Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

While everybody talks about the content and its optimization to attract traffic. They tend to ignore small things that can affect your overall ranking, traffic leverage situation through organic search directly or indirectly. 

In this very blog, I am going to pinpoint the hidden things that stay within the codes. You’ll get a whole new perception about how you can pull things off in a better way that may increase your click-through rate boosting your organic traffic and who knows your google ranking too! 

Stay tuned we will be talking about the tips and tricks hacks and hints that are generally overlooked knowingly or otherwise. You’ll get to know how meta description, page title, and other metadata elements can be optimized.

What Is Metadata?

Before we get into the optimization procedures for page title, meta description, and what not let’s brush up on what exactly these are and where can you find them. Metadata can be used as a parent to these tags.

Metadata simply put, is the information you fit in within your website coding to give a better understanding of software analysis, basically, you are just making it easy for bots, crawlers, and software to read and analyze your website and the data it has. 

Metadata can be for anything, your images, texts, title, embedded videos, codes, and much much more. We’ll talk about it. The two most important pieces of metadata from a digital marketing perspective are page titles and meta description. 

What Is a Page Title?

Like I just said, page title or title tag is a small part of the metadata. Therefore it is something that you put into website codes. But what does it do? As the name suggests it specifies that whatever is written between the tag is the title of a web page.

To check this out go to any website, you can find the source code of that particular page by pressing “Ctrl+Shift+I”

The is how title tag of one of our blog looks like with a heading “The Complete Google My Business Guide” within the source code.

Your title tag is the key element that stands between Google SERPs and your website. 

A title tag holds a crucial role at increasing their click-through rate in search results. How? Well this exactly what strangers surfing the internet for information see – your content title in the search results.

It is the title of the page that the website owner chooses to use. And it’s the title that Google uses to display your website in search results. Yes that blue bit at the top of each search result, that is usually the page title.

Not just that you also see the page title at the top of your browser tabs. It is helpful when you have multiple tabs open and you have to switch to the required one.

What Makes A Good Page Title?

A good page title is surely the one that tops your SEO perspective and also manages to impress visitors to click through. Here are a few points that make up for a good page title.

• Include Target Keywords In The Start Of The Page Title.

• Include USP Or Clear Benefit Theme

Tell the people why they should choose your result over anyone else’s.

• Include Your Brand Name 

There are multiple reasons for this, one it emphasizes your brand and people get to know it. Second if you miss it google itself is going to stuff it in there somewhere and you don’t want that do you?

What Makes A Bad Page Title?

A bad page title is the one that lacks convincing essence and is surely missing SEO perspective Here are a few points that must be avoided while framing your page title.

• Putting Up Just Brand Name And Nothing About The Result 

• All Lowercase Formatting 

• Lack of target keyword

Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.”John Mueller, Google, 2020

How Long Must Page Titles Be?

Page titles get truncated at more than 600 pixel mark which has a character count of nearly 30-60. So the recommended length would be somewhere around 60 characters if you don’t want you lat few words go whoosh..

The example above shows how Google just removes whatever exceeds its character limit. This can spoil your well crafted page title.

What Are Meta Descriptions?

Well, meta description is the piece of information that you see below the blue bit in search results. It specifically must be the summary of your website or a brief of what the visitor will be getting if they click that particular result.

Google doesn’t analyze meta description on the basis of target keywords, therefore they don’t directly influence your rankings BUT they are majorly responsible for your click-through from google search result. That is obvious afterall who is going to scroll over a really compelling, super juicy meta description. 

Now here’s a trick if you manage to get at least one extra click with your meta description there are chances the clicks increases over time. And what does increasing clicks on a search result show ? That the particular result is relevant for that particular keyword which MAY EVENTUALLY increase the ranking over time.  

What Makes A Good Meta Description?

Include some locations and they could also use some benefit statement, so USPs. For example, free shipping, free collection, ensured, guaranteed, best price.

A visitor is likely to click onto this result as they know what benefits are offered in comparison with others.

What Makes A Bad Meta Description?

In my opinion you can’t really mess up a meta description if you know what you are offering. The bad ones are actually the auto-generated ones that google add by itself. YES they are random out of context words.

Here, google picked up whatever it felt was relevant to be the meta description. You can see it is truncated in the middle, therefore these are just random sentences within the content on this page.

How Long Must Meta Description Be?

Google does like to play around with the meta description length trend every now then earlier it increased the meta description length to 320 characters now it has again been reduced. Now we will play safe and I’ll recommend sticking to somewhere between 50-150 characters. To save you from something like this:

Save your description from the threat of being truncated and VOILA! You are the boss of what visitors see in the description for your search result.

Which Pages To Optimize First?

If you have a big website on your hand to optimize for meta data you need to prioritize the choice of pages so that you don’t waste your time optimizing a less important page over one with greater value. 

For that I would suggest picking your static pages first For instance, the homepage, product pages, or service pages are the most likely to rank. Then, if you’re an e-commerce company with thousands of pages, you’ll usually want to start with product category pages before moving on to product pages.

