Placing the Brand Name First in Title Tags SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

Placing the Brand Name First in Title Tags SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we reordered title tags to include brand names at the start, especially if you are a household name.

Here is what they thought:

While it was close, the majority of followers that responded believed the brand name in the front had a positive impact on organic traffic. Although it was a small sample size of followers, the majority were correct!

This change had a positive impact on organic traffic – read on for the full case study!

Decisions about where to include brand keywords in title tags have been around as long as title tags themselves, and there are good arguments for leading with the brand and good arguments for leading with more generic keywords. Many industries have this tension, but local search is a fascinating example to investigate – with some people looking for their nearest store of a particular type, and some people searching for a specific retailer.

There is a theoretical tradeoff between a better click-through rate at a high level when the brand is presented more prominently and potentially worse rankings for generic queries. The only way to be sure which effect wins out is to test it.

While title tag tests are straightforward, they can often yield surprising results regarding their impact on organic traffic. The powerful effect on both rankings and click-through rate is the main reason why our SearchPilot customers love to test their title tags.

Our case study this week goes back to the basics as we look at localized search queries. We recently tested adding the brand name to the beginning of the title tags on city level pages.