Keyword and Branded Title Tags Site Wide
-
I have a client who is using a structure like this for site wide title tags:
Page specific keyword | Brand Name | Industry specific keyword + locations
So in an example it'd look like:
Drupal Development | BrandName | Web Services for Los Angeles, San Fransisco, New York
I've researched this structure pretty thoroughly to be able to make a case for or against doing this site wide.
However, I've received many mixed signals on many things. My questions are as follows:- Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful?
- Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword?
- Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral
It seems like all these things could go either way to me, but I don't want to tell them one way or another without having some more detailed explanations to give them.
Thanks for your help!
-
Thanks so much! This is very helpful
-
First, the correct answer for each page is to test different title tags over time to see which version gives you the best rankings for a handful of phrases that are mapped to that page along with the best click through rate.
Second, don't be scared of testing longer title tags. Google still reads everything after the ellipsis.
Third, I'm a fan of putting more keywords in a title tag wherever possible (or at least testing it). So for example, on a page that talks about drupal development services, I would test a title tag like, "Experienced Drupal Developers - Drupal Development Company & Services for Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York - Brand Name".
Now to answer your questions specifically:
- Should brand name be last in this structure? Does it matter? The length of this is obviously causing truncated Title in search results, so which is more useful?
- I always push to put brand name last because it doesn't help rankings or CTR (in most cases) to list it earlier. If a client is adamant about it, then I let them have their way.
- Is using a keyword intended for site ranking like "Web Services", "Digital Agency", "SEO Specialist" useful for every page to have or damaging? Is this cannibalizing that keyword?
-
I believe it is a waste of precious title tag space to include these words on all pages because there is only one page you are trying to rank for "Web Services", for example. It's better to include more focused keywords that are relevant to that specific page in the title tag than these generic terms. In my example title tag above, that page is now going to rank better for all of the following keywords:
-
drupal developers
-
drupal developer
-
experienced drupal developers
-
experienced drupal developer
-
drupal development
-
drupal development company
-
drupal development services
-
experienced drupal development
-
experienced drupal development company
-
experienced drupal development services
-
and all these phrases with those city names attached as well
- Is having multiple locations on every page title helping, hurting, or neutral
- It's probably neutral. I would suggest testing with and without them and monitor your rankings for the local terms to see if it makes a difference. Typically if it's only 1-3 locations, I don't have a problem throwing them in at the end to where they won't even be seen by a human because it'll be truncated. But again, test, test, test.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Service Page Strategy Should We Use to Target City-Specific Local Intent Service Keywords?
Hey guys! We are targeting a number of cities in the Nassau and Suffolk County areas for foundation repair, insulation, and mold remediation keywords, and we were debating on creating city-specific pages for each location and service, or creating one service page for each type of service that contains all of the services and solutions within that service category for each city. Example: City-Specific Pages for Each Service: One page for say foundation repair, one page for foundation crack repair, one page for foundation problems, etc. (for each target city) Service Category Pages for Each City: One page for foundation contractors that lists all services on one page in sections. Which one do you think is better for local SEO and rankings? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages to me. Just to throw a couple out there, the category pages may not rank as high as the city pages for each individual service if our competitors have a whole page designed for that service and we only have a part of a page covering the topic. At the same time, they would save labor hours, technical issues would be less, and they would be condensed, and we would have WAY less mess on the backend. I appreciate your expert opinion on this one. The site is www. zavzaseal.com in case you want to check us out.
Local SEO | | everysecond0 -
What's the best way to create keyword tracking lists for local SEO?
