What to ask your agency about title tags

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on title tags, these questions are worth asking early.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The title is the biggest on-page signal you fully control. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Duplicate titles across pages waste the opportunity. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about title tags before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Front-load the terms that matter most — 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.