The Importance of Product Titles in SEO: Best Practices and Why You Shouldn’t Change Them
When optimizing your e-commerce site for SEO, the product titles on your website play a critical role. Product titles impact how well your site will rank on search engines and directly influence how well consumers will understand and engage with your products. This blog explores best practices for optimizing product titles and why you should not change them after publishing.
Best Practice for Writing Product Titles
A well-optimized product title should be concise, descriptive and accurately describe the product. Here are some best practices you should follow:
- Use relevant keywords in your product titles that people will likely search for.
Include the product name and any product attributes that make your product unique. - Keep your title within the 60-70 character limit to ensure it is not truncated in the search results.
- Use title capitalization (capitalizing the first letter of each word) in your titles for clarity.
Why Changing Titles After Publishing Is a Bad Idea
While updating your product titles after publishing may be tempting, it’s generally not a good practice as it can negatively impact your SEO efforts. Here’s why:
- It Can Confuse Your Visitors
Product titles can significantly impact consumer behaviour, especially when it comes to purchasing decisions. Changing product titles after publishing can confuse prospects and customers, leading to lower engagement and sales. - Loss of SEO Ranking
Search engines crawl and index pages based on the page’s title, so changing your product titles after publishing can impact how well your site ranks in search engine results pages. When you change titles, search engines may re-index the page, and you could lose any rankability you had gained before. - Inconsistent Catalog
Changing product titles can create inconsistencies in your product catalogue and the linked shops on social media (Instagram and Facebook). If you have any cross-referenced links or pages that refer to specific products, these will need to be corrected, which could be labour and time-intensive.
Conclusion
Product titles play a crucial role in SEO and can significantly impact consumers’ purchasing decisions. To optimize your product titles for SEO, follow these best practices above. Additionally, avoid changing the titles of your products after publishing them, as it can negatively impact your site’s rankability and create inconsistencies in your product catalogue.
Sticking to a well-planned title strategy will ensure a better chance of ranking in search results and driving more traffic and sales to your e-commerce site.
