Mastering the Art of Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

hello we are live welcome folks we are live streaming on LinkedIn and YouTube so if you're watching on YouTube go ahead and say hi so we know you're here if you're watching on LinkedIn say hi as well we'll see those comments come in um and we'd love to know who's here where you're watching from all that kind of stuff so go ahead and comment hello and and let us know who's in the audience thank you for joining us we are here today for the agency hour um we've got Lindsay Hy co-founder of pathfind SEO so welcome Lindsay it's great to have you again thanks for having me back yeah I'm excited for this topic today so we'll be revealing the art of page titles and metad descriptions I know um if anyone's like me it's one of those things that you know you you have to do and sometimes it just feels so tedious and and wrote but it there is an art to it for sure because when you're when you're Google searching again if you're like me when you see a page title that really works you click on it so it's it's big um cool before we get into that I just want to say a couple words about quickly hire quickly hire is the fastest way to add vetted Freelancers to your team at quickly hire we understand the importance of assembling top tier talent for your business in a flexible way whether you need a developer content marketer SEO specialist designer PPC uh virtual assistant we have got you covered so we've got many roles we're adding new ones um often so check in and let us know what you're looking looking for if we don't have it listed uh our platform connects you with highly vetted Freelancers that we have vetted and assessed and ones that match your budget and requirements ensuring that you find the perfect fit for your team they work with you for a set number of hours weekly and you pay a set monthly retainer so it's all taken care of no surprise fees you know what you're going to pay each month and and how much time you get with your freelancer so if you have any questions about quickly hire or how we can help your business please reach out we'd love to help with that um so now back to the agency hour with Lindsay Hy so Lindsay is co-founder of Pathfinder SEO which is a software that gives agencies uh a system to Market and sell and deliver SEO services without feeling overwhelmed she is incredibly knowledgeable and smart and wise about the ways of SEO which seem like magic to a lot of people so we're really lucky to have her here um thank you for joining us today Lindsay and I will turn it over to you thanks so much Emily and thanks everyone for being here I'm really excited to dig into really mastering a skill in SEO sometimes SEO feels to really overwhelming there's so many things you can do um and it's hard to know um how to call yourself an expert in a topic well today you are going to walk away as an expert in all things page titles and meta descriptions um and and this is something that you can apply to your own website if you're a web designer a freelancer you can apply this skill to your clients websites um and it's one of the things in SEO that I consider a quick win or an area where um we take action and then we can actually see result results from that action relatively quickly um so let me start sharing my screen here and um and we'll Dive Right In awesome I think you all can see it I'm keeping an eye on the chat as well so feel free to start asking questions we'll have plenty of time at the end and uh and let's go ahead and dive in here we're GNA keep um the structure of today's conversation really quite simple um I'm going to cover the what why when and the how and obviously we'll spend um the most time here on the how and uh and we'll start with the easy stuff um and make sure we're all up uh to speed on on kind of the basics and that is what are page titles and meta descriptions um they really are short descriptions of a web page that are often utilized in the search engine results page so here's a little um snapshot of a Google search engine results page and the text in blue is uh the big text in blue that is your page title and the um kind of sentence format text in Gray or black below it um two lines that is the meta description and uh we often hear the page title get called a title tag or an SEO title it's different than the title of the page that you're on so it is a different um it's a different title there and the page title also displays um in the browser bar so uh if we go to a web page like so and we look at the page title we can actually see it um up here in the browser bar um up at the top um but otherwise it's not the content on the page here and you can use little spying tools um I like this one by a a Chrome extension called detailed and I'm not sure with streamyard if it's going to show you the extension um exactly but check out um detailed as a way of quickly spying on page titles and meta descriptions without having to actually look at the page code so that's a little bit about um what they are where they live they live in the header HTML um of of every page um and so uh they every CMS has a different place to enter them this is a little screenshot from WordPress um using yoast on on where those live and uh and if we come in here essentially we can uh go and look at the page Source since that's an easier way um to look at it without that Chrome extension and if we look here it's in the header text and if we scroll