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
-
What Service Page Strategy Should We Use to Target City-Specific Local Intent Service Keywords?
Hey guys! We are targeting a number of cities in the Nassau and Suffolk County areas for foundation repair, insulation, and mold remediation keywords, and we were debating on creating city-specific pages for each location and service, or creating one service page for each type of service that contains all of the services and solutions within that service category for each city. Example: City-Specific Pages for Each Service: One page for say foundation repair, one page for foundation crack repair, one page for foundation problems, etc. (for each target city) Service Category Pages for Each City: One page for foundation contractors that lists all services on one page in sections. Which one do you think is better for local SEO and rankings? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages to me. Just to throw a couple out there, the category pages may not rank as high as the city pages for each individual service if our competitors have a whole page designed for that service and we only have a part of a page covering the topic. At the same time, they would save labor hours, technical issues would be less, and they would be condensed, and we would have WAY less mess on the backend. I appreciate your expert opinion on this one. The site is www. zavzaseal.com in case you want to check us out.
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
Brand reputation - how to improve?
Our brand has relatively bad reputation locally and I was wondering how moz can help to improve this.
Local SEO | | LendonMarketing0 -
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 -
We are adding an ecommerce feature to our site. noindex the order. subdomain?
our site currently consists of directory listings for different stores but we will now be adding an ecommerce feature to our site. people from the main site will be able to click a button that will direct you to the orders. subdomain. we are thinking about noindexing the subdomain as i can't find any use cases in organic searches for this new orders. subdomain. What is the current best practice for this type of situation and will noindexing the orders. subdomain harm us in anyway?
Local SEO | | imjonny1230 -
301 redirect from OLDEST site to OLD site to a NEW site. Cons, pros, how?
Local business had a site on domain name - (A) for a 5 years. Few years ago they moved to a new domain - (B) and did 301 redirect from A to B. Now they want to move to another domain containing a keyword - (C+kw).com and apply 301 Question:
Local SEO | | Ryan_V
How to proceed with the redirect for a C+kw not to loose ranking? Which option is better?
1. Redirect from the oldest domain (A) to a newest (C)
A>301>C 2. Redirect from existing domain (B) to a newest (C)
A>301>B
B>301>C 3. Stop existing redirect from A to B, instead do two redirects to a new domain (C)
A stop 301 to B
A>301>C
B>301>C As far as I know under the same conditions a new domain will rank worse than an aged domain. On the other part keyword in domain name helps with local SEO. I think that for the long run it's ok to loose some traffic for a few months but have a better chances to rank in future. What do you think guys?0 -
Will I get Penelized for having a .co.uk site AND a .com site?
Hi Mozers, I have a very important pitch coming up which needs to tackle a questions about international SEO. My client currently has a .com website, but we are debating internally about creating a .co.uk website too so that we can localise content for the UK versus American English on our .com site. Currently, our clients proposition is global, so we made the decision to create a .com website but using American English spelling as a large chunk of English speakers in the world use American English over British English. However, we want to grow the business within the UK, and therefore want to use British English language. Hence creating a .co.uk website. Now, my question is this.... the new .co.uk website will be identical content as the .com website, except for a few spelling changes and the way we phrase certain sentences. How would we be able to run both a .co.uk site and .com site without being penelized from Google for plagarism? Would it involve href lang tags? Server hosting location? Any ideas from you guys out there?
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Getting Schooled in Local by 'Lesser' Brands?
Hi Moz! First question I've asked here. I've been working on campaign for my company (regional solar installation company in Northeast USA) for close to 7 years, we've always done well in local search but recently have noticed sites that, for lack of a better word, we 'school' in terms of all the usual metrics - better/more consistent local listings, better domain strength, better backlink profile, bigger company (in the real world), brand recognition, etc... However recently we have started seeing smaller competitors beat us in state-specific rankings, using stuff I would call 'old school' SEO that is no longer really tolerated, in theory - stuffing keywords onto page, keywords in domain, etc... domains of much less strength pulling #1 or #2 terms. Based on data I don't actually think keywords like "solar + state name" are actually that powerfully but frankly it is bit embarrassing to get crushed by 1-2 person companies when you have a 150+ company with a three-person in-house digital marketing team. My strategy so far has consisted of building a better Google review solicitation process, adding schema markup to our project gallery, and some SEO 101 stuff like reworking keywords and title tags. I've noticed a strong uptick on our site of leads from outside our territory (like folks from all across the USA who are NOT in our service territory) - I'm almost thinking I've done 'too good' a job of building a nationally relevant website and not enough state-specific options. Has anyone ever experienced something like this? Any clever strategies beyond the obvious? Can share more specifics if it'll be helpful. Cheers,
Local SEO | | revisionsolar
Fred0 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1