Title Tag SEO for Web Performance
Should you update existing page titles?

The Challenge

A long-term digital marketing client saw that interior pages were stagnant, without much growth in traffic and engagement. While paid search campaigns continued to drive traffic to core landing pages, the site lacked organic traffic to pages with specific content previously sought out by users. As part of our comprehensive digital strategy, it is vital to maintain a site with solid SEO practices for successful digital initiatives.

The Study

To better understand potential behavior on the website, we began with data on how users interacted with the pages in question before making any changes. We noticed a difference in the performance of pages with more relevant title tags to content on the page. This finding led us to test shorter, simplified titles on pages with lower performance, measuring results after set periods to see how the changes affected traffic and engagement compared to the original page titles.

The Results

The results made it clear that cleaning up pages on the website with simple, short titles was a critical component of the webpages' overall performance. The six months after the title updates compared to the 30 days prior resulting in the following performance of the updated pages: 

• Total pageviews increased by 113% overall.
• In the same period, bounce rates improved by 33%.
• Click-through rates (CTRs) increased by an average of 0.8%.
• Exit rates from the updated pages decreased by 19%.

The updated page titles allow visitors to easily anticipate the content of a web page before even clicking through to the website from the search results page. This meant more users could quickly find the content they needed, making them more likely to revisit the site in the future as well.

To learn more about SEO, custom strategy, and digital marketing services, check out our additional case studies.