Are descriptive titles better?

[sammecooper]

I'm thinking about changing the page titles on my website and wanted to know if it is a good idea to help improve SEO!

Using a page 'training and engagement' as an example (as is on the dropdown), the page title itself is actually 'Providing the skills to make the change stick.'

Is that long descriptive title negatively effecting me? Or should I change it to 'Training and Engagement'?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Sam

[seobrighton]

Hi @sammecooper, it is definitely a good idea to optimise your page titles to improve SEO. These can have a great impact on SERP ranking as well as CTR.

Firstly as has been mentioned by others here, it is very important to include your target keyword in the title "Training and Engagement" it is also then good to follow up with a more engaging phrase that will encourage people to click on your page. Something like you have already as a combination of both "Training and Engagement: Providing skills to make the change stick" (don't be scared to use longer titles but keep the URL as short as possible (also including the target keywords)).

It may also be useful to have a read of this post about stop words that are ignored by search engines https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-stop-words/

Other points to test out for increased CTR (which can lead to better ranking in SERP) is to use emotional SEO power words, emoji and even [brackets] in your title. These have been shown to increase CTR in many cases.

Also worth mentioning this recent update by Google where HTML title tags are being replaced by the H1 of the page for SERP listings https://www.seroundtable.com/semrush-data-titles-google-32004.html

Good luck with your optimisation, it is an ongoing process so don't give up if you don't see immediate results!

[mozarttt]

Use the keyword always, that the most important part.

[sammecooper]

@nozzle Thank you! I'll get testing. Thanks again.

[Nozzle]

@sammecooper I'm a huge fan of testing several different Title Tags for each important page.

The first thing you need to, if you haven't done so already, is to create a keyword map. This map will tell everyone on your team which page is going to be optimized for which keywords.

Then, you take the most important phrases that have been mapped or assigned to a specific URL and try and figure out how to get them in the title tag while still writing something catchy that someone will click on.

Don't be afraid to test longer title tags that are even more than 65 characters; just keep in mind that humans will only see and read what's in the first 65 characters when looking at your listing in the SERPs so that part is the most important.

So change your title tag, wait until Google comes to recrawl the page and the changes have been cached, then check your rankings to see if you moved up or down for all the keywords in the keyword map for that page. If you are on page 1, you can monitor the CTR of that listing in Google Search Console to get an idea if your click through rate moved up or down as well.

Then every so often test another title tag variation for that page and rinse and repeat until you find the best title tag that results in the best rankings for the mapped keywords with the highest CTR.

-Boyd

[sammecooper]

@martijn_scheijbeler Thank you Martjn, that's very helpful!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

@sammecooper If you're trying to rank for: Training and Engagement then you likely want to include that in the title tag instead of making it too descriptive. Google does put still quite some value in it. In this case, I'd try to find a way to make it both descriptive as well as enticing to click.