in and have to kind of zoom in um here is the page title and here is the meta description um for this page so that's a little bit about what they are and kind of where they live on a on a website and a little bit about how you control them in the back end um it's really more interesting to think about why these matter and why we're even talking or mastering this skill in some ways um this is a very old school skill I literally remember remember like 15 years ago starting an SEO I knew almost nothing about the field um I was an account manager and and on day one of my job one of the tasks I was given was to write page titles and metad descriptions for a website um and so you know when I think back to those early days of of building an SEO skill set um 15 years ago page titles and meta descriptions mattered and uh and they still do today and they've evolved but they haven't changed um overwhelmingly so so why do they matter well the first is that the keyword usage provides Google with context and um essentially when you think about context you think about the search engine crawlers coming into a page and crawling the HTML on the page before they ever get to all of the great content you wrote in that great user experience they're in the header here and this is where they get context about what this page is going to be all about um and so these are some of the first like non-programming or noncode lines um that they really get um to understand the context of the page that they're about to crawl in index um so there is some value there in this idea of of giving Google a contextual clue um the second is that they help you win the click and so if you're in a crowded keyword space and you are trying to win the click um things to do in let's try things to do in Breen Ridge and you're trying to win this click um the content content in here is going to really influence um what we choose to click on and clickthrough rates are an important part of SEO we got to win um The Click and as Emily noted the beginning like sometimes you click on a result that's not number one two or three in the search results because you see something super engaging or catchy um in in that um ad text essentially that comes out of the page titles and meta descriptions well it turns out um that we have confirmation now that that some um data got leaked or some API data was leaked from from uh Google that this click data is actually part of Google's broader um systems or algorithms and so Google has a lot of different systems that comprise the the overarching algorithms that calculate who's number one and who's number 100 and seos have long suspected that um click interaction is part of that um is part of those systems we don't know how big of a part of a system um it is but we've long suspected it's part of the system and that's really part of um what we've gotten confirmation out over the last month or two from Google is that um there are systems in place that look for things like let's say lots of people are scrolling down and they're clicking on this result down here that's in the position six or seven result and that this um website is getting somewhat of an outsized uh essentially an outsized result um and so if this is getting an outsized result in clicks or click-through rates that sort of is a vote of endorsement for this page and Google systems kind of look at that type of behavior they look at then if you click over and then do you come back quickly or do you um stay on that site and dwell for a while um to really try to engage and and that is part of the ranking system so there's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy here that if your page titles and metad descriptions are good for your website or your client's websites they're going to help you win the click but that winning that click is actually going to help you win more clicks and sort of crawl up the search engine results page um and that's what I um have sort of noticed intrinsically for clients for so many years and why our agency spends a lot of time doing what is considered sort of old school or or basic SEO of really putting a lot of focus on these page titles and metad descriptions is because we've always seen the residual impact um you know with SEO it's hard to operate in a vacuum but I will say that if I go into a client's website and there and there's only one thing I do and I go in and I kind of overhaul and really improve their page titles and meta descriptions I'll see a lift in their traffic the next month um and and there's this kind of correlation and and expectation that well the the lift was likely the result um of that SEO kind of project that we did for them around this topic um the big thing here is that they impact both users in the search engines they impact your potential visitors um in the search engine results page page they impact um the search engines and the search engine algorithms um and so there's just a lot of reasons why we should care about page titles and metad descriptions and why that I consider this an impactful SEO task um the next thing I want to chat a little bit about is when to focus on them um if you know the what and the why um the next question is sort of uh when when should we dig into these and so um when we think about the when there are kind of four General time periods where I tend to to work on page titles and meta descriptions or really three and then a call to action to to dig into these now um the first is