Optimise Your Meta Titles for Search Engines & Site Visitors
The heading you see for your search listing more often than not comes from the meta title of the page in the results. For most websites this will be the title of the page itself, but for most sites it’s also possible to create a bespoke meta title and meta description that shows up in the results.
In the same way as you can craft a description for your search results listing, you can also make the meta title of your page, and therefore the heading for your search results listing, more appealing – but you need to be more careful here as the meta title is a on-page factor that helps your rankings in the results. It’s likely to be one of the main reasons your page is ranking where it is currently, so we need to make sure any changes we make are improving your rankings for your target keywords, not hurting them. If you do see any adverse impact on your rankings that lasts more than a week or so (changing your meta title can cause your rankings to fluctuate before they improve – this is totally normal), you can always change your meta title back to what it was or try again to improve it.
So with that in mind, when it comes to your meta title your main focus, and what we’ll be looking at in more detail for our second tip, should be to make sure it’s optimised for your main target keywords. Including the primary keyword in your meta title is key for SEO visibility. Your secondary goal should be to make it as appealing as possible to searchers, like we did with the meta description, but we’re improving rankings with this tip so keyword focus comes first.
If you haven’t created unique meta titles for your pages then doing so and having the right focus on the keywords you want to rank that page for can move your pages up the rankings fast. Creating unique meta descriptions for each page can boost your site’s CTR and overall SEO. Adding an optimised meta title or better optimising the one you have can move you up the rankings in days.
Assuming you know what keyword you want your page to rank for, there are a couple of key things to focus on to make sure your meta title is optimised. The first is to try and get the keyword as near the front of your meta title as possible to highlight the term for the page you want to rank.
The second thing to consider which helps to highlight how important your page is for the terms you are trying to rank for is to not just limit yourself to one keyword in the meta title, add a secondary related keyword to help achieve this.
So instead of:
A much better use of this powerful on-page optimisation factor might be:
You can see we’ve gone from a meta title that targets ‘interior designers london’ to one that targets ‘interior design london’, ‘london interior designers’, ‘luxury interior designers’ and ‘london luxury interior designers’. All of these keywords are related to each other and with Google moving away from single keywords and looking more at keyword topics this helps to reinforce what this page is about and increase the number of keywords it can rank for.
But don’t overdo it and try to cram in too many keywords or repeat the same term two or three times – you’ll look spammy (to the engines and your audience) and do more harm than good.
Make Your Meta Titles Pretty
When crafting your pages’ meta titles you also want to think about how to make them appealing to searchers to get them to click on your listing in the results. A good meta description can also play a big role in boosting your CTR from search results. As long as you have a meta title that’s focused on the terms you want your page to rank for if you can make it more appealing (to help with CTR) then so much the better. You also want to make sure your meta description is within the 155- to 160-character range to avoid truncation in search engine results. For example with the last meta tag we created we could potentially make the title more appealing (without reducing the optimisation) if we went with:
Or perhaps:
These are only small differences and the keyword optimisation is still there, but who wouldn’t click on a top, award-winning Interior Designer in the search results? Especially if you could combine it with a meta description tag and/or your Schema review stars for our first strategy
If you’re struggling to come up with a meta title that you think will help you rank for your target keyword here’s a tip – look at the meta titles of those that are already ranking on page 1 for the same keyword and copy those! We don’t mean copy those exactly but you can certainly use these as inspiration for a meta title that can compete with them and once you have a good idea of the format and wording that seems to rank well see how you could maybe improve the optimisation or appeal to increase your rankings and CTR.
Optimising your meta title can help you rank for a specific keyword but it’s got to be a keyword that drives traffic. Optimising both your meta titles and descriptions will increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you’re not sure what keywords you should be targeting or want to make sure your meta titles are optimised for maximum benefit get in touch and we’ll show you how we can help. Understanding search intent is also key; tailoring your meta descriptions to user expectation will boost engagement and CTR. When you write meta descriptions focus on creating unique and compelling content that appeals to users and improves your SEO.