I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
-
Hi Guys
QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ.
1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content.
Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development
I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz
Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to
**ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat **
If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well?
How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make?
Any insight into this would be great!
Thanks
-
Thanks Christina!!! Appreciate your feedback!
-
If your customers are searching for Online Psychic Readings than the title you have chosen should work well for you.
- Christina
-
Thank you again Alick300!!!!
-
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for your follow up!
Yes all domains are the same content, aka duplicate on all domains - however we added all of the Hreflang tags and also the CcTLDs for all domains, and I know a competitor does the same as well, and have been running for around 7 years etc and seems to be working ok.
I haven't looked into canonical tags yet, but am looking into it currently? Can you tell me what you mean by "original source" meta tags?
-
Hi Christina,
Yes we ran PPC and alot of them were coming from our .com domain not our co.nz obviously its a bigger country. But it seems strange we are ranking page 1 for online psychic readings but the ctr is pretty low in nz, this is what it told me when we ran the PPC as well. It was alot faster to get to that position for NZ obviously, but what concerns me is that we are not ranking anywhere in google for our .com site.
I have set up the right tags etc for CcTLDs and Hreflang tags etc we try to make content as relevant to those areas as possible but in most cases it is near impossible.
But for the .com it seems quiet strange, do you have any thought around this?
-
Thanks Tom for the heads up, I will read into more of the cannibalization link you sent me!
-
Thanks Rick, you are so helpful! I have responded to Christina as per what you suggested as well - let me know what your thoughts are around my new title tag if that is okay?
Many thanks for your contributions as well!
-
Thank you so much Christina!!! The more the better
I'm currently using in my home page title tag:
Psychic Advice Online - Phone and Chat - Zenory, but my clients don't search for "psychic advice online" its rare, they search for "online psychic readings, or psychic readings, chat psychic readings and phone psychic readings" so I was wanting to change my title tag to
"Online Psychic Readings via Phone and Chat - Zenory" My competitors also have something like
(Free Psychic Readings Online - Live Psychic Chat - Phone Readings - Company Name)
or (Company Name - Online Psychic Readings, Tarot, Astrology, love Advice)
What are you thought around this? I see a few of my competitors tend to write longer title tags as well
-
It's exactly how Christina put it:
-
keyword in title (the more keywords in title the better)
-
title needs to make sense (as a sentence, not just as an enumeration of keywords)
-
keyword closer to the beginning of the title it's a common practice
-
keep it up to 70 characters long (google will truncate longer titles)
-
also use your brand / site name somewhere
The example Christina gave is great, but to include even more keywords (and if you company is a local one) I would do:
"Top Rated UK Web Design Company - DR Adept" - as this would include the keywords uk web design company, top rated web design company, etc (combinations of all the words in there, you get the drift) - it won't rank as well for all of them, but it will be there.
-
-
I know you've asked someone else for this answer, but as it's something I think I can help with, I hope you both don't mind my answering it. If I'm trending on toes please let me know so I don't make the same mistake in future - Cheers Christina
Yes you need keywords, and the closer to the beginning of the title the better.
But unless the sentence of the title makes sense to the user then you are likely to have a lower CTR.
Think about your keyword and what the page is about.
As an example my title tag would simple say 'Web Design Company - DR Adept'.
-
Hi Rick
Thanks for your comments and feedback!
Just a quick question, how would you go about finding or coming up with well optimized titles? What should I be looking for?
I have looked into title tags my competitors are currently using, and they seem to put alot of keywords in there.
Cheers
-
The only way to go is up, just make sure you keep your titles well optimized.
-
If your website isn't that powerful then changing title tags can drop the sites rankings for that set of keywords if you are looking for an exact match.
The titles you are proposing seem relevant, and there isn't that big a change so your rankings should be ok.
Before changing title tags I usually test keywords in PPC to see which have better CTRs. I also pay a lot of attention to the terms my clients use and not what people within my industry use.
-
I've completed site audits where the only thing I changed was the title tags which resulted in an increase in rankings and organic traffic.
Make sure you don't have any keyword cannibalization going on and you should be fine.
-
Hi Justin
From the sounds of things, you have no where to go but up, honestly.
You've listed the following:
-
More valuable content (FANTASTIC!)
-
Updating title and meta tags (FANTASTIC!)