before a new website goes live so if I'm working on a brand new client project um for a website um that's a really good time or if a client's going through a re-platform or a redesign um this is a task that we include in what we call an SEO setup sort of the project that goes alongside with the launch of a new site um to either preserve or enhance their current visibility so that's a core time um to focus on them the second would be as you create new pages and posts so I go to write a new blog posts and a blog post and I'm going to publish it um we finally got around to to launching a Blog on our own agency website and as I publish um a piece of content like this um I'm going to think about the page title In The Meta description and sort of tune these up as I go for new new content the same is true um when I'm working on a client site so if they launch new content um I like to get in and make sure that uh the page title and meta description are are appropriate um and engaging for those the other time that I tend to do this and is what I'm going to call an annual tuneup and so the title of today's talk is the art and the science and we're about to get into that balance of the art and the science um and so it's super exciting and uh when you get into the art and the science sometimes you come back and you Circle back around to what you may have written or maybe your client wrote um a year ago or six months ago and you find There's an opportunity for improvement you're like o actually this isn't as engaging as it could be or you know what I really don't have a good Focus keyword here maybe I didn't even know what the focus keyword should have been and um and so I see room for improvement so um as I I kind of map out if you're offering SEO Services um you know the times that this Pops in is in that setup with that new site going live or doing SEO um kind of a jump start project to get a client's website going um as clients add new content or you add new content and then finally um scheduling time on an annual basis to take a step back look at what you have um in all of your page titles and meta descriptions and try to make some incremental improvements um in in like a tuneup type project um the last time I kind of or the last one as I just said now if this is something that's sort of new to you um or you just feel like you've neglected it then now now is a great time even if you only have an hour um to dig in and uh and to invest in in your page titles and meta descriptions so let's get into the how because this is um really what you came here for is to master the skill set and um like everything we try to follow a process and following a process allows us um to scale and and to make improvements so uh the the first step is really just to gather the necessary resources and really what you'll need is access to the website so if it's WordPress or Shopify or Squarespace ideally you'll have access to the website you're working on you're going to want a spreadsheet or a place to sort of organize your work um so that you can uh work on it and step away and um and really look at the big picture and then you're also going to need some basic keyword awareness we sort of have to know like what we're trying to rank for with a page or with a website um to be able to do a good job with um with this project and so ideally we've already done keyword research and sort of created some keyword strategy or maybe we have a keyword map in place um but sometimes when you're working on this um for a client or just in a quick project um just trying to kind of tune things up um you may not always have like full-blown keyword research um at your fingertips and so one of the kind of shortcuts that I like to do um for that is sometimes use the Google search console so I'll show you a little bit of that how that could be um a supporting resource of what you might need um to to be able to get going as search console access and so I'm going to drop this uh handy link into the task uh uh or into the chat and I think Emily this goes to everyone but maybe double check my my work in streamyard for me um but essentially this is just a really quick and simple um spreadsheet you can get access to it's a um a Google sheet and it'll prompt you to make a copy so that you can work from uh square one and it's uh really quite simple but it basically has six or seven columns we have the URL or the page we're working on the focus keyword like what we're trying to rank for with that page if anything where we're going to write our page title a little formula so that as I write a page title um the uh this updates over here so that I know the character count and then the same for a meta description um Etc so super simple little spreadsheet but it helps me stay organized um and on top of things and uh and now you've got access to it too the next thing I do is I prioritize for impact um and so the role I tend to play here is the SEO account manager so I tend to be passing this task along um to somebody else on my team oftentimes a copywriter and I know the client's site I know the client's budget like how much time and energy we have to invest in this project um to stay on budget and so I need to be really mindful of how do I prioritize my time um for impact because you can imagine that if a site is small let's say five to 10 pages no big deal this project just isn't going to take that long you're going to have 10 rows or so of um of work um in this spreadsheet but