There are benefits to a good website title that go far beyond the SEO relevance. Ask any search advertiser about the benefits of having a snappy, relevant title and you’ll hear endless benefits – higher clickthrough rates, better ad positioning, and cheaper leads from searchers.
It’s tempting to think that these benefits are only relevant to paid search, but they’re every bit as important for businesses that depend on SEO for their customers. Titles can make or break your website’s SEO benefits, not by sabotaging your position in the search engines, but by reducing the people that click on your listing.
Think about it – on competitive search terms, you may be competing against ten or more other businesses, each with their own SEO strategy. Putting your keyword in your title and hoping for the best simply isn’t enough if your title is dull, uninspired, and the opposite of what people are likely to click on.
By thinking about your website title as the headline of an advertisement, you can craft a search engine listing that users will respond to. While marketers might just click on the first listing they see – a habit of overusing Google for research – most ‘ordinary people’ actually read the search titles and descriptions before they click.
As such, you can drastically improve the percentage of people that click through to your website in the search listings by tweaking your title and description to better represent your product or service. Instead of putting your keywords into your title with no thought, craft a title that invites users to click with clever sales wording.
With a smart title and an equally effective description, you can secure more traffic in the third search position than a poorly optimized website can in the first. Help your website generate the amount of search traffic it deserves by tweaking your page title to appeal to searchers on a practical, emotional, and direct level.