As you may well know when it comes to the language of SEO each landing page on your site has a Title tag and a Meta Description tag. If you weren’t aware of this, then you have a couple of other blogs to read as well to brush up on your search visibility and SEO optimization knowledge. In this article, we will just be discussing the Title Tag as it is incredibly important to the overall On-Page SEO value of your website. Anything that directly communicates with Google is something worth optimizing, so let’s take a look at what that actually means.
Which Pages Should You Optimize?
Depending on the size of your website, it is important to prioritize what you tackle first. Especially if you are running any sort of eCommerce website, you might have hundreds of different product pages and sub-collections. In order to focus your time wisely, start with the pages that are a major part of your website navigation. Just consider what pages are the most important ones for people to find first and start there, these are usually collection pages, your home page, your contact page, etc… you get the idea.
Next, download Screaming Frog, and use it to crawl your site in the Spider mode. That will give you a great idea as to where your site currently stands as far as SEO.
In the Internal Tab, click to sort HTML pages by the number of internal links.
I would start optimizing Title Tags of pages by looking at the pages that have the largest number of internal links. If a lot of pages on your own site link to a page, that page must be important (or it is a part of the main menu), either way, it should be optimized.
Finding the keywords
Finding keywords with Google's Keyword Planner is easy. Checkout our Keyword Planner guide. Alternative, if your site has been verified in the Google Search Console, then you already have a head start. You can learn more about your best keywords by going to the “Performance” report and clicking the “Pages” tab. Click on a page for which you want to find keywords, and then click on “Queries” tab. This report shows you which keywords have been driving traffic to that page. That means those keywords are relevant to the page, and it is worth exploring which of them drives the most traffic.
This isn’t a foolproof system, however, because a page might have the traffic coming from multiple queries. Since the Title Tag length is limited down to 55 characters, you must ask yourself the question, which query do we use as your primary keyword?
Consider exporting all the keywords from the report in a CSV document, and then pasting them into the Keyword Planner tool to get an “average searches” number for each keyword. Then sort the “Search Volume” column in descending order. Keywords with a high number of searches are great candidates for primary keywords. Organizing the data this way may not give you an automatic answer, but it will at least help you make some decisions.
Here’s an additional pro tip now that you are an expert in your website’s SEO... Consider merging several keywords into a longer phrase that can be used for the page’s Title Tag so that you can get the most out of each keyword…. Just remember, nothing over 55 characters.
Now that you are armed with Screaming Frog and the general knowledge of how to make your landing pages more in line with Google’s algorithm, make sure that you keep up with it. Your website is constantly changing and evolving as your brand evolves, make sure that you evolve with it, and keep your landing pages easy to find… at least by SEO standards.