Using Brand Name in Page titles
-
Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title? We have a very strong brand name but it is also long. Right now what we are doing is saying:
Product Name | Long brand name here
Product Category | Long brand name here
Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.
-
In my Opinion your Brand Name should not be in your Titles. At least not on all pages. It should be in Contact pages, in pages and articles texts but it titles not that much. The reason I'm saying this is that there is 2 possible options :
1- Your Brand is not so well known so why trying to rank for your Brand when you could target a more efficient Target in term of relevant traffic generation.
2-Your Brand is well known, so that it is probably already in your Domain name and the texts everywhere everywhere on your sites, in anchor text of incoming links. You probably had a website running for this brand for a while so that Search Engine knows that your web property is the one of your brand. You probably also have a lot of links pointing to your homepage with your Brand for Anchor Text. Search Engine will then know.
So instead of focusing on your Brand, I think it's more clever to focused on bringing visitors and customer by using Keyword related to your products and services and have a larger base of customers to get awareness of the brand and then promote and recommend your Brand !
-
I thought about this after lunch and while I still stand behind my original post I think you can get away with leaving off your brand name if your products have a brand of their own.
Search for "Chuck Taylor All Stars". That's a brand in and of itself so Converse didn't add their name to that title tag.
Whereas if we're talking about a general product I'd say absolutely add the brand name like with "Pencil Sharpeners | Office Max".
-
In the case of Gap, not only is their brand name short, but it is also the brand of their clothes. People are going to be looking for Gap Jeans and the like. If you're in a similar situation where it's your brand name + product that signifies a sale, it'd probably be wise to have the brand in the title tag in that case, but you'll want to consider whether or not it's worth it across your site globally.
In a case like Harbor Freight, their name is some what long, but they use it on their location specific pages because they have stores, they get localized searches, and they are going to pull in visitors, and the usage adds value. On product specific searches it makes fewer appearances.
-
That could be. Then again, how do some brands become so well known for their brand identity? By including it everywhere human eyeballs are.
-
That's why I initially offered that the brand can be optional - if it's a weak brand, make use of that space in the Title - however rather than assuming a site can be found for Product Name | KickA$$ Price (very unlikely to be a high volume longer phrase), I believe it's better early on to get a couple phrases in each title where each phrase by itself is relevant, and the combination of those phrases (in different various sequences) is much more likely to get that many more people ultimately finding the site.
This is especially true when having quality content on the page - combine all those Title variations and partial variations with a handful of words in the content that results in exponential long tail visits.
Just my experience though.
-
I think that a lot of people using THEIR BRAND in the title tag are simply lazy or egotists.
... but it's OK with me.
-
Gap is lucky to have such a short brand name.
In a lot of cases we are talking about egos that are enormous compared to the size of a brand as widely known as Macy's.
For my sites at least I think that the opportunity to grab extra sale through the title tag is more important than trying to communicate a weak brand when I am head-to-head with a Macy's. I'd rather use my title tag to shout value propositions, elicit clicks and reach for more keywords.
When we are talking my brand vs Macy's I need to get my foot in the door with value and then impress them with service and quality.
-
I like the Hybrid approach. Much more dynamic.
-
Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Fortunoff, Gap... All have their Brand in page Titles.
Interestingly, Gap uses the combination of Category | Gap | Sales Hook (a hybrid of my suggestion and EGOL's) on many of their pages.
-
To your comment Alan, I am talking about a world-renowned brand. With that in mind, it sounds like we should keep the brand there at the end in order to maximize clickthrough and brand recognition.
-
In most cases I'm a fan of leaving the brand name off of the title tag as EOGL mentions. It's probably in your URL and all over the page that someone is going to see if they click on your search result, so you should do as much as possible to get that click. His examples are great.
Also consider that people searching for your brand already know about your site and if they don't they still have a VERY high likelihood of interacting with your site at some point. With generic searches you want to do as much as possible to expose your brand to people that are unfamiliar with your brand, the ones that are the farthest from knowing who you are and what you do. If you track how someone arrives at your site via search, you're very likely to see this progression:
1. Generic search
2. Generic search + brand or domain name
3. Brand name search
4. PurchaseYour brand is important, but having it in your title tag has very little influence over steps 2-4. Focus on getting those initial visits.
-
I always recommend to clients that unless they're a world renowned brand, it's important to include the brand name on core information type pages (about, contact, jobs, etc.) as the first part of the page Title, but that it's optional to include on the rest of the site - and if it is included on other pages, it should definitely be at the end of the Title string, after each page's primary topical focus.
