The title tag is one of the most important elements on your website.
It’s a bit of code that marks the title of your page.
The word “code” might seem daunting if you’re not familiar with coding or website development. But if you have a WordPress or another site it’s usually easy to change the title of the pages on your website.
And it’s usually very easy to do so for your homepage, which is the most important title on your entire website.
The homepage is title is like the title of a book. When you’re browsing books on Amazon you probably look at the titles and the description. This is just like the information you see on a Google search result (SERP):
You can see at the bottom the result for GBW. The title is the title or title tag for the homepage of the website. Then you have the description, which comes from the content on the homepage along with the URL and a few other links from within the site.
The Meta Description will often determine what the description is, but it also depends on what a person is searching for.
Back to the title – it’s the most important item for people that come from a search engine to your site. There are different ways you can go about creating your title, but I have a theory that seems to work best.
Step 1 – Start With Your Brand Name
I’ve gone back and forth on this one, but after consideration I feel that it’s important to use your brand name.
My argument for it is that you want people to remember your name. It’s an important part of your business and I feel that starting with your brand name in the title is a good long-term play.
Over time you want more and more people to use your name whether they’re talking about you with colleagues or searching for you on a search engine or looking for you on a directory or social media site.
The other argument is that people who haven’t heard of your name are looking for other phrases first. This would make it seem like the best option would be to start your title tag with that term and put your brand name at the end.
But my play is to start with my name and put the keyword phrase second.
My suggestion: Ghost Blog Writers: Blogging Services For Businesses
The other way: Blogging Services For Businesses – Ghost Blog Writers
Step 2 – Identify A Main Industry Keyword Phrase
Next is the keyword phrase. I feel that for most businesses it’s about finding a single keyword phrase and focusing on that. This keeps your title tag short and it keeps it understandable.
Over the years it seems that people have gotten away from stuffing their titles tags with multiple phrases. It looks weird and I’m not sure it works.
You need discipline in business. Here’s an example, with a website design, there might be 10 things you want on a page. But if you put all those things on the page it won’t look good and it will be slow. So you have to cut back to maybe 3 things.
That requires you to prioritize and you have to do the same with your homepage title tag. Instead of adding 3 keywords, add just 1.
I’ve changed the one for GBW a few times to experiment, which we’ll discuss later. Right now I’ve found that the best one is “Blogging Services”.
I found this by looking at other companies that offer blogging services. I looked to see what title tags they were using. Then I searched for those and looked to see what the result pages were like.
If there are a lot of ads on the page it usually means that it’s a popular term, but you also have a lot of competition. Blogging services seemed to have a good balance of being highly used and not too competitive at the top of the results.
I added the “for Businesses” to the end to focus more on my target customer. Blogging services on its own would be fine, but we don’t usually work with individuals unless they have their own business.
So that focus narrows the scope and we get targeted traffic from the term.
Step 3 – Keep It Short And Descriptive
A general rule for titles on the Internet is that short > long.
I would try to keep your title to 40-50 characters.
But there is a “but”. You still want the title to be descriptive. You want people to understand what your homepage is about and you want to entice them to click to find out what’s on your site and how you can help them.
It helps if you have a descriptive name. Ghost Blog Writers is pretty good and Blogging Services for Businesses is pretty straightforward.
Step 4 – Track The Results And Tweak If Necessary
Finally, track the results. It’s hard to get keyword data these days. That would be nice, but it’s not critical. You can still track traffic to your homepage from search results.
If your search traffic ticks up and traffic to your homepage ticks up it’s a good sign that the keyword you’re targeting is working. You can also see where you rank for your target term.
If you’re unable to get high in the rankings then you can see if there is a less competitive term. Or if you’re high in the rankings and not getting traffic you probably need a more competitive term with more traffic potential.
I’ve done this a few times with GBW and I’ll probably still change it on occasion to fine tune things.
Conclusion
Traffic to your homepage is generally targeted to people that are a little further along in the sales funnel for your service. For GBW, the people that find our homepage are typically searching for blogging services. They need more traffic and they want blogging. By having a relevant title tag on our homepage we’re able to give them exactly what they need and that traffic converts really well.
It’s a little different with blogging where you’re targeting people in the early stages of the funnel. At GBW, that means people searching for marketing tips or ways to increase traffic or to get more clients. We get them with the blog post and start them through the funnel that way.
But the homepage is important. You don’t want to pass up that high converting traffic.