This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while. To get things moving, this is part 1. I’ll plan on getting to part 2 some day.
Title tags are an outsized lever in SEO.
Making a minor change to one line of code on a page can have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the organic traffic to that page. And, since title tags are typically relatively easy to make changes to, it makes updating them ripe for “low hanging fruit”-type quick win opportunities.
How this approach is different
A typical approach to optimizing title tags is to identify the “target keyword” – usually a highest volume term you could find in a keyword research tool – and find a creative way of including it in your title tag without appearing too too spammy.
Instead, this approach uses your actual organic query data for optimization ideas. By analyzing a page’s search query data and joining to the current meta data, we’re able to find opportunities to better align title tags with the words users search with.
Even better, using a data analysis/visualization tool like PowerBI it’s possible to do this at scale.
For more on why title tags are important and worth optimizing check out Moz’s resource on title tags.
What you’ll need
You’ll need the following:
- PowerBI – you can download various different versions for free here. Mac users will need to find a workaround since PowerBI doesn’t work on a Mac. Tableau and Looker are paid alternatives.
- A crawl of your site – the template included below uses a Screaming Frog crawl but any data source containing URL, and title tag. Plus, if you want to optimize your meta description, and H1 using the same process, the crawl data will need to include those too (more on that in a follow-up post).
- Google Search Console query data – this can be downloaded directly from the GSC interface. The main thing is this needs to include both the query and the landing page in addition to click and impression metrics.
Some PowerBI resources
If you’re new to PowerBI, it might make sense to dig into some beginner resources first:
More to come in part 2!
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