I have a question for the local SEO crowd: when it comes to creating keyword tracking lists, what are your best practices in reference to tracking from a set location? Do you typically create national keyword lists that include the location operator in each term or are you better creating a list of locally-tracked keywords around a business' location and dropping the location operator from the keyword? Or some combination of the two? To clarify, if I had an example business of a realtor in Chatham, MA, would I want to track -"realtor in chatham ma" (national)
Local SEO | | formandfunctionagency
-"realtor in chatham ma" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)
-"realtor" (with the location set to Chatham, MA) Or some combination of all of the above? Right now, I track waaaay too many keyword variants on my local campaigns! Hoping there's a better way from some more-seasoned Moz users. Thanks in advance!2 -
We are adding an ecommerce feature to our site. noindex the order. subdomain?
our site currently consists of directory listings for different stores but we will now be adding an ecommerce feature to our site. people from the main site will be able to click a button that will direct you to the orders. subdomain. we are thinking about noindexing the subdomain as i can't find any use cases in organic searches for this new orders. subdomain. What is the current best practice for this type of situation and will noindexing the orders. subdomain harm us in anyway?
Local SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Can we use the same titles and meta descriptions for all of our office locations? We have 18 locations in total.
Hello, TTR Data Recovery has 18 different office locations and I am wondering if we can use the same title and meta description for all locations and just change the location name...For example: #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Atlanta, GA| TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Atlanta, GA including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! #1 Best Data Recovery Services in Miami, FL | TTRDATA TTR Data Recovery offers a comprehensive suite of data recovery services in Miami, FL, including Hard Drive, SSD, Server and RAID/NAS. Get A Free Quote! Would this be already, or would it be better if we had a unique title and meta description for every location? We want to get the same message across and it would be difficult to change the wording 18 times. I look forward to hearing back from you guys. Thank you.
Local SEO | | Kiakh19870 -
Duplicate page titles because of multi language setting
Hey SEO-ers! I've run a Moz crawl on my clients site, and I'm getting back over 4,000 duplicate title errors which is a real headache for me! The reason why is because my client has 5 different languages on their website, so if you spoke French for example, you could change the language of the website to all be in french, so the domain would change from www.example.com to www.example.com/fr/ The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages - which I know, is an issue anyway - why would a French browser using Google.fr choose a website that has English meta tags!? Crazy. So my question is... if I translate all page titles from my English title to the native language, will this fix my duplicate page titles as now they will be in the correct language? OR will it still be classed as a duplicate because in theory I'm just translating the same content 5 times? Anyone had any experience in this? I'm using Polylang on my clients Wordpress site to change the locales, so if you have knowledge on this plugin too then great!
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Lots of [keyword]in[city].com domains - what to do?
A client of mine had purchased a lot of domains. They all start with the same keyword following by "in" following by a cities name. The cities are all the cities around their location. They had the pages set up to all look the same with very small differences in content. A bunch of duplicate content. All of them have a DA of 8 and PA of 19. There are 35 of them total. They get roughly 30-60 hits a month each but it's mostly all spam. The idea was for users to type in [keyword] in [city] in Google and these websites show up. A competitor of my clients had done something similar which was working for them. The main website (separate of these) gets ~1500 visits per month of non spam traffic and gets ~10 referrals from these websites. What should be done with these domains? Chalk it off as a bad idea and have them 301 to the main website until they expire? Or can they be changed into something useful? If so, how? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Note: I did search for this similar topic but it was hard to search it out and I did not find an answer. Thanks!
Local SEO | | RedKeyDesigns0 -
Niche Keyword Opportunities in Canada when US Market Dominates
Hey, I have an interesting question. I am the owner of a Canadian E-Commerce site, and I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by American E-commerce sites. I looked around at another Canadian e-commerce site, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "KONG Goodie Bone" (a dog toy) and include local and intent terms in their title. For example "Buy KONG Goodie Bone from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Kong Goodie Bone", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, the Kong company website, Petco (which is not in Canada) etc. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities. Thoughts?
Local SEO | | evan890 -
Mobile Options for indexing mobile sites and live sites.
Our development team has noindexed our mobile versions of desktop pages in Wordpress. I am wondering if there is a negative impact to noindexing the mobile pages? We have a desktop version of the page live so the content is available in both locations and I believe we would be avoiding duplicate content issues by no indexing the mobile page, is there a reason I am missing that I would not want to noindex my mobile pages? Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Local SEO | | Highline_Ideas0