In the world of book publishing, a title can make or break a book. Think about it. When you visit a bookstore, what gets you to pick up a particular book? No doubt the cover art and the title.
Page titles are important to websites as well, as you already know. But what do you know about page title competition?
Understanding Page Title Competition
I recently took an SEO seminar with Jill Whalen of High Rankings. Jill is one of the premier SEOs in the business (and she’s a really nice person to boot). One of the best tips I learned from her seminar was this: focus on page title competition rather than web page competition. Since search engines, like Google, put such a heavy emphasis in their algorithms on page titles, it makes sense to see how well your keyword phrases compete with other existing page titles.
Why? Well, if your keyword phrase doesn’t have “a lot” of page title competition (more on the definition of “a lot” below), using it in the page title may help boost your ranking for that phrase—even if there’s a healthy amount of web page competition.
Checking Page Title Competition
So how do you check title competition? Search on this:
allintitle:your keyword phrase here
Let’s look at an example. Pretend you operate a pest control company and you specialize in termite removal. You do research in Google’s free keyword tool, and you discover an interesting keyword phrase: termites eradication.
Google’s tool shows that this phrase receives approximately 58 searches per month, with August being the most popular month. But you figure there’s a ton of competition in Google for this phrase. So you search on termites eradication in Google. Sure enough, there are 217,000 competing web pages. “So,” you think, “It’s unlikely I’ll rank high for this phrase.” Well, wait a minute. Let’s consider the title competition.
allintitle:termites eradication
Turns out only nine page titles use the phrase termites eradication. While nothing is guaranteed in the world of search engine optimization, your page on termites stands a good chance of eventually ranking well for the term termites eradication if you use it in the title and, of course, the page copy, including headlines.
Writing Effective Page Titles, With Title Competition in Mind
Writing page titles can be a lot of fun because, as Jill Whalen says, it’s like putting together a puzzle. How well can you put together 8-10 words?
Let’s consider our termite example. Google’s keyword tool also shows the phrase how to kill termites receives a monthly average of 1300 searches. If you plug how to kill termites into Google, you’ll see that there are over 93,000 competing web pages that use this phrase. But let’s check page title competition:
allintitle:how to kill termites
As you can see, there are only 161 competing page titles that use that phrase. As for how many page titles is “too many” in terms of competition, that’s a judgment call. I’d say if you have a highly competitive phrase in terms of web page competition, but the phrase has fewer than 500 competing page titles, consider optimizing for that phrase, with a focus on the page title.
But back to our example. Watch how I use these two phrases without repeating the word termites:
<title> How to Kill – Termites Eradication </title>
Search engines ignore the dash, so it will see how to kill termites and also termites eradication. Plus, I have more room for another keyword phrase and/or the name of my company.
Of course, as search engine algorithms evolve, page titles may have less importance. But for now, the page title competition check is another cool tool in your SEO toolbox.
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