Before you invest in title tags

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on title tags, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Front-load the terms that matter most. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about title tags before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.