The Title Tag; Used for More Than Just SEO!

This is guest post written by Mark Cronin, an avid SEO and Travel blogger.

All experienced SEO’s know how to label a title tag for their clients, but getting it right for each customer can be something even experienced SEO’s get wrong.

I don’t want to bore you all with the basic ins and outs of the Title Tag, but just for quick reference for those that are new to SEO or even web design / Programming, it is simply the Text at the top of your browser when you access a website.  It is also the first line of text that you see for each listing in Google’s results.  This piece of text is used primarily to give the User and the Search Engine the best one liner information about what your web page does.

This is where things can sometimes go wrong.

As an SEO I used to make this following mistake quite often before I started to get more involved with what would actually be best for my clients business.

• I used to optimize the Title tag for the benefit of the Search Engines, which is what it is best for.  I would then use the description as the pull for the customer, something to entice then into the website.  Seeing as Search Engines in general utilize the Title Tag as the stronger part of the Meta Tags, it is used to help increase rankings in Google.
• Most of the time I would try to squeeze in two mentions of the term I was going for, and most of the time being successful, and sometimes getting a little slap on the wrists from Google, to remind me that over doing it can be a problem.  However even though I was in the top five for many terms my client was receiving a low CTR (Click Through Rate).  This was quite disturbing, mainly because without these clicks people wouldn’t land on the site and make a purchase.  I began to investigate what could be done.

Heat Maps show you where people click, and Eye tracking maps show you whereabouts people look at these search engine results.  These maps are rare and only come out every now and then (sometimes without much hype).  If you have seen any of these results it becomes quite clear that the description will maybe get one or two scans, whereas the Title will get a good grooming from potential customers eyeballs!

I started some more aggressive and frequent link building to my client’s site and changed the title tag to incorporate a price.  The overall results were tremendous, with CTR soaring, increasing my client’s visitor rate by more than 258% and conversion rate even more so.  It may have helped that our site was the only one that displayed prices at the end of there title, but you can imagine how eye catching it would be.

Even though this site wasn’t the cheapest site, they still managed conversions.  Obviously the main disadvantage is that there is minimal if any SEO advantage from having a price, but you can’t deny that there is great potential for conversion using this method.  All I did was spend more time getting some more powerful links to the client’s site to hold the weight of the Title being amended, and everything held stable!

Bio:

Mark Cronin is an avid SEO and Travel blogger sharing his own experiences with others, he works for a St Lucia holidays tour operator.