what do you do if your client's website or your website has a thousand pages on it or even a hundred um they simply may not have the budget or you may not have the budget on your own site to be able to go in and work on that comprehensively and so I like to time box um this effort and I time box it by looking at this blend of customization versus automation so when I talk about customization I mean defining a page and then sitting down and writing the page title and meta description physically for that page so I am customizing it at a page by Page level um on the other hand a lot of content Management Systems um and and WordPress is my favorite for this allow you to create some automation or to create some patterns where you can get a good page title and meta description for a page based on essentially um based on the content type settings so this is a screenshot here out of yoast where I can say for all my blog posts I want the SEO title to be the title of the page and I want the meta description to be the excerpt for the blog post and so all of a sudden if I have a thousand blog posts on my website I know at a bare minimum um they have unque page titles and meta descriptions and that they fit this sort of General pattern um here and I can imagine going through and let's say I'm working on a site that has a lot of blog posts a lot of products so maybe some e-commerce maybe they have events um things that are usually high volume and frequently updated um these are examples of um content types that I'll often automate um to time box my effort so I'll I'll look at a client's website and I'll say okay what should I automate and what should I customize based on where I'll have the most impact and then also um what kind of my budget is um in in the project I can also break this into pieces so I can customize for the top 20 Pages as part of my SEO setup um and set some baseline automations and then I can come back over time and say customize on top of that automation if that makes sense so I can come back and say okay now I'm going to go this month and I'm going to write custom p P titles and meta descriptions for the top 20 blog posts um that had been relying on this automation but now for the the best of the best I'm going to go in and and customize this work so we can time box our effort and basically make a strategic plan about how to approach the project a great resource for that time boxing is oftentimes your XML sitemap so if I come in here and I look for our XML sitemap um on this website which is a little bigger than our agencies website um it will pull up here and I can see all the different content types and sometimes I'll just open these up for sites that I don't know very well and I'll be like okay how many blog posts or Pages do I have okay there's 45 pages that's a lot and I can kind of look and see like which ones need um you know which ones actually need work um and which ones don't and then in here I'm like webinars okay 31 blog um case studies there's not that many and then I'm like o category Pages not that many how many blog posts Etc so I can get a sense of the size and scale and then here I might be like oh okay I don't have budget to go in and customize the work on each one of these um and sometimes I'll even kind of open some of these up and I'll see well like what what do they have in there today what do they actually have as their page title and meta description settings so that can help you to to time box um time box your effort a bit so we've got the resource is we've got this idea that we're going to kind of determine the depth or um approach we're going to take and um just to kind of reiterate the key Pages for customization are likely your homepage the main navigation Pages already driving organic traffic or content created with an SEO intent and so sometimes I create a blog post and it's not really for SEO it's like sales enablement or I think it'll be really good in social media or email marketing um yes I care about the SEO on that page but it's probably not um super driven towards um getting traffic or getting uh getting uh winning the click other times I create a piece of content it was like came out of seeing the demand or the search volume it's super oriented towards SEO um I put that as a key page for customization and then those content types for automation frequently um created or just large content types um are great ones for that so step three now that I sort of have a big picture is I'm going to list the pages that I want to focus on and I'm going to note their focus keywords and so this is really um relatively simple I go into my spreadsheet and I list my core URLs and then I note those Focus keywords and so um I think this was an example of um something pretty simple like what I might do for my agency website and so for agency website um you know what I'd likely do is do our homepage and then all of our navigation items and if I don't know um you know what a page ranks for or something like that um I might come in and actually um come in and look at this page it's been live for a while so it has some traction I can actually go over into the search console let me see oh unfortunately let me see if I can find a property um or a search console that has this one verified I'm logged into too many Google accounts as always um okay here we go so here's Google search console and I have performance we don't do a lot of marketing on our agency website so if I come in and I view