Instantly Boost Rankings With The Perfect Page Title (5 Requirements)

Today I’m going to talk about  how to write the perfect page title and give 5 specific requirements/guidelines that I apparently follow without realizing it, and only now laid it down as a process out of necessity for a client.

Bare with me – normally I would completely roll my eyes at this post if I saw it on Moz or SELand, but after a recent conversation with a client regarding an extremely high competition page where they were asking why I was making certain word/phrase choices, I realized there really  is a lot of thought that I put into it without realizing it because I’ve been doing it so long. And it will likely help others who are trying to optimize their pages!

First off, many people who are completely new to SEO will have no idea what a page title is. So let’s get that out of the way. Skip the next couple paragraphs if you already know.

Page titles are so important that at a previous company, we had a developer make a mistake when installing a new plugin that made all of the page titles on a website exactly the same (just their brand name), and they  lost almost all of their rankings overnight. They jumped back up to their original positions within about 48 hours of fixing it. 

Onto the good stuff…

Getting a great page title can impact your rankings  almost instantly . This is not to say that you’ll change your page title and then rankings will truly go up a soon as Google recrawls the page, but it means that the page title is one of the few tiny things you can change that can have a  direct impact on rankings once Google decides what it thinks about the new title. (Obviously, this is not taking into consideration Google’s “transition rank” patent where they literally mess with your rankings to freak you out a bit after making a page change to see if you’re trying to screw with them.. but that’s a topic for another day. The point is changing a page title takes just a few seconds and can have a direct impact, unlike many other SEO changes.)

Now, the page I was consulting on to come up with this little guide is going for a  huge keyword. Let’s pretend it’s  business loans . So the situation was that the client had “Private Business Loans” EVERYWHERE on their page – in the title, in all of the headings, and repeated throughout the content at a huge density. I made recommendations to expand this in a few ways, adding variations and taking out some of the over-optimization. One of the recommendations was for the title, which I wanted to change from something like:

Private Business Loans | Brand Name

To something like:

Business Loan Options | Best Private Lenders for Companies | Brand Name

Why?

The client was uncomfortable with the wording as they felt “lenders for companies” was an awkward phrase, so I illustrated how competitors on page 1 are winning with that type of phrasing, and then opened the title to different phrasing suggestions as long as they followed the above points.

We’ll see what the client chooses – what’s important is that now they know exactly  how and  why I came up with that phrasing, and will likely be able to write better, more competitive titles in the future on their own due to the competitive research and thinking I laid out. It’s very rare that I go into this level of background detail for clients since many aren’t interested – usually all they see is the recommendation of “change your title from this to that” and think that it took seconds to come up with.

In this case I’m hoping it will help more business owners write better titles instead of defaulting to “Keyword – Brand Name,” as it’s very rare that Google will reward that level of obviousness and lack of uniqueness if the industry is super competitive.  To be clear, sometimes that format actually is the best option as writing titles is not a cut and dry process, and really depends on the existing search landscape.  This guide is intended more as general advice rather than a hard and fast set of rules.