You can use Google Search Console or Google Analytics to find your top search landing pages and make sure that you’re doing those first, although there’s obviously gonna be a bit of a bias here because the ones with terrible page titles

and meta descriptions might not be ranking and might not be getting you any traffic.

BONUS TIP 💡

Make you also optimize for social page titles and meta description with OG title and OG description.

What Are OG Titles And OG Descriptions?

OG stands for Open Graph, and these are just the page title and meta description that will show up when your site is shared on Facebook, in Slack, etc. social media in general.

If you look up for source code you might find them like this. You can optimize them for whatever social platform you are targeting. It is better to stay prepared and keep those OG descriptions and titles optimized.

This is how your OG title and description appear on a facebook post. You can always use the same page titles as your Open Graph titles and same meta descriptions as your Open Graph descriptions, if you’re unsure.

How To Craft Seo Approved Page Titles And Meta Descriptions?

Improve According To Search Intent

Search intent can be understood as the mindset with which a person is searching for any piece of information on the internet. There are majorly four types of search intents:

1. Informational
2. Commercial
3. Transactional
4. Navigation

Informational searches are the ones where people look out for information, data, about a product service or topic.These searches mainly begin with WHAT, WHERE and HOW or can include words like REVIEW, GUIDE, DEMO

“Ahrefs’ beginner guide”

Commercial searches are the ones when the buyer is aware of his/her requirements and is not looking out for best deals.These searches include phrases like: BEST DEALS, BUDGET-FRIENDLY, BARGAIN.

“Budget-friendly SEO services”

Transactional searches are the ones when a person initiates a search with a mindset of buying something, hiring someone.

“Freelance job posts.”

Navigational searches are the ones in which you redirect to a page you’re looking for, such as the download page for any app.

“Twitter App”

If you are still unsure about what kind of words people are using for different intents below is a list of words you can use. Try matching these up with the keyword phrases you’re most concerned with ranking well in Google.

Include Unique Selling Points (USPs)

Google’s A/B tests on SERPs reveal that USPs work best when it comes to earning clicks. And why not ? Who is going to pass through an appealing and benefitting deal? 

That is exactly why it is important to include USPs in your Page title and Meta Description.

We all tend to open ecommerce sites that flash “free shipping”,”freebies” and “flash sales” in their description. You can agree we all have been guilty of the instance below:

Use Psychological Triggers

Marketing is all about how nicely you can convince the person to give in.Therefore using the right set of psychological phrases in your metadata makes up a good chance of success. Like here how “decorate your space” will make you spend some time on this website. Because it connected exactly to what you looked up home decor for.

Make Every Page Title / Meta Description Unique

Every page of your website is unique some way or the other, and so should be its page title and meta description.

Pay attention that each page title is custom so that it gets easy for any visitor  to differentiate between similar pages.

Ensure whatever you put up as your page title it needs to be a unique summary of the page and not deceptive. If your page isn’t about the “digital wellbeing”, then it mustn’t have that title.

Use Target Keywords

This point is nothing new. But still it needs to be in this list. Whenever a person types in a search query google tends to find the results with the same phrases and rank them in an order that is your search result.

You can add the target keyword wherever it is possible but i would suggest it is impactful if added in the beginning of the page title. Just like this:

Don’t Cut Them Too Short

Keep your page titles between 30 and 60 characters in length to avoid exceeding Google’s character limits. Don’t go shorter than that it’s like giving up the liberty of expression that you are offered for free.

While in case of meta description ensure it lies between 50 and 150 characters in length to avoid surpassing character limits and get truncated. Don’t go shorter than 50 characters, remember you need to make an impression with this description.

Don’t Stretch Them Too Long

If your page title exceeds 70 characters, Google is very much likely to truncate them and replace an ellipsis in its place, as shown in the example below.

If a page title is too lengthy, beside adding ellipsis, Google may simply add the website’s brand name at the end, shortening it even further.

Improve Readability

Your titles must be easily understandable and readable by a human, because it is a real human, not a robot, that will click on your website. Avoid adding slashes and line breaks like this:

<title>Keyword | Keyword | Keyword | Keyword</title>

For instance this title below isn’t bad, but it could have been great if they used a continuous targeting sentence instead of multiple breaks. This doesn’t simply seem appealing enough to click on.

Conclusion

I hope this was an easy walk through each and every aspect. I tried to keep it simple yet elaborative. Now you know what importance these little pieces of texts that go under the code hold. Metadata indeed has the potential to charge your CTR and proportionally boost your ranking. 

To sum up what all i have discussed up i am listing bullets for you:

• The title of each page should be at least 30 characters long.
• The title of each page should be no more than 60 characters long.
• The meta definition should be at least 50 characters long.
• The meta definition does not exceed 150 characters.
• Make each title and summary distinct from the others.
• Titles and explanations should correctly summarize pages (without being deceptive) and have the Unique Selling Points.
• They must include “trigger” phrases.
• Humans, not robots, should be the target audience. Work on readability.

Note that you have to make metadata that is click-worthy not click-bait. Go ahead get going with the optimization!