I think of title tag analysis as part art, part science.
No matter how long you’ve been working crafting page meta titles and analyzing their impact in Google search, you’re bound to run into surprises at every turn. This is, of course, why I recommend testing your page titles.
The page title that looks perfectly on-point to you (the writer) may not necessarily resonate the same way with users and/or search engine results, creating a gap between the publisher’s spin and the searchers’ intent. Title tag analysis is the most straightforward way of closing this gap between publishers and searchers.
What exactly is title tag analysis?
Title tag analysis for SEO is the process of analyzing top-ranked meta titles to inform your title optimization strategy. The title tag itself is an HTML element that gets displayed as a clickable blue link in search engine results pages (SERPs). Proper analysis of page titles is a method that helps SEO professionals drive higher click-through-rates.
Three main reasons for analyzing and testing your page titles are:
- Page meta titles are known to be one of the most heavily-weighted on-page ranking factors within our control.
- They’re easy to change & test. No coding or full-page rewriting required.
- They’re a users’ first impression of your content. Your handshake, if you will.
7 fundamental truths & takeaways for page title analysis
Some of these truths may be obvious to the advanced SEO professional here, but for anyone who’s new to title tag analysis, it’s important to keep the following truths in mind.
- Truth: Search intent is the most critical component of a good title tag.
- Takeaway: Don’t slouch on SERP analysis. Spend some time analyzing the SERPs, empathizing with your audience, and thinking through the different search intents for each title tag that you optimize. Always be asking the question, “what do searchers want to see, learn, or do when they search this keyword?”
- Truth: Every SERP environment is unique.
- Takeaway: A title formula that works in one SERP environment will not necessarily work in another.
- Truth: Every SERP environment fluctuates over time as a result of Google’s machine learning, and competitive influences.
- Takeaway: Even if your page titles are effective today, there’s no guarantee that they will continue to remain effective in the future.
- Truth: Page titles are #1 driver of click-through-rates.
- Takeaway: You can’t just think about writing page titles for the sake of your keyword rankings. You’ve got to ensure that your titles resonate with your search audience primarily.
- Truth: If, after clicking on your title, users find that your page content doesn’t live up to the expectations that they initially had when reading your page title, they will pogo back to the search result.
- Takeaway: Don’t over promise anything that your on-page content doesn’t deliver, and write page titles that connect users to the content that they’re about to consume.
- Truth: Google may decide to dynamically rewrite your title tag. (See Google’s August 2021 update)
- Takeaway: Although it may be frustrating to most webmasters, there is always the possibility that Google may decide to dynamically rewrite your page titles. When this happens, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, if you want Google to display a new title, I recommend running new title tag experiments until you find a version that sticks, or editing your h1 to match your preferred title.
- Truth: Google will truncate your page titles by pixel length, depending on the device that users are searching on, but it’s okay to go beyond the recommended character lengths.
- Takeaway: Even though you can write titles that are longer than the recommended character lengths, your titles may get truncated at different pixel limits, so it helps to use a SERP preview tool like this one.
How to analyze title tags for optimal performance
1. Prioritize which title tags are worthy of analysis, based on available clicks
Sometimes, you’ll be analyzing title tags one at a time, so each individual use-case may vary here. However, in most cases, I recommend looking for the page titles on your website that have the highest opportunity of driving incremental traffic and revenue gains.
The easiest way to find these is by using your Google Search Console data to measure available clicks.
Available clicks is the difference between how many clicks your page is currently receiving from Google, versus the number of impressions from searchers who did not click.
Available clicks = impressions – actual clicks
All you’ll need to do is export a CSV with your top 1,000 URLs from Google Search Console, add the formula for available clicks, sort by available clicks, and voila!
2. Identify the primary keyword for URLs with high available clicks
For each URL that has high opportunity for traffic growth, identify a primary keyword and pair it with the URL.
Granted, it’s important to remember the long-tail opportunities when analyzing title tags, but I find it’s easiest and most effective to focus on one primary keyword. Occasionally, you can pair the primary keyword with a secondary search intent, but that’s a topic for another day.
3. Conduct SERP analysis
Using the primary keyword for your high-opportunity URL, run an incognito search to start looking for patterns in the SERP environment that your page is competing in.
If you’re stuck on how to do SERP analysis, this guide from Portent is a great place to start.
Questions to ask yourself while you’re analyzing the SERPs:
1. How many search intents are there for this query?
2. Of those search intents, which one is the primary and which is the secondary?
3. Does my page title (and content) accurately fulfill what a user would be looking for in at least one of these search intents?
4. Are there any hidden search intents here? (questions no one else has answered but users are looking for)
5. What titles and content types are performing well for this query? And what patterns exist among them?
6. Is there any way that your title can demonstrate additional value that the current list of competitors are not including?
4. Build a hypothesis
Based on all of your research thus far form a hypothesis about what kind of page title might be able to outperform some of the titles and pages that are currently performing.
A good formula for your hypothesis is:
Changing X to Y will result in Z outcome.
In other words, get clear on what has influenced you to rewrite your page title. It could be that you’re adding more value to the title. Or, you might be cutting out filler words to make the title more “punchy.”
Whatever your hypothesis is, use this to inform your new title creation process.
5. Write your new page title tag
This is where it will be especially important to keep in mind the six fundamental truths and takeaways that we talked about earlier.
I recommend reviewing them so that they’re fresh in your mind. If you focus too much on one idea, it’s easy to overlook the other truths that might result in a poor outcome.
Additionally, I almost always recommend writing your new titles with a SERP preview tool. Even though you technically can write longer titles without major consequences, it does help to see how users will experience your title from multiple devices.
6. Publish your title and continue to analyze its performance over time
The only way to truly know if your initial analysis work was effective is to test and measure the title’s performance over time.
Publishing a new title is not without risk. Even though most title optimizations tend to improve your organic performance, the last thing you’d want to do is allow your traffic to deteriorate because of a flawed hypothesis.
Keep your eye on the performance, and be ready to revert the changes just in case your new title doesn’t perform as well as you hoped it would.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the start of this post, title tag analysis can be both an art and a science. And, there is no one-size-fits all formula for title tag success. So, simply copying what others are doing is not going to be nearly as effective as analyzing the results for yourself and learning more about what is going to work in the SERP environments that you care about most.
