Five mistakes teams make with title tags

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit title tags.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control
• Front-load the terms that matter most
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Making it stick

In practice

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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.