When discussing SEO and the TITLE tag we tend to only think of its use in ranking. That’s extremely important and should never be overlooked. However, SEO – or at least the effective kind – goes beyond ranking.
A good SEO professional considers the marketing and sales consequences, too. Getting in front of a search is step 1.
Step 2 is getting them to click on your listing instead of the other 9 on the same page. How does the TITLE tag play into all this?
A Penn State study found that the TITLE tag counts for as much as 60% of the decision by a searcher to click on a particular Google listing. That includes yours. So you have to think hard about some things.
Your TITLE tag is the largest, most prominent element in your Google listing(s). It’s sometimes the only thing that’s seen as a person scans the Google results. So you have to grab their attention and do it fast.
You have to ask yourself – how does your TITLE appear to a searcher? Is it just a run on sentence of keywords thrown together?
That might help with ranking, but it’ll do very little to convince your prospect to click on it instead of your competition. Those sounds you hear are customers going to a site that isn’t yours.
Does your TITLE tag read like a limp description that doesn’t communicate what the page or your site is about? If it isn’t, your TITLE tag is letting you down. Hard.
Do a few Google searches and see what I mean. You’ll see listing after listing that just lays there. Some do even less than that, looking like they were written with the ‘shotgun’ approach.
That’s when a dozen different keywords are thrown in end to end without rhyme or reason, sometimes making no sense at all when read.
Effective, targeted SEO is much, much more than keyword stuffing and spamming the comment section of blogs (You know who you are).
The SEO you should be getting or doing is different. It sells. It advertises. It markets.
Always with the aim of that Conversion box. Are you getting that kind of SEO right now?