Testing Your Homepage Title Tag

[BeTheBoss]

It can be a scary thing to change your homepage title tag to get the best results in the SERP while also maintaining your rankings. You obviously want to be irresistible and clickworthy… so how much time do you give before changing it up to test again?

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Nathan,

I generally A/B test every element I'm considering changing, but due to the nature of meta data this doesn't really work for title testing. I'm therefore pretty meticulous about research and strategy before I make any changes.

I would say that the frequency really depends on your level of traffic. If you have 100,000 visitors a month, I would consider figures reliable and safe (from the point of view of not messing around TOO much) to change it every two months and monitor results. If your traffic is 1,000 visitors a month, you might have to leave the experiment running longer (perhaps 4 months) to get reliable statistics.

Good luck!

[NoahsDad]

Ahh, got ya. That's a great question, I'll look forward to reading the replies. I personally don't mess with the home page title tag, but have tweaked some of the blog post title tags. I normally just wait and see if I notice a chance 30 days after I change the title, but nothing real scientific.

[BeTheBoss]

It's not about a single site of mine in particular - just a discussion thread. I'm curious how often most of the mozzers go about changing their title tags when testing them out. And what best practices they use.

[NoahsDad]

Hey Nathan, I think it would depend on what your overall goals are, what the title tag you have now is, etc.  If you look at seoMoz's title tag you'll notice they don't have a call to action or anything in their title tag. They have developed the brand.

In regard to your site, have you built a brand for it? Are you selling merch? Is it a blog? Does the content on the home page change often?