One drum I seem to spend a lot of time banging is the need to optimise title tags for searcher-to-visitor conversion, not just rankings: a great slot in the SERPs can under perform hugely if the snippet isn’t well aligned to searcher intent.
I’ve been having a disagreement with a friend about this for a few weeks: he feels SEO overrides most other considerations and a top result will net plenty of clicks no matter what. I’m of the opinion that even tiny changes can make a big difference to the ratio of searchers which turn into visitors, and I’d rather have a #5 result with a strong call to action than a #1 result that was blatantly keyword stuffed or otherwise unappealing to the searcher.
To prove my point I took a site that is #1 for a particular term, receiving 100-150 search visitors a day. Lets say the search term was “britney spears naked”, and that I changed the title tag from that exact phrase to “Buy Honda Fireblade parts online”. Here’s what happened:
The first thing we learn is that I’m not a big fan of “widgets” as an example term 
The second is that people looking for Britney’s bits don’t care about (or click on) results about bike parts. Visitors coming in on that search term dropped from ~150 p/d to less than a dozen, and the 10 or so visitors a day were actually coming in from Yahoo & Live, whose indexes haven’t caught up with the title change yet. Not a single visitor clicked through from the changed title snippet in SERPs where the new snippet was shown.
In one sense it’s a bit of a no brainer, especially in an extreme example like this where the result is so blatantly not what the user asked for. On the other hand it does illustrate the point that there’s more to title tag optimisation than rankings quite effectivly, so hopefully of some use to anyone else who has to make the same argument.
21 Comments
-
- 2
@dudibob I agree with Dan, ok this test was extreme and and the search terms where not related to the title in anyway, but it was interesting that see that the site in question didn’t get any clicks.
- 3
Agreed bob – definitely an extremely artificial example. The bet was that I could totally wipe out a sites traffic with a title change though, so at least I got a pint out of it
- 4
Brittany Spears Buying Honda FireBlade Parts » Naked …
That’s Hot …
- 5
[...] More to title tag optimisation than SEO [...]
- 6
this is an extreme example, what about doing some testing on title optimisation and increasing traffic click through’s with the use of modifiers such as free , cheap or any others you can think of.
- 7
thanks, it gave me another idea to optimize my site.
- 8
Interesting study! Even though it might be extreme, it certainly indicates that rankings are not everything.. nice to have, but a well crafted title and description definitely rocks.
- 9
Are you sure that the position in the SERPS for “britney spears naked” stayed the same?
- 10
That’s a very good point if you changed the title it would affect the position in the serps , so the test is flawed
- 11
Agree with Steve Morris
- 12
This is extreme example. Can you tell us what happens when changes are minor or major? (but not extreme like this.)
- 13
[...] More to title tag optimisation than SEO [...]
- 14
Nice post. The conversion value of snippets in general, and of title tags in general is overlooked. There’s also the fact that titles can appear in many situations wholly or only secondarily related to search. RSS comes to mind especially, where (unlike organic search results) the user is more often than not presented with only the linked title, and no description.
- 15
@ dennis I just checked and yes we are still number for the term
and we are still getting no clicks, - 16
Good information. We have to take care title tags, its very important as SEO point of view.
Regards
- 17
Great post. Title tag order placement in the meta tag hierarchy seems to be of equal importance.
- 18
Nice post. This goes to show how important the title tags are. But what if there will be a little tweaks in the title, will the same plunge in visitor hits appear as well? Perhaps a new test with some modifications in the title?
- 19
Title tags are only the first and most basic step to SEO. They are extremely important but without the relevant content in a website it would never rank in any competitive market.
- 20
I’ve don’e pretty well with my title tags…..first two words of my title are #2 (non-sponsored) for my KW and anchor text.
Of course, the content matches the title…..and the links match the KWs in the content (to make the Googlebot happy).
- 21
i think the tags are only a litle piece for ranking. i think for bing they are more interesting as for google.
Good post however the title change was very extreme and even non-technical users could see that it was an artificial result hence the lack of clickthroughs IMO. If you changed it to something less extreme (I seriously can’t think of a boring way to put ‘Britney Spears Naked’) then that would be interesting