I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
-
Hi Guys
QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ.
1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content.
Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development
I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz
Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to
**ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat **
If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well?
How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make?
Any insight into this would be great!
Thanks
-
Thanks Christina!!! Appreciate your feedback!
-
If your customers are searching for Online Psychic Readings than the title you have chosen should work well for you.
- Christina
-
Thank you again Alick300!!!!
-
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for your follow up!
Yes all domains are the same content, aka duplicate on all domains - however we added all of the Hreflang tags and also the CcTLDs for all domains, and I know a competitor does the same as well, and have been running for around 7 years etc and seems to be working ok.
I haven't looked into canonical tags yet, but am looking into it currently? Can you tell me what you mean by "original source" meta tags?
-
Hi Christina,
Yes we ran PPC and alot of them were coming from our .com domain not our co.nz obviously its a bigger country. But it seems strange we are ranking page 1 for online psychic readings but the ctr is pretty low in nz, this is what it told me when we ran the PPC as well. It was alot faster to get to that position for NZ obviously, but what concerns me is that we are not ranking anywhere in google for our .com site.
I have set up the right tags etc for CcTLDs and Hreflang tags etc we try to make content as relevant to those areas as possible but in most cases it is near impossible.
But for the .com it seems quiet strange, do you have any thought around this?
-
Thanks Tom for the heads up, I will read into more of the cannibalization link you sent me!
-
Thanks Rick, you are so helpful! I have responded to Christina as per what you suggested as well - let me know what your thoughts are around my new title tag if that is okay?
Many thanks for your contributions as well!
-
Thank you so much Christina!!! The more the better
I'm currently using in my home page title tag:
Psychic Advice Online - Phone and Chat - Zenory, but my clients don't search for "psychic advice online" its rare, they search for "online psychic readings, or psychic readings, chat psychic readings and phone psychic readings" so I was wanting to change my title tag to
"Online Psychic Readings via Phone and Chat - Zenory" My competitors also have something like
(Free Psychic Readings Online - Live Psychic Chat - Phone Readings - Company Name)
or (Company Name - Online Psychic Readings, Tarot, Astrology, love Advice)
What are you thought around this? I see a few of my competitors tend to write longer title tags as well
-
It's exactly how Christina put it:
-
keyword in title (the more keywords in title the better)
-
title needs to make sense (as a sentence, not just as an enumeration of keywords)
-
keyword closer to the beginning of the title it's a common practice
-
keep it up to 70 characters long (google will truncate longer titles)
-
also use your brand / site name somewhere
The example Christina gave is great, but to include even more keywords (and if you company is a local one) I would do:
"Top Rated UK Web Design Company - DR Adept" - as this would include the keywords uk web design company, top rated web design company, etc (combinations of all the words in there, you get the drift) - it won't rank as well for all of them, but it will be there.
-
-
I know you've asked someone else for this answer, but as it's something I think I can help with, I hope you both don't mind my answering it. If I'm trending on toes please let me know so I don't make the same mistake in future - Cheers Christina
Yes you need keywords, and the closer to the beginning of the title the better.
But unless the sentence of the title makes sense to the user then you are likely to have a lower CTR.
Think about your keyword and what the page is about.
As an example my title tag would simple say 'Web Design Company - DR Adept'.
-
Hi Rick
Thanks for your comments and feedback!
Just a quick question, how would you go about finding or coming up with well optimized titles? What should I be looking for?
I have looked into title tags my competitors are currently using, and they seem to put alot of keywords in there.
Cheers
-
The only way to go is up, just make sure you keep your titles well optimized.
-
If your website isn't that powerful then changing title tags can drop the sites rankings for that set of keywords if you are looking for an exact match.
The titles you are proposing seem relevant, and there isn't that big a change so your rankings should be ok.
Before changing title tags I usually test keywords in PPC to see which have better CTRs. I also pay a lot of attention to the terms my clients use and not what people within my industry use.
-
I've completed site audits where the only thing I changed was the title tags which resulted in an increase in rankings and organic traffic.
Make sure you don't have any keyword cannibalization going on and you should be fine.
-
Hi Justin
From the sounds of things, you have no where to go but up, honestly.
You've listed the following:
-
More valuable content (FANTASTIC!)
-
Updating title and meta tags (FANTASTIC!)
