5 Best Practices For Title Optimization

We have often heard people saying, ‘What’s in a name?’; well when you plan on advertising your products online a lot can be said in that regard.  

As a retailer, product title optimization seems like an easy job, because you are more familiar with your products, but the job here is to make Google know more about your products so that it matches your products with the relevant search queries.

Selling products offline can give the buyers options to touch and feel the product, as well as you can leverage your verbal communication skills to further convince them. However, when it comes to online shopping, the goal remains the same, but it all depends on how specific you are with the details like title, description, and price which have the potential to make or break a deal.

In this article, we will go through some of the best tips on Title Optimization!

Think Like Your Customers 

Before you sit down to optimize your product titles, think of the terms that a prospect can use to search your products. If you write for people and not just for bots that prioritize keywords you can stay far ahead of your competition as the ultimate point of going through all the advertisement hassle is to drive more and more sales.

As customers, we all look for ease and convenience while shopping; thereby if a product title matches our language and resonates with the exact information that we are looking for, it engages us to start our purchase journey.

Take a look at the two ad results for the user’s search query “Heat Resistant Water Bottle” below. 

Insert relevant Keyword 

Put the most important and the most searched keywords in the first 70 characters of the title. As per Google’s algorithm, the first few words placed in the product title get more weightage and have the power to grab users’ attention. 

The most important keywords, however, differ by industry. So, depending on the products you sell, you’ll need to identify the important keywords that work for you and must be included at the front, such as brand, gender, category, and other attributes that best describe your product. This helps your customers quickly scan the relevant features of a product, potentially increasing your click-through rate.

Compare the example below to see how a varied set of attributes is used to define the Product titles belonging to different industries.

The highlighted features in the Mobile Title are the Brand and its Technical specifications, whereas the focus shifts to Appearance-related Keywords when it comes to the Mobile cover.

Note: To get your title highlighted on Google’s platform, avoid stuffing too many
keywords into it, as this will make it look spammy and irrelevant.

Use all the 150 characters 

Indeed, quality matters over quantity; but when we talk about product titles, quantity has an equal weightage. 

As you make your Product titles more and more descriptive, it increases the chance of surfacing your ad for relevant search queries. Also, you get more room to convince shoppers, you have got what they are searching for.

However, Google only shows a range of 30-70 characters at first glance to the users depending on their screen size. Yet, it is vital for the merchants to use all 150 characters to make the title descriptive and specific so that it appears for more and more related search queries.

Note: If your title does not fit within the maximum character limit, Google will truncate it to fit. 

In the first picture, we can see that the product title is truncated in the ad result after 50 words, however, the complete title shown in the next image still has significant keywords that describe the product. So, it is important to mention them in the product title to be able to appear for all the relevant search queries.

Make distinguishing variant titles

 If you have multiple variants of your products and you wish to appear for different search queries as per your variants, make sure you define your product titles accordingly. Each user can search for a separate set of variants and if you have not clearly defined your variant titles they will not appear for a specific search query, and you may lose a probable sale.

Look at the images below showing distinct variant titles defined by Color and Size, so whenever a user searches for this product with a specific color or size, the individual product will appear as per the search query.

Follow Google’s requirements for title optimization

While you are free to optimize your titles your way, you will need to take care of the minimum requirements set by the particular shopping platform. And, as we know when this comes to Google it gets very specific about the user experience it provides to their shoppers. Some of the criteria are as follows :

• Avoid excess capitalization
• Avoid putting promotional texts like sale price, sale dates, shipping, delivery date 
• Make sure your titles are grammatically correct to get a more professional appearance 
• Don’t make your title look spammy, avoid foreign characters
• Don’t use extra white spaces

Please follow this official document from Google to know more about the minimum requirements – https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324415?hl=en

Remember, it’s OKAY to start small 

If you are a store owner with a large number of products then this task may seem a bit tedious and time-consuming. But, you can start your journey by optimizing titles for your best-selling products and simultaneously keep a tap of the click-through rate and the CPC for those products. It’s highly likely that in a week or so you will be motivated to work on the rest of your product titles by looking at the results of your last experiment.

By far we were able to find out the importance as well as some of the best ideas to optimize your product titles; however, consider this as an ongoing process.

This will not only boost your ad performance but also give your products good exposure in Google free listings. A well-optimized product title goes a long way in shaping ad performance as it directly helps Google to identify your product and the better it identifies your products the more it will display them for the potential search queries. 

In a nutshell, the relevant title >> more impressions >> more clicks > > more conversions.

So, keep optimizing and stay ahead of your competitors!!