Kick default page titles into touch

SEO since google adwords change

Recently we created a blog about how to increase the click through rate on your organic search engine listings. It highlighted the important role of your page title and meta description. It explained the need to make both title and descriptions enticing and not just stuffed with keywords.

Here is an example of a PLC with annual profits of over £3 billion, using what looks like, default page titles created by the website CMS highlighted in purple.

The importance of a page titles

I have been through more pages within the site and found the same format on each page, page name followed by company name, exactly the kind of page titles created by CMS systems automatically when no page title’s entered manually by the page author.

I’m not sure if this is a case of a business too big to care or a web developer just not putting any thought into it. Either way, this is such a waste. I’m sure Prudential spend millions of shareholders’ pounds on sales and marketing, as well as their own time and effort to get the perfect message across to their stakeholders; yet they haven’t spent a minute or two to think of the best message they want to appear when found in Google.

Here is an example of a competitor, with around half the profit of Prudential and yet they have done such a better job when found for ‘life insurance’ in Google:

legal and general page title and description

As you can see, they have tailored both the page title and the meta description to entice the click. If you were making your choice based on the above two listings’ text alone, you know Prudential would miss out every time.

The moral of the story is: don’t be lazy and rely on default page titles and don’t just think about keywords for SEO. Give people a good reason why they should click on your link as opposed to every other link within the search engine results.

For further advice and support with your SEO, click here.

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