-
Yes, they do matter
-
Title tags are one of your most important (if not, THE most important) onsite SEO ranking factors
-
Meta descriptions, while not a ranking factor, are a great "first pitch" to searchers and can increase CTR - use them
Are these 3 top level domains going to be all the same content? Or are they going to be their own standalone sites? I would be extremely mindful in that situation as you could run into a major duplicate content issue. Mind your canonical tags as well as (possibly) "original-source" meta tags if necessary.
Hope this helps you, let me know if you have any questions, but it sounds like you are making some good moves here. Good luck!!!
-
-
Hi Justin,
As you know that meta title is very important on page factor so if you change meta title that could affect but in your case I don't thing it will affect too much because you are using very similar terms . *** CTR would also very important rule to improve ranking so write title in such a way that you can get more clicks.****
Second thing I would like to suggest you to use those keywords that currently in title you should place those keyword into web page content/ H1 tag where you find appropriate.
Meta description is not ranking factor directly but indirectly yes it is a ranking factor because a good meta description can increase CTR & if CTR will increase keyword ranking will improve. So you can change it to more compelling meta description in order to improve your CTR.
URL - You can change URL by using 301 redirect maximum link juice will pass to new URL.
You can follow this URL in case of Title tag
Firstst word in the title is the most important. Second word is the 2nd most important. The last word in the title tag is the least important.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
Do we lose Backlinks and Domain Authority of URL when we change domain Name?
Have 1 performing domain (Monthly - 4M visitor ) now we want to change domain name ( Brand name like SEOMOZ to Moz ). I have general knowledge about domain changing prevention tips like 301 redirection and other thing. My concern is about backlinks and DA. How can I prevent any lose from SEO Point of view. (backlink lose) Do I need to change all backlink form source or redirection is enough to get all reference traffic from that backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Highly competitive keywords ranking
Hi , I just start one page website ( website that give a user one service like backlinkswatch . com or prchecker ) This niche is so competitive and the first 5 results for keywords that I have selected for my website have a google pagerank > 4 I know that ranking for high competitive keywords take more times but what Can I do to make it fast without getting penalized , all what I hear now is guest post and guest post and guest post any other idea ??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loumi0 -
Rankings dropped, should I start a new website?
Hello, my rankings dropped last year (penguin update) - I think it was April 2012 and the website went from 300 visitors per day to 10 per day. This probably happened because I bought links, but I also did a lot of manual and natural SEO (at that time). After the drop, I didn't know what to do... so I did some manual SEO, blog comments, forum posts, article publications (lets say 60 links in total - with diverse anchor texts - brand keywords, etc) and then I paused working on the site to see if there will be any changes... and 1 year latter, there are still no changes. My site used to be in the top results of the first page and now it is totally out of Google. http://getmoreyoutubeviews.com Should I move on and start a new website or do something to fix this one? Thanks Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | buysocialexposure0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Webiste Ranking Differently Based on IP/Data Center
I have a site which I thought was ranking well, however that doesn't seem to be the case. When I check the site from different IPs within the US it shows that the site is on page 1 and on other IPs it shows that it's on page 5 and for some keywords it shows it's not listed. This site was ranking well, before but I think google dropped it when I was giving putting in too much work with it (articles and press releases), but now it seems to have recovered when I check with my IP, but on other data centers it still shows it prior to recovering. It was able to recover after not building links to for a period of time, it showed it moved back up from the data center I'm connected to, but it still shows the possibly penalized results on other data centers. Is it possible that site is still penalized? So the question is why does it show it recovered in some data centers and not others? How do I fix this? It's been about 2 months since it's recovered from some data centers. Is this site still penalized or what's going on? There are no warnings in web master tools. Any insights would be appreciated! This isn't an issue with the rank tracking software, I've tested this on a multitude of IPs with varying differences. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozzy0 -
Help! Why are my rankings down?
Hi, Over the last couple of days I have found a HUGE drop in traffic. I checked a lot of our rankings, and we are definitely out of the game for at least a few keywords (not on 1st page). Our ranking has dropped on other keywords. We even dropped to #2 (for the first time ever) for our branded keyword search term. What happened?! Could it have been the Penguin update, 1 month after it was released? Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160 -
How The HELL Is This Site Ranking So Well In Google Places?
When I do a search for this site it ranks number 2 on Google just below the official federation of master builders website for the keyword phase "builders in london" this is the site http://bit.ly/Lypo8E which is a nasty looking blog which has nothing to do with builders and they don't even have an address anywhere on the site. The only thing I can see is that they are sharing there address with a lot of other businesses and all of the citations from those other businesses are causing them to rank higher on Google places, but surely Google can't be that stupid right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730