The importance of title tags for ecommerce conversion rate
A recent blog post on Search Engine Watch entitled Ecommerce Title Tags: Top 5 Ways to Increase Clicks emphasised the importance of the ecommerce title tag for increasing click-through rate & ecommerce conversions in addition to having primary importance for SEO.
I wholeheartedly agree that the title attribute is the most significant from an search engine ranking perspective and used creatively can be for conversion as well.
It showed a number of examples title tags where including or adding relevant information such as sizes available, free shipping, returns policy and pricing can provide the information to a would-be potential customer to encourage an increase in click-through rate to the particular site.
As shown giving as much relevant info up-front can only increase the likelihood of attracting that all important clickthrough. And, that can make the difference for an ecommerce site!
In the increasingly competitive ecommerce marketplace each and every little detail and opportunity needs to be given full consideration.
Length of Title tag
However, the statement that title tags should be no more than 70 chars as anything more is ignored is misleading and even wrong.
There is no evidence that it’s the case although it is true that only the first 65-70 will be displayed with the rest not contributing to provide additional visible information.
There is some evidence to suggest, however, for the same reason as highlighted about the benefit of expanding the exact match search term, it may well be taken into consideration for search engine ranking if some of the search terms are there but just not visible in the serps (search engine results pages).
The importance of meta description tag for ecommerce conversion
Also, when discussing titles, search and conversion, although not used as a ranking factor, consideration should also be focused on the meta description tag and emphasised as another opportunity for conversion expanding on the title tag message.
The same applies that the length of the meta description tag, being limited to approx 155 characters, relates only to the displayed character length and not an absolute maximum.
How a well-crafted description tag can contribute to ecommerce success
A test in 2010: Using description tag to boost conversion showed that if appropriate, alternative content contained in the meta description could be selected if relevant to the search terms.
In that case the char count was 564. A broad search for wedding rings edinburgh & engagement rings edinburgh returns first search page results displaying different meta description text contained in the tag content.
Particularly important for the optimisation of an ecommerce home page, where generally more than one keyword/phrase is being targeted.
The takeaway: there is more than just one way to beat the competition and making the effort and taking the time to properly understand the buying personas of the your customers and creating title, meta & product descriptions answering their search(ing) questions will help to do just that!