all the traffic we're getting um I can see some some Traction in here some keywords that are are getting some traction so I see SEO for outdoor Brands and outdoor brand um SEO services and I see that over the last three months we've gotten some Traction in here my guess is it's this page that I'm interested in this active lifestyle so I can kind of zoom in I know I'm clicking around a little bit quickly we have done some trainings um in the archives here at quickly hire about search console if you want to master this skill more but here I'm basically honing in on only this page and I'm saying well what are people searching for and how am I ranking and here I'm like okay Impressions SEO for outdoor brands or outdoor Brands SEO Services these are kind of the two core keywords and so if I was making this sheet and I I wanted to add this in I could put um this URL uh in this list here and then I could come in and um it was SEO for outdoor Brands looks like my my core keyword for this page um for our homepage I'm probably going to focus on uh the brand because that's uh you know really a lot of our traffic to our homepage is just the name of our business um and I could go in and I could do this exercise uh for additional um additional page I think I saw in here um some other good queries like Google ads for small businesses were like sort of on the map for it but not getting any traction but I can see we have two pages competing in this space um we have a blog post and we have an actual um URL and so I could go in and um and kind of get a little bit of insight um into that so I go through and I build out essentially like all of the URLs I'm going to customize here and then what I think they're keyword should be here and uh and the main things to think about um when you're doing this um kind of keyword to page mapping is um avoid keyword stuffing so if there's a keyword I want to rank for but I can't find a page for it it's not enough to just like list it next to some random page that doesn't have a keyword and say oh I'm gonna optimize this page around um this Focus keyword in the page title and meta description because I don't have anywhere else to put this like wishlist keyword doesn't work like that you've got to have the page um that Maps nicely to the focus keyword because if I win the click on a keyword like this and they come to this page and they bounce right back to Google Google's going to pick up on that poor user experience and this page will probably rank uh further down the list in the long run so there's really no value in trying to like trick the system it doesn't work so no keyword stuffing um and and kind of mismatches really think about user experience and just use General logic there um the next is this concept that you get to use the Google search console for insights so if you haven't done in-depth keyword research or if you just want to sort of reframe like you're you're thinking about it and you're like okay what was what is the real world's traction look like for a given URL maybe you don't have that Insight yet I can click on something like the about page here and I can come in and see okay it's um it's it's names in the business so we should probably optimize our about page around um around those types of keywords we generally want to avoid duplicates um this sometimes is is challenging um and so when we want to avoid duplicates um you know we essentially um you know want to avoid putting the same Focus keyword on two pages because then Google doesn't totally know what to rank it for so kind of look for ways to get more unique in your P or in your keywords so that you don't have the same keyword in two places and then your homepage is your strongest page so if you're trying to rank for something kind of big or hard um it's oftentimes your homepage that stands the best bet um and and that you might map um those big keywords to your homepage step four is we're going to draft these page titles and meta descriptions and um it's helpful to just kind of know what that looks like it literally just means getting in your spreadsheet and writing these out um but ultimately um I just kind of keep a little checklist of what makes a good page title um the first thing is that it's concise and enticing so um it needs to be relatively short um here it's noted to aim for 30 to 60 characters and it has to be exciting so it does we don't want it to be super boring we want to leverage your brand um we generally leverage a separator like a dash or a pipe and then we want to utilize the focus keyword so if we go over to our spreadsheet here and I was writing a page title for homepage on my homepage I almost always um and I don't use the word always often um with SEO but I almost always start with uh the brand and then do whatever my separator is going to be maybe it's a dash and then I do um a focus keyword here so we're um search engine marketing agency in Aspen Co or something like that so maybe I do something where I put the brand keyword here and then our mother ship keyword something that is the defining thing of our service in this case our service area or Target geography um in uh the page title for this one over here I'm going to go the other direction I'm going to put my focus keyword first and then I almost always add in um the brand so for services pages and stuff like that um that's that tends to be my um my mapping or or matchup um there are exceptions to where I don't get the brand in and