The Power of the Title Tag for SEO
January 29th, 2010by Matt Parisi
We recently had a unique and enlightening look at the power of the title tag for acquiring organic traffic (Case study below). As a marketing agency focused on search and SEO, we are acutely aware of the need to ensure targeted keywords are used in a web page’s title tag. The philosophy we preach to clients revolves around the dual audiences of SEO.
On the surface, SEO is about getting high rankings, so that in turn you get increased organic search traffic (unpaid traffic from the search engines). However, an often overlooked element in this equation is that tags written for SEO purposes (title tags for instance), in select cases, are presented to users. The most prominent example of this is on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), where a ranked web page’s title tag is presented to a user in a set of search results. This is the blue text that a searcher actually clicks on to go to a particular site which is ranked in the SERP.
Traditionally, many SEOs have attempted to simply stuff this tag with unattractive copy primarily to influence search engines into interpreting a page’s content in a particular way. On the other end of the spectrum, marketing personnel use this tag to present some sort of marketing message, with little regard for keyword usage or describing the page accurately. To achieve maximum results, it is absolutely essential to find a compromise between the two, where search engines can determine the true relevance of a page AND the tag is appealing to human searchers to encourage clicks from SERPs. Without getting the clicks, organic traffic will not increase. Without giving search engines descriptive text in the title tag, a site will not rank high in SERPs to have a chance to get clicks.
To illustrate this point, a client recently accidently deleted part of the title tag on their most trafficked webpage. The title tag was chopped to only have the website’s brand name, without any descriptive text. For example, for illustration purposes only, let’s say the title tag of the highest trafficked page on sitelab.com had a title tag of ”Interactive Marketing Agency – SiteLab”. What happened is that the first part was chopped off, so that the title tag reads “- SiteLab”. This title tag stayed like this for about 1 month. The site maintained it’s #1 ranking in SERPs for its primary keyword throughout, but instead of having a descriptive title for people to click on in SERPs, the title tag simply had the name of the website, which didn’t relate directly the targeted keyword. The following graph illustrates what happened to their organic search traffic to this page (keep in mind this page was still ranked #1 in SERPs, but it’s title tag accidently became much less descriptive and attractive to searchers, despite it’s #1 ranking).
Pageviews to Landing Page (In Organic Search Traffic Segment):
Keyword Traffic for Targeted Keyword (#1 Ranking maintained throughout, poor title tag while traffic depressed):
As can be seen from the above graph, organic search traffic returned immediately when the title tag was updated in Google’s index. Long tail rankings also returned contributing some increased traffic, but the majority of this lift is due to capturing a greater percentage of organic search clicks for the top priority targeted keywords. This demonstrates that not only is it essential to appeal to search engines with the title tag, but also to human searchers who have to decide between search listings based solely on one line of text (in the title tag).
