Testing Your Homepage Title Tag
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
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
-
Is there another option for User Testing besides Usertesting.com
I loved the presentation Phil Sharp did about A/B testing using User Testing. I would love to use his company UserTesting.com, but their minimum package is for $7500! I'm a small business and certainly cannot afford that. Is there another option for the small business owner?
Search Behavior | | RoxBrock1 -
I changed my home title and meta description but on google, i still see the old title and meta description. Whats the problem here?
I basically changed the title and meta description of my homepage and when i search on google, it still shows old. Whats the issue?
Search Behavior | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
SEO For A Title Company?
Has anyone ever had success with doing SEO for a title company? The owner of our law firm has one, and I'd be happy to work on it, but it just doesn't seem to be cost-effective. From my experience, title business goes to people who personally know the realtor; no one who actually has a say is "googling title companies." But, if I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it and any experiences you want to share. Thanks, Ruben
Search Behavior | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Homepage & Subdomain Love Story...
Hi, Here's the situation: There's this website URL.com which is a search engine for a certain purpose (android developers). In fact, the homepage and maybe the "about" page are the only pages sitting on URL.com, all of the other inner pages (hundreds of thousands) are generated within one main Sub-Domain - X.URL.com Also, the analytics is tracking only X.URL.com because those inner pages are the only ones to attract organic traffic. So, in Analytics we see URL.com as referral traffic to X.URL.com Also, in WebmasterTools under "Links to your site" we see like half a million links from URL.com to X.URL.com Is this situation normal, do you think it may impact SEO in any way? Last remark, organic traffic is growing in a great way to the inner pages generated by the search engine, which as said sitting under x.URL.com Thanks
Search Behavior | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
Is a Shorter Page Title Better?
Is there any evidence that SEs give a greater weighting to keyword phrases in the page title if there are less characters? For example: 1. "Buy Silver Bullion" 2. "Buy Silver Bullion Coins Bars Rounds Easily Privately Securely" The key phrase I am trying to optimize for is "Buy Silver Bullion." To my knowledge, current practices would say the 2nd phrase is better optimized since it contains more keywords and it has a few USPs. But is there any evidence that the 1st example would be higher ranked in google for the phrase "Buy Silver Bullion" because it is more focused than the 2nd?
Search Behavior | | nwright0 -
Better rank VS Better Title Tag
I changed my title tag to encourage a better CTR by looking less keyword stuffed and my rank dropped from #2 to #5. So what do you think is better a title that business name first unlike everyone else who is just keywords first or a more google friendly title that looks like everyone else?
Search Behavior | | greenjoe0 -
Would like to test other words besides "subscribe"
I have a newsletter button on my website that states "subscribe now". I am wondering if there are better words than the word subscribe since people are so numb to that word now. Anyone ever measure or A/B test different words?
Search Behavior | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Google Is Displaying An Alt image tag as my homepage's page title
Google is randomly displaying the alt image tag as the page title for my homepage. It happens when you search for the brand name, but the page title appears as "BrandName Logo" (obviously not "BrandName"). Has anybody seen this happen before?
Search Behavior | | MichaelWeisbaum0