When someone is scrolling through a SERP (search engine results page), it’s the title of a listed webpage that could be most influential in making them click through to it.
Furthermore, when the same person is scanning the webpage itself, subheadings can help them to quickly decipher what kind of information is displayed where on it. What follows is advice on how to keep titles and subheadings succinct but, from an SEO perspective, effective.
Insert keywords that would likely pique interest
When putting together a title, it can be too easy for confusing technical terms to slip in. Here’s an example scenario to help illustrate this point: you own a tech retailer and want to post a blog article outlining how to get started with the Raspberry Pi programmable microcomputer.
For this piece, a title like ‘Beginner’s Guide to Getting to Grips with the Raspberry Pi’ would have more of an immediate impact than ‘How to Program and Accessorise a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B’.
Keep the title limited to roughly 60-65 characters
A webpage title should not exceed about 60-65 characters — including letters, spaces and any numbers — in length, lest the title be chopped short on Google SERPs.
You can rest assured that, according to Google executive John Mueller, the title’s length will not directly affect the page’s SEO ranking. However, it could still indirectly enhance that ranking, such as by making the page more popular and, as a result, boosting its authority in Google’s eyes.
Include your brand name where appropriate
One SEO no-no when titling webpages would be putting in repeat phrases across a large number of those pages. However, it can still be a good idea for you to add your brand name to some of them, such as landing pages and generic blog posts.
It would also be wise for you to make sure the piece’s main content, including its subheadings, consistently adheres to your brand voice. If you lack confidence in your writing ability, rest easy that we have digital copywriters who could pen that content on your behalf.
Be careful with how you capitalise
The titles and subheadings of many online articles use what has been referred to as ‘sentence case’ capitalisation, where the first word’s first letter is uppercase while the remaining letters — with a few possible exceptions, like the first letters of proper nouns — are lowercase.
For your own titles, this kind of capitalisation would look professional — as would ‘title case’ capitalisation, where uppercase is used for a title’s main words but not connective words like ‘and’ and ‘for’.
Conversely, you should avoid seemingly random, erratic capitalisation — like, if it was used for the above subtitle, ‘BE CaREFUl WItH HOw YoU CApITALiSE’. This would look amateurish, and risk giving the impression that the main content on the page must be similarly sloppy.
If you need further tips on how to get the text on your website just right, don’t hesitate to reach out to our digital marketing experts by sending them a filled-in online contact form.
