In a previous post I spoke about the importance of H1 headlines in SEO. Now I’m going to speak about another piece of content that is equally as important.
The page title. Also known as the meta title.
This is the title that shows up in the browser tab at the top. It’s also the title that shows up on Google in the search results. Let me show you what I mean.
If we do a quick search for Lawyers in Sydney, for example, you can see the results here. The meta title is the headline of these results (outlined in red):
So why are they important?
Similar to the H1 headline, Google looks at the keywords in the meta title to decide what the website is relevant for, and thus ranks it accordingly.
So if you want to rank for certain keywords, you will need to make sure that they are in your meta title.
Similar rules apply to the meta title like they do to the H1 headline. You want to make sure that you have a unique meta title on each page and that you don’t have the same keywords across multiple pages, as that would cause “keyword cannibalization” and neither page would rank as high.
Here’s a format you can use to write meta titles:
“Legal Services in Location | Firm Name”
So an example of that would be:
“Conveyancing & Property Attorneys in Sydney | Top Lawyers”
You want to make sure that you use they keywords that are worth targeting in these meta titles. Don’t just put any keywords there that you think are good. Check the search volume and make sure it’s worth targeting them. In an upcoming post I will show you how to do this.
In the example above, because the firm name already contains the keyword “lawyers”, I put the keyword attorneys after Property so that way you target both keywords. That’s a trick you can use. An alternative to “Attorneys” would be to put “Law Firm”. The way I decide which to use is to simply look at which one of those has a higher search volume and then use that one.
Also keep in mind that you have a limit of around 60 characters for these meta titles. If it’s too long it’s going to get cut off in the Google search results, and whatever’s after that cut off isn’t going to be relevant.