You may find yourself wondering whether the humble title tag still matters in modern SEO. When it comes to your click-through rate, the answer is a resounding yes! In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome back our good friend Cyrus Shepard to talk about 7 ways you can revamp your title tags to increase your site traffic and rankings.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm very excited to be here today. My name is Cyrus. I'm a Moz associate. Today I want to talk you about title tags, specifically title tag hacks to increase your traffic and rankings.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Are title tags even still important today in SEO?" You bet they are. We've done a lot of correlation studies in the past. Those correlation studies have shown different things sort of decreasing in the past years. But we've also seen a lot of experiments recently where people have changed their title tag and seen a significant, measurable increase in their rankings.

Now, the other aspect of title tags that people sometimes forget about is the click-through rate that you get, which can measurably increase your traffic if you get the title tag right. Now, what's neat about increasing your traffic through click-through rate is we've seen a lot of experiments, Rand has experimented a lot, that if you can increase this, you can measurably increase this.

Traffic through increased clicks can seem to increase your rankings under certain circumstances. So you get the dual benefit. So that's what I want to talk to you about today — increasing those rankings, increasing that traffic by changing the first thing that your visitor is going to see in the SERPs.

So the important thing to remember is that these are things to experiment with. Not all of these hacks are going to work for you. SEO is founded in best practices, but true success is founded when you experiment and try different things. So try some of these out and these will give you an idea of where to get started in some of your title tag experiments.

1. Numbers

Numbers kind of pop out at you. These are examples: "5 Signs of a Zombie Apocalypse" or "How Mutants Can Save 22% on Car Insurance."

• Cognitive Bias - Standout specific – When you see these in SERPs, they tend to get a slightly higher click-through rate sometimes. This works because of a cognitive bias. Our brains are trained to find things that stand out and are specific. When you're scanning search results, that's a lot of information. So your brain is going to try to find some things that it can grasp on to, and numbers are the ultimate things that are both specific and they stand out. So sometimes, in certain circumstances, you can get a higher click-through rate by using numbers in your title tags.

2. Dates

Rand did an excellent Whiteboard Friday a few weeks ago, we'll link to it below. These are things like "Best Actress Oscar Nominee 2017" or even more specific, you can get the month in there, "Top NFL Fantasy Draft Picks September 2017."

Now, Rand talks about this a lot. He talks about ways of finding dates in your keyword research. The key in that research is when you're using tools like Keyword Explorer or Google AdWords or SEMrush, you have to look for previous years. So if I was searching for this year's, we don't have enough data yet for 2017, so I would look for "Best Actress Oscar Nominee 2016."

• Leverage your CMS – If you use WordPress, if you use Yoast plugin, you can actually have your title tags update automatically year-to-year or even month-to-month leveraging that. It's not right for all circumstances, but for certain keyword queries it works pretty well.

3. Length

This is one of the most controversial, something that causes the most angst in SEO is when we're doing audits or looking at title tags. Inevitably, when you're doing an SEO audit, you find two things. You find title tags that are way too short, "Pantsuit," or title tags that are way, way, way too long because they just want to stuff every keyword in there, "Tahiti ASL Red Pantsuit with Line Color, Midrise Belt, Hook-eye Zipper, Herringbone Knit at Macy's."

Now, these two, they're great title tags, but there are two problems with this. This is way too broad. "Pantsuit" could be anything. This title tag is way too diluted. It's hard to really know what that is about. You're trying to scan it. You're trying to read it. Search engines are going to look at it the same way. Is this about a pantsuit? Is it about herringbone knit? It's kind of hard.

• Etsy study – So Etsy recently did a study where Etsy measured hundreds of thousands of URLs and they shortened their title tags, because, more often than not, the longer title tag is a problem. Shorter title tags, not so much. You see longer title tags in the wild more often. When they shortened the title tags, they saw a measurable increase in rankings.
• 50–60 Characters – This is one of those things where best practices usually is the best way to go because the optimal length is usually 50 to 60 characters.
• Use top keywords – When you're deciding what keywords to put it when you're shortening this, that's where you want to use your keyword research and find the keywords that your visitors are actually using.

