Titles are meant to be concise but descriptive of the purpose and intent of the page. Admittedly, this may be hard to achieve with a very short title.
And so, if your title is short, you can update it to lengthen it. Read on to learn how.
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Short Title Tags Are a Missed Opportunity
A short page title is typically a missed opportunity for optimizing your page for search engines and your audience.
If a page title doesn’t properly summarize the contents of a page, search engines may find it complicated to understand what the page is about. Search engines like Google are also more likely to rewrite short page titles with an algorithmically-generated title. This changes the experience and message you want to deliver to your audience.
As for the user experience, site visitors use the page title to confirm that the page addresses their query. A short title may not always be strong enough to make that true.
How to Make Title Tags More Descriptive
10 characters or less is considered too short for a title tag. In any case of these short titles, you’ll create a better search experience for the user (and offer more relevance to search engine crawlers) by updating the title to include well-formed, page-specific, descriptive text.
Recommended Reading: How to Write Optimized Page Title Tags for SEO
For example, imagine there is a page about how to paint a metal fence. A title lacking relevance and descriptive text would be something like “Fence Painting”. A title like that is too short to tell users what this page is really about. Googlebot misses out on these important relevancy clues, too.
On the flip side, a descriptive title could be something like “How to Paint a Metal Fence: Recommended Paint, Brushes, and More”.
This title clearly summarizes the contents of the page, which should help a user know that the page matches their query (if that’s what they were looking for, of course).
The page title can be updated directly in some content management systems, although some websites require updates be made directly to the backend code. If updates to your site need to be via the code, but you don’t have access, the dev team should be able to help you.
Updating Title Tags at Scale
Another way to update your title tags is to leverage SEO execution platform ClarityAutomate. This way, you can update title tags side-wide with just a few clicks.
1. Select what you'd like to optimize: Title
This optimization starts by selecting “Title” in ClarityAutomate.
2. Choose how you'd like to optimize it: Replace
As opposed to adding or deleting an element, this fix required an update. One value will be replaced by another.
3. New Title: The text for the title
Enter the new text that will serve as the page title tag.
Before and After
With a few clicks, a short title tag can be updated with ClarityAutomate to give both users and search engines more context.
