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My recommendation is to always test, test, test. Your default should be to test and use the title tag that gets you the combination of best rankings and highest click-through rate. And to find the optimal title tag, you should be testing one's that duplicate keywords too.

I'll give you an example but I'm going to change out the actual essential oil name used so my client remains anonymous.

On March 5th, a specific page was ranking on Google as follows:

• #19 for "catnip essential oil"
• #17 for "catnip oil"
• #7 for "where to buy catnip oil"

The title tag at the time on that page was: "Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name".

I changed the title tag to "Catnip Essential Oil - Where To Buy Catnip Oil | Website Name".

After the page was recrawled by Google the rankings moved up to better positions. Here are the results:

• "catnip essential oil" has been as high as #6 but is at #9 today.
• "catnip oil" has been as high as #8 but is at #10 today.
• "where to buy catnip oil" moved up to #1 and remains there today
• No change in click-through rate

As you can see the results are better even with duplicating the words "catnip" and "oil" in the title tag.

Someone suggested that I should have just changed the title tag to "Where to Buy Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name". That is a worthwhile test and maybe I'll do that still just to see what happens but for now I actually prefer having both "catnip essential oil" and "catnip oil" in my title tag.

Hopefully you can see from this real world result that you can have duplicate words in your title tag and that testing is more important than following so called "best practices".

First of all, it's a great thing to have two URL's ranking on page 1 for your search terms.

I would not recommend 301 redirecting your landing page to your homepage because this will make it so you only have 1 listing in the SERP's.

Even though your homepage has more links pointing to it, your landing page has the better ability to be optimized for your 3 keyword phrases especially since you mentioned you do not want to change your homepage title tag.

I suggest you change your landing page title tag from "Washington DC Car Service-DC Limo and SUV Service" to "Washington DC Car Service - Luxury Limo, SUV, & Car Service in Washington DC"

After that, see if adding "DC car service one more time in the content helps your rankings at all. It may or may not, but it's worth testing to see.

As an aside, I always like to preach that people shouldn't be scared of testing different title tags. The worst that can happen is that you drop in rankings but you can always change your title tag back and once Google crawls your page again, you'll get your rankings back. The flip side is that you might improve your rankings for more terms without hurting existing rankings. Or your rankings may not even move at all, but you'll never know unless you test the changes.

In regards to your local pack question, Google is always changing changing SERP listings and testing different layouts. We know it can be very frustrating when it affects you directly. It's possible they'll change it back to 3 map listings for your term randomly one day and you won't have to worry about it again.

Either way, to improve your rankings in the local pack, you should continue to build backlinks to your site, build citations, and post content on your Google My Business page. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7342169?hl=en

That is correct. Sorry for the late response.

How do I get Google to crawl white papers that displays a form for human visitors?

I have been looking into this and understand that I need to set the form up as a GET form which has been done. Google said they want you to "avoid" forms that require personal information but to what extent do they want you to do that?

The form is used as a lead generator so we need to collect information such as name, company name, email, ect.The information we require currently is: Name, Company name, Email, Phone Number and Number of employees.  Once a user puts in their information they have access to the rest of the content and they don't need to re-enter the information in so I assume once Google gets past this feature they can gain access to the rest of the content.

I understand that I need to have a form that doesn't ask for personal information which is the dilemma. So what should we do to work around this? Is there a solution that will allow me to obtain some personal information while still allowing Google to crawl the pages?

Thoughts and any feedback is much appreciated,

TJ

My recommendation is to always test, test, test. Your default should be to test and use the title tag that gets you the combination of best rankings and highest click-through rate. And to find the optimal title tag, you should be testing one's that duplicate keywords too.

I'll give you an example but I'm going to change out the actual essential oil name used so my client remains anonymous.

On March 5th, a specific page was ranking on Google as follows:

• #19 for "catnip essential oil"
• #17 for "catnip oil"
• #7 for "where to buy catnip oil"

The title tag at the time on that page was: "Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name".

I changed the title tag to "Catnip Essential Oil - Where To Buy Catnip Oil | Website Name".

After the page was recrawled by Google the rankings moved up to better positions. Here are the results:

• "catnip essential oil" has been as high as #6 but is at #9 today.
• "catnip oil" has been as high as #8 but is at #10 today.
• "where to buy catnip oil" moved up to #1 and remains there today
• No change in click-through rate

As you can see the results are better even with duplicating the words "catnip" and "oil" in the title tag.

Someone suggested that I should have just changed the title tag to "Where to Buy Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name". That is a worthwhile test and maybe I'll do that still just to see what happens but for now I actually prefer having both "catnip essential oil" and "catnip oil" in my title tag.

Hopefully you can see from this real world result that you can have duplicate words in your title tag and that testing is more important than following so called "best practices".

First of all, it's a great thing to have two URL's ranking on page 1 for your search terms.

I would not recommend 301 redirecting your landing page to your homepage because this will make it so you only have 1 listing in the SERP's.

Even though your homepage has more links pointing to it, your landing page has the better ability to be optimized for your 3 keyword phrases especially since you mentioned you do not want to change your homepage title tag.

I suggest you change your landing page title tag from "Washington DC Car Service-DC Limo and SUV Service" to "Washington DC Car Service - Luxury Limo, SUV, & Car Service in Washington DC"

After that, see if adding "DC car service one more time in the content helps your rankings at all. It may or may not, but it's worth testing to see.

As an aside, I always like to preach that people shouldn't be scared of testing different title tags. The worst that can happen is that you drop in rankings but you can always change your title tag back and once Google crawls your page again, you'll get your rankings back. The flip side is that you might improve your rankings for more terms without hurting existing rankings. Or your rankings may not even move at all, but you'll never know unless you test the changes.

In regards to your local pack question, Google is always changing changing SERP listings and testing different layouts. We know it can be very frustrating when it affects you directly. It's possible they'll change it back to 3 map listings for your term randomly one day and you won't have to worry about it again.

Either way, to improve your rankings in the local pack, you should continue to build backlinks to your site, build citations, and post content on your Google My Business page. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7342169?hl=en