to noindexing the mobile pages? We have a desktop version of the page live so the content is available in both locations and I believe we would be avoiding duplicate content issues by no indexing the mobile page, is there a reason I am missing that I would not want to noindex my mobile pages? Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Local SEO | | Highline_Ideas0