As I quickly approach my 1300th Daily Golden Nugget, I find myself pondering my existence. What else could I possibly write about that I haven't already?
Truthfully, a lot, but I'm also realizing that's I've never created a series of simple examples or how-to's for typical search engine optimization tasks. So, starting today, I'm going to work through several days (however many it might take) to show you how to tie together simple SEO procedures.
I'll tie together information from free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, but I won't go into specifics about how to directly edit your website.
I think I'll dub this my "Practical Guide" series of Nuggets. The first one will be...
Page Title SEO for Products
Look through your Google Search Console for keywords that have impressions but now clicks.
Go here to get started: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Open your website property and then navigate to the Search Analytics report as shown here:
At the time of this writing, the Search Analytics report was still in beta. I didn't see any data in this report so I had to click the "Search Queries" link you see in this screen shot:
Then I looked through the list to find keyword phrases that had a lot of impressions but zero clicks, like these examples of "diamond stud earrings" and "diamond studs" shown here:
This particular website has a single product page showing the range of diamond stud earrings they carry. I can't show you the actual page, but here's a really close example that I found on the Zales website to help illustrate this:
The product title and the page title are exactly the same:
"1/2 CT. T.W. Diamond Solitaire Stud Earrings in 10K White Gold"
The first 5 or 10 characters of your page title are the most important characters. In the above example that would mean "1/2 CT. T.W." are the most significant.
No one will search for the "1/2 CT. T.W." character string. The above report shows they are searching for "diamond stud earrings" and "diamond studs".
We need to remove "1/2 CT. T.W." from the beginning of the page title and keep the word phrases that people search for. Here's how I would change this:
"Diamond Stud Earrings | Diamond Solitaire Studs in White Gold"
People don't generally search for the numbers or the "ct tw" abbreviations, so I simply took them out.
It's important to note that I didn't change the title of the product. That stays set to "1/2 CT. T.W. Diamond Solitaire Stud Earrings in 10K White Gold." I only changed the Page Title.
Your online product catalog should have the built-in feature to use your product title as the Page Title. You will have to figure out how to override those SEO settings on a per-product basis.
Potential Results
When search the web, we all tend to scan the results quickly to see what best matches the query we typed in. Removing "1/2 CT. T.W." from the page title should remove the visual road block that's preventing people from clicking the link when they search for "diamond stud earrings" and "diamond studs".
It's that simple.
All it takes is a quick review of your Google Search Console and a few minutes to evaluate your page titles. This type of analysis has worked for me in the past; hopefully it will work for you too.
