When building a website - its always a tricky one trying to juggle which content to use and whether to make it better suited to SEO and attracting a better ranking or whether you should word it in a lavish, elegant way that woo’s your potential customer into making an enquiry.
The starting base for this is with title tags. Titles are the main bait that hook people into reading a piece of content on a webpage - but also so many other forms of media, such as: Newspaper ads, social media posts even sales letters. Its important you have title tags in your content that instantly and easily convey the message you’re trying to put across. If you have a special offer, you need to make it obvious! If you are doing something no one else is doing, you want people to notice! That's why when doing copy writing you need to make sure you use good titles.
But when I refer to good titles, most people default to writing something that is relevant to a human reading it on their website, but they don’t consider the best title to include to help convince the Google crawlers that your website is more important or relevant than the competitors.
What is important here is you really think about and plan what titles should you use on each webpage. You generally have 2 key areas to tell people what your page is.
1. The Meta title - this is shown in the browser window and also the search engine result if someone looks up information that may relate to your website.
2. The page heading title - this is the large font, big, bold heading you use visually to grab the users attention.
When writing a meta title, you can often include more information within them. Where as your page heading often is more condensed and to the point.
Lets take an example; for ABC Mechanics their current titles look like this:
Meta Title: Home - ABC Mechanics
Page Title: Welcome to ABC Mechanics
Now, ABC Mechanics has a standard set of titles in the example above - while they tell people the company name, that is about it! Lets revise these below and include more relevant titles and highlight the services on offer.
Meta Title: Car Mechanic Auckland - Trusted & Affordable - ABC Mechanics
Page Title: Reliable, Affordable Car Mechanics Auckland
The above is relatively tidy yet much more informative. It tells people what they are, where they are, what they are called and why you should use them.
So this title is better suited to the customer because its more information and its also on top of that, better suited for SEO. Search engines like Google will look at these revised titles and rank them a lot better because they’re informative and tell the search crawler what the page is about.
Quick tip: Google search engines recommend your page meta title is no more than 60 characters long! Try this site here to test your titles!
Many websites (and possibly yours) fail to properly use title tags which greatly affects their potential to rank better, but also attract and convert customers. Remember, around 80% of people just want the basic details and to make an enquiry, so if you’ve got a plain ‘ol title saying "Welcome” then a short novel on your companies profile, you’re not giving people what they want so they will move on quicker!
Make sure you write good, clean, concise titles!