-
Yes, they do matter
-
Title tags are one of your most important (if not, THE most important) onsite SEO ranking factors
-
Meta descriptions, while not a ranking factor, are a great "first pitch" to searchers and can increase CTR - use them
Are these 3 top level domains going to be all the same content? Or are they going to be their own standalone sites? I would be extremely mindful in that situation as you could run into a major duplicate content issue. Mind your canonical tags as well as (possibly) "original-source" meta tags if necessary.
Hope this helps you, let me know if you have any questions, but it sounds like you are making some good moves here. Good luck!!!
-
-
Hi Justin,
As you know that meta title is very important on page factor so if you change meta title that could affect but in your case I don't thing it will affect too much because you are using very similar terms . *** CTR would also very important rule to improve ranking so write title in such a way that you can get more clicks.****
Second thing I would like to suggest you to use those keywords that currently in title you should place those keyword into web page content/ H1 tag where you find appropriate.
Meta description is not ranking factor directly but indirectly yes it is a ranking factor because a good meta description can increase CTR & if CTR will increase keyword ranking will improve. So you can change it to more compelling meta description in order to improve your CTR.
URL - You can change URL by using 301 redirect maximum link juice will pass to new URL.
You can follow this URL in case of Title tag
Firstst word in the title is the most important. Second word is the 2nd most important. The last word in the title tag is the least important.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Url suddenlly diappeared from Google search results
Hi, I am facing a big problem wheel Google stop showing a basic url of my site, It was ranked good for more than 35 keywords from 1st to 8st positions, and suddenly I can find it indexed in Google , this is the URL : http://tv1.alarab.com/view-8/مسلسلات-عربية Thnaks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alarab.net0 -
How to deal with spam heavy industries that haven't gotten the hammer from Google?
One of our clients works in the video game category - specifically, helping people rank higher in games like League of Legends. In spite of our trying to do things the right way with white hat link building, we've suffered when trying to compete with others who are using comment and forum spam, private blog networks, and other black hat tactics. Our question is - what is the right approach here from a link building perspective? Is it an "if you can't beat them, join them" or do we wait it out and hope Google notices and punishes those who don't play nice? Some test terms to see what we're up against: "elo boost" and "lol coach." Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who's dealt with a similar situation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kpaulin0 -
Partial Manual penalty to a URL
Hi Mozers, I have a website which has got a partial manual penalty on a specific url. That url is of no use to the website now and is going to be taken off in 3 months time as the website is going to be completely redesigned. Till then I dont wont to live with the partial manual penalty for this url. I have few things in mind to tackle this: 1. take out the url from the website now (as the new redesign will take 3 months) 2. take out internal links pointing to this url in question 3. file for reconsideration with google stating we have taken off the url and have not generated any backlinks and the backlinks are organic. (no backlinking activity has been done on this website or the url) Please let me know if this works or i will have to get the backlinks removed then the disavow then the reconsideration. Looking forward for ur response 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Can I 301 redirect old URLs to staging URLs (ex. staging.newdomain.com) for testing?
I will temporarily remove a few pages from my old website and redirect them to a new domain but in staging domain. Once the redirection is successful, I will remove the redirection rules in my .htaccess and get the removed pages back to live. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Changing domains from .net to .com after 7 month of traffic loss.
We are in business since 2005 and we always used the .net version as it was the only one available when we started. In about 2007 we bought the .com version to the person who owned it but we kept using the .net as customers were already used to that version. In January we started to see a SE traffic loss, not to mention being outranked by several sites (95% of those site spammers). We had no manual penalty but it could be an algorithmic, we are not sure if we even have some sort of penalty or is just that our niche is too spammed. We are now considering moving the site to the .com version as all our tries of increasing and regaining our ranks were useless (backlink cleanup, disavow tool usage, excellent link building, excellent content creation and social interactions). Our DA and PA are both higher that any of the other ages ranking on top. We have about 3k pages indexed. What do you guys think? Should we move the site to the .com? (note that the change is ranking-wise, not in terms of branding). And if we do, should we 301 all pages? or rel=canonical to avoid a possible "penalty flow" to the other domain? Note: for years, the .com version was/is 301 to the .net one. Thank you all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
I'm worried my client is asking me to post duplicate content, am I just being paranoid?
Hi SEOMozzers, I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries. My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content. So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media). My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent. I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content. Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid? Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devoted2vintage0