Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title
-
Hello,
I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together!
1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name
OR
1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement
Thanks!
-
Yes !!!
I recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If a brand is well–known enough to make a difference in click–through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If the brand is less known or relevant than the keyword, the keyword should be first.
Personally I think Brand on titles are good for the following
1. Brand Exposure (User point of view)
2. Reputation Management (Google point of view)Google also started putting many site's name in the title. I think the reason Google started doing it was to distinguish
many of the same titles in the SERPS. Lots of sites, me included, just put "Build Blue Widgets" in the title and the SERPS looked a bit silly with 5 of the top ten having the same title.Nowadays, if anybody searches for your brand and you don't have your brand name in your title tag, google ignores your hard coded Title Tag shows Brand name as your title Tag in its serp.
If Google wants to add site names to the title who am I to disagree with them.
P.S - However if you do your seo right and you rank on important keywords, everytime user searches in google and find you and see your brand on the google serp, you are spreading Brand awareness and you are building your brand for Free ! and gradually the user will know that this brand sells this product and then if you are not ranked on top the user will still click on your link. So you are killing two birds with one stone. Free Traffic + Free Brand building...
Happy Selling !
-
I came across this:
Nowadays Google includes your brand name automatically to the end of your title tag(if theres enough space), so it doesn't make any sense to include your URL in the title tag or description.
from this link: http://moz.com/community/q/url-domain-used-in-meta-description
Any validity to that?
-
A/B testing is always there, but I'm assuming the site is new and doesnt really have much traffic yet, I can't really say specifically answer that. So it's more of a preference as it's normally the one that brings in results for me more often than not. Then I'll test from there with the traffic/rankings/ctr.
Heck, I'll just imitate Zappos first if I need to then test from there. lol
-
Dennis,
Thanks for the reply. Is this because you have a/b tested and including was the better option? Or just preference?
-
There is no rule book for crafting titles except one and that is to create the titles that encourage users to click on the website plus after reading they get a clue of what they are going find in the website. The idea is to test different titles and see is working for you and your business.
I have experienced website that receives are better click ratio when the brand name was added and for few other websites the CTR goes higher as we remove the brand name from the title.
My advice for you is to test and see what works best for you!!
-
This is subjective but yes, I almost always opt to have the company brand in there.
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
-
Importance of City in Title?
Anyone doing SEO for a local business ever tried to do an A/B test between city name in title and not in title? Seems that if you have a Google Places for Business Listing and have correct NAP on your web pages, Google places heavy importance already on that when determining geographic relevance in their algo. As a business expands, maybe not that far from their original service area but starts to offer services in other nearby cities some of which may be as big of a population as the city the business is located in, it seems to make less and less sense to put city names in the title if not for the basic reason of making the title too long. But what if your primary area is basically three cities and including them pushed your title to say, 90 characters. How much does city name in the title tag matter when you are already coming up the local 3-pack map listing on search results for the relevant cities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem1 -
How to switch brand domain and address previous use of domain
We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette0 -
Redirecting Domain / Maintaining Keyword Ranking
Right now we have two sites: "our-company.com" and "cool-widgets.com." We rank high for "cool widgets" searches due to our keyword-friendly URL, but we're merging everything into our newly-redesigned company site. Should we redirect the old "cool-widgets.com" homepage to "our-company.com" (to directly transfer the old PR and links), or would it be more prudent to redirect the old homepage to "our-company.com/cool-widgets" to keep the "cool widgets" keyword in the URL? This option seems like it would be good for maintaining organic search results, but it wouldn't pass the strong link backbone to the new site's homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versare0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Domain Choise
Hello, Im working a e-commerce shop, and my question is about choosing the domain. Presently the website is not performing good with the domain www.casaobjecto.com, that is the brand name of the shop. Now I have made my analysis about keywords and conclude that it would be very interesting to have a domain name with the main keyword that im targeting. The domain is available. If I choose the maintain the www.casaobjecto.com as main domain and the other keyword domain pointing to that site, whats the influence that can take in the keyword im looking for? Or should I replace the target keyword domain (becomes the main domain) by the brand domain name? Whats the best choice? Tks in advance, Pedro M Pereira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Domain buying
hello Mozzers - a bit shout out to all of you. Question - I have a 3 keyword, and the domain is available - the only thing is it has a hyphen example: black-book-covers.com Is it worth getting this domain? There is a fair amount of traffic to this domain. Thank you all - we love you, Best, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Domain w/ Identical Content to Site we are Optimizing
Hi Guys, We've been optimizing a client's site for about a year or so now and on a call the other day the client brought up that he owns and operates another site that's marketing the same product, but to a difference audience (we work on the direct to consumer side, this is a distributior focused site),with the same exact content as the site we are optimizing. Obviously this is a major duplcant content issue and we need to get it resolved very quickjly. We have already reccomendt to the client that we re-write content, but this is where my questions comes in - Which site should we rewrite the content on? The site we are optimizing is the more impoorant of the two, while we still want the other site to hold rankings we dont want to end up accidently optimizing the other site wherein the site we are working on full time suffers a lost when a "compeiting" site creates compeltely new content and may, accidentally, end up ranking higher than the site we are focusing on full time. As links also play a role, would that be a KPI to look at here in determining which site gets new content and which does not? In this scenairo, would would you guys recommend? Just want to make sure I'm dotting all my I's, and crossing T's here. Many thanks to all in advance, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Havas_Disco0 -
Where do I redirect a domain to strengthen another domain?
I've got a UK domain that I need to redirect to a US domain. Should I point it to the root domain or a landing page off the root and what it the benefit to doing one over the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCorp0