Title tags: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about title tags this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Start here

The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Then this

Front-load the terms that matter most. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Eventually

Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What this looks like day to day

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
• The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.