Seasonal homepage titles?

[JAR897]

Hiya guys,

I'm wondering if it's worth updating my website's homepage title to focus on a seasonal message in the run-up to Christmas, or if I would be better to leave it as standard and focus on a more specific category page with a seasonal title and content?

Cheers,

JAR

[KristinaKledzik]

I've heard theories that Google doesn't like you changing your page title too much, but I've never seen that substantiated. So, I recommend testing this for yourself:

**Paid option: **For brand searches during the holidays, run an AdWords Search ad that uses a seasonal message. Compare the metrics of the seasonal messaging vs the metrics of the ad for the rest of the year to see what searchers are more likely to click on. This will tell you searchers' preferences, although it won't tell you Google's reaction to you changing homepage content.

Unpaid Option:

• Identify the non-seasonal vs seasonal keywords that you'd like your homepage to rank for. Start tracking them in a tool like Moz. (I don't think that just changing the page title will drastically change rankings, but you want to be sure.)

• Change your page title, and have Google recrawl your page immediately using Fetch as Google. I've been able to get new page titles up within an hour that way.

• Keep the page title up for the shortest time span you can to get a significant amount of traffic.

• Ideally, you'd get enough traffic each day that a day's worth of traffic is fairly predictable, so a change in the page title will show an obvious spike or drop in traffic, depending on rankings and click through rate.

• If your traffic varies a lot day by day, though, change it once a week.

• Look at the changes in traffic, rankings, and conversions.

Hope this helps, and let us know what you find out!

Kristina

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Just to add my 2c in

I remember a while back that Google said they don't like page titles that change, and I would be tempted to not change these to something seasonal that you then have to change back again.

There is absolutely no harm in creating new pages though (as Tim said). Write new pages that focus on seasonal products and then link these internally as they will help you create strong 'hub' pages. Have a read of this fantastic article from eConsultancy.

-Andy

[TimHolmes]

As Martijn has stated if your homepage has a much lower amount of traffic than any of your specific category or product pages then I would see no harm in adding a little festive cheer to your title. However, If it is for the "Chocolatier" that you work for, then I would assume a lot of your traffic is actually direct, based on brand terms and relatively close matches so be careful when making changes and monitor so you can always revert if it doesn't work as hoped.

I would imagine that it may help with your CTR at this time of year. Also Valentines and Easter. This can also be said of the meta description and possible snippets you may or may not have in place.

Finally...

As it is likely a very popular time of year, make sure you have some festive content on the homepage which I am sure you already have scheduled in, and that this content leads to specific seasonal category and unique product pages.

Hope this helps a little.

mmmmmm chocolate

[ClaytonJ]

I agree with Martijn.  First question do you get alot of traffic? If not then yes, fine tune and try and use the keywords customers will use to find your site in the lead up to Christmas. Also review H1 keep it in context.

If you get alot of traffic - do not change the Title but change the meta description, make it a great CTA for the festive season.

Hope that assists.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Depends, how much traffic are you receiving for specific terms to the homepage of your site? If this is not a lot then it's probably worth taking the risk and seeing what you can do to get more visitors based on a clickworthy title.