As for products and categories, unless you've got a site that's dominating the search results, I always recommend Product Name | Product Category | Optional BrandName
This is vital because you need to build topical relevance for every product - both specific to that product and how that page relates to it's larger category. Imagine having 30 product pages in one category - that's 31 pages that would have the Category emphasized, yet in proper syntactical order for individual page relevance.
Then, as your site becomes truly strong in search results, you can go with EGOL's method.
Always remember that Google only displays the first 70 characters at most from each Title - so look at how Titles would in Google. If you do include the brand at the tail, it's okay if it gets cut off in the Google display - they'll still see it, and users will see it in their browser when on your site - as an additional brand-strengthening aspect of your site's design.
-
Lots of people are hung-up on using their brand name in titles. I think that they should consider some of the examples below.... and use their imagination to appeal to the searcher. Let's be honest... brand names make a really sleepy title tag...
Product Name | KickA$$ Price
Product Name | Free Shipping
Product Name | A Phrase that Elicits Clicks
Product Name | Most Popular Uses
Product Name | Immediate Shipping
Product Name | What the Competition is Keeping Secret
Product Name | Buy Now and Get Free Beer
-
I think if you use Product Name | product Category you shouldn't use your brand name as second keyword but your product category.
On pages that you're not putting as much focus on the title ex: About us | Long Brand Name Here
Remember each page is treated as a unique page.
-
I'd say stick with what you have. Even if it exceeds 70 characters, like you say it's a recommendation to stay within it, not an absolute.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Does the more number of ranking pages improve the website ranking?
Hi all, Let's say there is a website with 100 pages ad 95 pages are not ranking for any keywords; but the other 5 pages including homepage are ranking for some keywords. In this scenario, the 95% non-ranking pages does impact the other 5% pages rankings? Or every page holds their credibility in ranking irrespective of other pages in website? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Header Structure In Product Gallery Page
Hi Everyone, Should product names have an H2 header tag on a gallery page? (H1 already optimized) Why or why not?
Algorithm Updates | | JMSCC0 -
Fetch as Google - removes start words from Meta Title ?? Help!
Hi all, I'm experiencing some strange behaviour with Google Webmaster Tools. I noticed that some of our pages from our ecom site were missing start keywords - I created a template for meta titles that uses Manufacturer - Ref Number - Product Name - Online Shop; all trimmed under 65 chars just in case. To give you an idea, an example meta title looks like:
Algorithm Updates | | bjs2010
Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop The strange behaviour is if I do a "Fetch as Google" in GWT, no problem - I can see it pulls the variables and it's ok. So I click submit to index. Then I do a google site:URL search, to see what it has indexed, and I see the meta description has changed (so I know it's working), but the meta title has been cut so it looks like this:
Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop So I am confused - why would Google cut off some words at start of meta title? Even after the Fetch as Googlebot looks perfectly ok? I should point out that this method works perfect on our other pages, which are many hundreds - but it's not working on some pages for some weird reason.... Any ideas?0 -
Google Algorithm change? - Brand name now overwriting title tag?
Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion... "Site name: page title" I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly. I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far. Edit:Some links talking about the subject http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/
Algorithm Updates | | mattylac0 -
Same page but appearing in Google with different titles
I have a page ranking on position 1 for a key phrase. The key phrase is the title of the page as well. I'll use a mock key phrase to aid my question - "Teeth and Gums" So the page is ranking number 1 for "Teeth and Gums" and "Teeth and Gums" is the meta title. However, I went ahead and did a new search adding an additional keyword to the original search. When I did a new search adding an additional keyword to the original search, Google has done something weird.. Let's say the search is "Dentistry - Teeth and Gums", Google has ranked my page again as number 1 but changed the title. The title in the search result is now "Dentistry - Teeth and Gums" How and why? It's kinda like Google PPC's keyword insertion but the title hasn't got anything weird like {KeyWord: Dentistry}. It's just "Teeth and Gums" Has this happened to you guys? Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
How much posting product links to Social Media affect your ranking? Any use ?
Google has Google Plus. Facebook has partnership with Bing. How much social media affect your ranking ?
Algorithm Updates | | rahijain0 -
FB Like and G+ on page transferred ?
Hi , As we all know that social signals like FB Like and G+ give a boost to the search engine rankings. I have several pages we have garnerd 100s of FB likes with a 10s of G+ . Now i want to reorganize my site to so that the contents of the blog would be having a different URL . So i have planned for 301 redirections for the older content to the newer ones. But does the FB Like and G+ also move along with the 301 redirection ? If not whats is the best way to handle this... Warm Rgds Avinash MB
Algorithm Updates | | ShoutOut0 -
"Revisit-after" Metatag = Why use it?
Hi Mozfans, Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them; name="revisit-after" content="7 days" /> I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag? Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible? Thanks in advance everyone! Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshSEO20110