Should title contain the term Top 10?
-
One of my clients' run a hyperlocal marketplace (have different pages for each city) to hire music teachers. Should the title be "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston"? or "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston".
I prefer former title as it has 2 keywords - "violin teachers", "violin tutors" than latter. But my client argues that "Top 10" has a strong affinity to attract users that would increase CTR.
Am I right? or Is he right? and Why?
-
Look at the keyword you are trying to rank for. Perform several searches and see what currently ranks in the SERPs
Two things to look at
- Are you going to look the same or different from everyone else?
If everyone who is ranking right now uses the title "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" then go with something like "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston". Likewise, if everyone else uses "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston", then go with something like "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" You get the idea. If you want to get clicks, you need to stand out from the rest a bit.
- What is the user really looking for? What is the searcher intent?
Google is big on searcher intent. Forget what you and the owners think. What is the problem that potential students are trying to solve? Have your client go ask a bunch of his students / parents of students. Are they looking for "the best"? Are they looking for "the cheapest"? Are they looking for "the most experienced"? Are they looking for "most experienced with teenagers" etc. Use that with the KW volume to drive your decision.
Here is an example.
Let's say the keywords are "violin teachers Boston". It has good search volume and goal completion rates.
You have the owner talk to clients and find they really looking for Violin instructors with the most experience.
You then see that all the pages in the serp use the listicle approach - top 10 violin teachers in Boston, the best 5 instructors for violins in Boston" etc The results seem to indicate that people are looking for the best/experienced violin teachers in Boston, but the pages that are ranking are trying to fulfill this intent by using a list approach.
Brainstorm with ideas around the keywords "experienced violin teachers in Boston", that don't include lists and try that out. You should now have the basic keywords covered for volume/conversion/ranking purposes, you have searcher intent covered, and you have something that can help you stand out a bit on page 1 among all the other titles. Make sense?
Cheers!
-
Would go with his suggestion, the top 10 keywords will make sure the title is catchier and the keywords for SEO are still in the title with that as well. You could test by looking at your data in Google Search Console if this is working for you or not.
-
That's a good question. I'm not surprised that your client really loves the good ol' "listicle" approach, a la Buzzfeed & the like. The listicle was ~the~ thing to do in 2015/2016, it seems! I almost think that "Violin Teachers, Tutors" seems _kind of, slightly _keyword stuffy. I'd encourage you to instead place one of those two words (teacher vs tutor) in the meta description to make the title tighter & cleaner if you go with your preferred title.
I say this because I try to remember to cater to my searcher/user first & foremost with compelling titles & descriptions, while still giving nods to Google with proper practices. However... When in doubt, consider A/B Testing with your different locations to see which performs best! Good luck!
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
-
Adding Location to Title Tags has dropped SEO Rankings
After adding the suburb of my business to each title tag on my website, I've noticed their rankings have dropped from page one to page four in a lot of cases. Should I wait it out and expect to see them improve in the future? Should I revert them back to their old title tags? I'm a little concerned!
On-Page Optimization | | thomaslutrov0 -
Use of '&' in meta title
Hi, I know that use of '&' would be helpful to save space and also add more keyword variation to the title tag. But just want to make sure if it matters if I use '&' in most of my title tags? And also is it common to use more than & in one title? Would the following title be different in Google's perspective regardless of the title length? I am thinking they are all targeting the keywords 'fruit cake' and 'fruit bread', but the first one is the best. buy fruit cake & bread buy fruit cake & fruit bread buy fruit cake and fruit bread Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | russellbrown0 -
Penalty for Changing Home Page Title Tags
Hey Mozzers I'm certain of the answer to this question, however I wanted to get some input from the experts in Moz-land to hopefully provide some additional perspective. I recently disagree with a client's assertion that there is some penalty Google levels for changing the title tags of your home page. Now, I understand changing the title tags can influence serp rankings, however, is anyone aware of some penalty Google levels for simply changing the title tags? Most of what I've read and experienced has people changing them all the time without some phantom penalty. It seems to me a problem of correlation = causality, in that people often attribute a drop to an action that may not have actually been the cause. Anyway, if you have any particular insight on this top I would appreciate it greatly. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BrandLabs0 -
Image Tags And Titles
Hi, I am currently revamping my website with a new look. Some questions i have with regards to the images found on a page. I know that we need an alt tag for each image. This should not be keyword spammed. However, what about the title tag for the image? What is the best practice for image title tags? Should it be the same as the alt tag? Should it be different? Should I leave it blank? If I am running a wordpress platform for my website. The defaulted settings for wordpress is that all images inside a post are clickable. When clicked, the page loads from abcdef.com/page/ to abcdef.com/page/image.jpg. This seems to be generating alot of internal links but I don't see the value of loading an image when my visitors click on that. Should I let the image be clickable or remove the link on the image for best SEO practices? Thanks for your advice. paul
On-Page Optimization | | paulgian1 -
Should a title tag and the URL be a 100 percent match?
My understanding is that a URL should be as short as possible and also match the title tag, but in order to keep the URL shorter, can you abbreviate it? For example: Title Tag: Eat Your Way to Beauty with Superfoods URL: websitename.com/sbeauty-with-superfoods
On-Page Optimization | | KimCalvert0 -
How dangerous are duplicate page titles
We ran a SEO crawl and on our report it flag up duplicate pages titles, we investigate further and found that these were page titles from the same product line that had more than one page, e.g 1-50 (products) 51-100 (products) with a next button to move to the following 50 products. These where flagged as duplicate page titles ".../range-1/page-1" and ".../range-1/page-2" These titles are obviously being read as duplicates but because they are the same range we do not know what the best course of action is. We want to know how detrimental these page titles will be to our SEO if at all. If anyone could shed some light on this issue it would be a massive help. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SimonDixon0 -
Title tags missing
I have noticed that some of my title tags have been altered (by Google?) on the SERP. I am only showing the keywords on some listings, not the full title tags that I wrote, this is happening to our competitors as well. Any idea what is going on, one of my clients is looking for answers! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | USHoleInOne0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0