So if I go into my Analytics or Google Search Console, I can see that people are actually searching for "pantsuit," "Macy's," and maybe something like that. I can come up with a title tag that fits within those parameters, "Tahiti ASL Red Pantsuit," "pantsuits" the category, "Macy's." That's going to be your winning title tag and you'll probably see an increase in rankings.

4. Synonyms and variants

Now, you'll notice in this last title tag, the category was a plural of pantsuit. That can actually help in some circumstances. But it's important to realize that how you think your searchers are searching may not be how they're actually searching.

Let's say you do your keyword research and your top keywords are "cheap taxis." You want to optimize for cheap taxis. Well, people may be looking for that in different ways. They may be looking for "affordable cabs" or "low cost" or "cheap Ubers," things like that.

So you want to use those variants, find out what the synonyms and variants are and incorporate those into your title tag. So my title tag might be "Fast Affordable Cabs, Quick Taxi, Your Cheap Ride." That's optimized for like three different things within that 50 to 60 word limit, and it's going to hit all those variants and you can actually rank a little higher for using that.

• Use SERPs/keyword tools – The way you find these synonyms and variants, you can certainly look in the SERPs. Type your keyword into the SERPs, into Google and see what they highlight bold in the search results. That will often give you the variants that people are looking for, that people also ask at the bottom of the page. Your favorite keyword tool, such as Keyword Explorer or SEMrush or whatever you choose and also your Analytics. Google Search Console is a great source of information for these synonyms and variants.

5. Call to action

Now, you won't often find the call-to-action words in your keyword research, but they really help people click. These are action verbs.

• Action words — buy, find download, search, listen, watch, learn, and access. When you use these, they give a little bit more excitement because they indicate that the user will be able to do something beyond the keyword. So they're not necessarily typing it in the search box. When they see it in results, it can create, "Oh wow, I get to download something." It provides a little something extra, and you can increase your click-through rates that way.

6. Top referring keywords

This is a little overlooked, and it's sort of an advanced concept. Oftentimes we optimize our page for one set of keywords, but the traffic that comes to it is another set of keywords. But what's very powerful is when people type their words into the search box and they see those exact same words in the title tags, that's going to increase your click-through rate.

For an example, I went into the analytics here at Moz and I looked at Followerwonk. I found the top referring keywords in Google Search Console are "Twitter search," "search Twitter bios," and "Twitter analytics." Those are how people or what people are looking for right before they click on the Followerwonk listing in Google.

So using that information, I might write a title tag like "Search Twitter Bios with Followerwonk, the Twitter Analytics Tool." That's a pretty good title tag. I'm kind of proud of that. But you can see it hits all my major keywords that people are using. So when I type in "Twitter analytics" into the search box and I see "The Twitter Analytics Tool," I'm more likely to click on that.

So I've written about this before, but it's very important to optimize your page, not only for the traffic you're trying to get, but the traffic you're actually receiving. When you can marry those two, you can be stronger in all aspects.

7. Questions

Questions are great tools to use in your title tags. These are things like, "Where Do Butterflies Migrate?" Maybe your keyword is just "butterflies migrate." But by asking a question, you create a curiosity gap, and you give people an incentive to click. Or "What is PageRank?" That's something we do here at Moz. So you get the curiosity gap.

But oftentimes, by asking a question, you get the bonus of winning a featured snippet. Britney Muller wrote an awesome, awesome post about this a while back about questions people also ask, how to find those in your keyword research and claim those featured snippets and claim "people also ask" boxes. It's a great, great way to increase your traffic.

So these are seven tips. Let us know your tips for title tags in the comments below. If you like this video, I'd appreciate a thumbs up. Share it with your friends on social media. I'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.

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