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
-
Local Site stuck on page 2 for years. Can’t penetrate page 1! Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!
Local SEO | | Seanthewood1230 -
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 -
From traction to non existent! What happened to my Photography site and what can I do to fix it?
Aloha guys, To start as I always do with the (awesome) Moz community I wanted to say thanks for the insight! This has to be one of the best online communities and help resource with great positive and concise help that really makes a difference, so many thanks everyone! PS I also do my best to relay what I learn here to fellow business owners and point them to SEO boosting avenues to help support the community as much as possible. Anyways... **My Photo website ** **Current top wedding website (I do enjoy her work!!!) ** Attached below is a link to some stats/graphs! The Problem! After the recent Google update last month I've had a drop in my site visibility from 5.8% and some change to now .7% of search volume.. Painful for my photo & video business here on Kauai to say the least. A few images are attached, is there also any correlations you guys can see or think may help to get my site up to the first page? I know we deliver some of the very best work here on the island and deliver great service too, its a bummer that we cant do more for folks visiting here that dont even know we exist! The question! Do you guys have any ideas on what can be done to get my page to gaining organic traction and doing great again? My goal is to have our business rank for Kauai Wedding Videographer, Kauai Wedding Photographer, and Kauai Family Photographer! My moz dashboard is still saying we're on the way for that but that my search visibility is way way down. Any clarity or ideas are greatly appreciated you guys! I would love to relay this to the wedding community as well! Warmest aloha from Kauai everybody and have a great day! NjELT NjELT
Local SEO | | Trey30 -
Another Keyword Driven Domain Question
So we have a client that has a ton of great links, solid social profiles, content with good keyword-to-content ratio (7.5-9%), etc. This site has been around for a while and performed well. Recently a new competitor showed up with a very long keyword driven domain and has been outranking our client (and everyone else) for a large quantity of keywords. We own a keyword driven domain that could be used, but should we switch? I am always for branded domains vs keyword, but in this case it appears to be working and undefeatable. We have waited for 6 months to see if it's a fluke, but it has only gained additional ranking. The site in question has bad backlinks, many spam items, and stuffed content on the homepage. We will not copy that format obviously, but should we take one more step and beat him at his own game? Our client has Yext Premium, MOZ local, AdWords, social paid campaigns, location targeting pages, fast load time, etc. Overall a good presence. He seems stuck around the 3-5 position on page one, and is looking to push into the top 3 consistently.
Local SEO | | David-Kley1 -
Keywords & Domain
I need some advice. We are a real estate company that offers real estate sales and rentals. I have a domain (for example lets pretend there is an imaginary island called Pumpkin Island) - pumpkinrealestate.com (as many people just refer to pumpkin island as pumpkin eg. I am going down to pumpkin this weekend). pumpkinrealestate.com will be a website that offers all the properties for sale, local real estate community information, buying process, selling process, etc for the Pumpkin Island real estate market (we are a brokerage). I am also beginning to build out a new website that will be for our vacation rentals at "pumpkin island". I have a domain called "vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com" Question taking this factors in account: EMDs work well in our area IF the content is good. So assuming I will have a good link profile and good content, on page seo and offpage - - - pumpkinrealestate.com will have a decent amount of traffic naturally while vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com will have very dramatic increases of traffic during the winter, spring and summer (due to people planning vacations) would it be best to have the vacation rental website under its own domain vacationrentalspumpkinisland.com and the sales site under pumpkinrealestate.com OR have the sales site as pumpkinrealestate.com and the vacation website a subdomain of it for example: vacationrentals.pumpkinrealestate.com?? (maybe helping to leverage the traffic for both sites for benefit of one domain). Puzzled and need some thoughts, advice or suggestions. Thanks!!!! CHris
Local SEO | | topsailislander0 -
How to globalize your brand if the name contains a geo-location modifier?
Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members 🙂 ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction: Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc). Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says..."). Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers". Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand? What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!
Local SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
If you have a product on your site that's only available in the US, is there a way to avoid it leading to a 404 error if a user in Canada accesses it?
A client has some products on their site that are only available in Canada. When a user in the US accesses the product listing, it results in a 404 error page. Are there any work-arounds for something like this? Thanks in advance!
Local SEO | | DA20130 -
SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages? If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?) Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign! Thanks
Local SEO | | EdwardoUK0