that tends to be if the character count is too high so if the character count goes too high because this is too long the the keyword then I may just leave the brand out um because uh and that often happens for blog posts because they're on little lengthier topics they take a little bit um more more space when I'm writing these there's so many things I'm thinking about like keyword usage um trying to to be engaging following just general best practices um I generally capital ize uh I capitalize things we don't capitalize the W in our brand um but I generally capitalize um things like I would in a title and then I oftentimes also search for this on Google to see what the competition looks like because again I'm trying to win the click and so I'm like okay outdoor brand SEO strategies um or tactics that could be a word to get in there um SEO for outdoor industry companies it's not winning SEO tactics for SEO Brands these look more like um page titles for a blog post and a little bit less for a Services page but you can see how some folks um go about it here they did outdoor SEO tips to improve your ranking so they didn't put their brand they did something that they're considering like enticing to win the click um I generally speaking avoid um multiple separators this one has one separator here and then another one here like three parts I really try to limit myself to two parts um and you know your two parts could be the keyword here and then like I said um something enticing and skip the brand um or it can be um something around uh something around the the brand you can see how most people here are skipping the brand um and they're doing a lot around like SEO tips for the outdoor industry um and trying to get in uh into the space that way so these are best practices that's a little bit about what it looks like um and how we kind of bounce around when we think about metad descriptions we go with a sentence format we want to include a call to action there's some studies that show when you have a call to action um in there you are more likely to lead the person to do the thing you want them to do so if it's a Services page on our agency website my call to action might be something like um book a discovery call or something like that uh or um download a white paper or whatever the lead magnet might be I'm going to try to include that in there uh we're aiming for5 to 160 characters or Google will just kind of um cut it off and a lot of times here I'll either use my focus keyword again or some kind of a synonym so um oftentimes we want to rank for more than one keyword with a page and we put like the keyword we want the most um in the page title sometimes in the The Meta description I'm going to go with um I'm going to go with something that's more of a synonym type thing so in here you know I could come over to um the page and uh and try to grab a little bit of content you don't have to reinvent the wheel here um essentially and uh and try to generate something that's going to be um a good meta description and this is where you're head you're probably five steps ahead of me here you might be thinking about leveraging um AI somewhere in this process and there's nothing to stop you from from leveraging AI um while you're drafting page titles and metad descriptions in fact um WordPress SEO plugins like yast now have ai functionality built into them so I can actually just leverage the AI directly in that interface um so that opportunity exists to you or you can go back to something like a chat GPT um and have that um be the tool let's see if I can get in here um be the tool that allows you um to do that so what would that look like maybe I take this content here I go to chat GPT and I say um write five meta descriptions um that focus on outdoor industry or SEO for the outdoor industry I think SEO for the outdoor industry as the keyword um for a page with this copy B engaging concise and stay under 160 characters and so then maybe I'll drop this content in and let's see my prompt isn't amazing but um that was a quick uh prompt where I might be able to give them okay I already wrote this copy um maybe essentially I can come in here and um see if I like some of the content that um chat GPT wrote or I can do this using yast or other um plugins directly in so that I don't have to Mastermind the copywriting of the meta description really depends on like how creative you are um or sometimes um I find like I know I'm an SEO I'm not super creative I just know the keyword I want to rank for and kind of the content I'm working with so a lot of times um AI is a really nice way uh to to jump start things here so these are the best practices um for these areas and once I've gotten these written for like the top 10 or top 20 Pages whatever I'm doing in terms of a customization I move into what I'll call a feedback and edit phase i' like to step away from these for a day and at the very least I'm going to review the spreadsheet I'm going to go in and spell check them I'm going to look at them I'm going to see if I over optimize them like did I put too many keywords in did I stay in Lan Etc I'm going to give them a good review um if you're doing this as a service you have to determine if you're client is going to want a review period on these two in which case um you can send them the spreadsheet but they're probably going to need some context they're not going to be able to just jump in and know what you want them to do with these and so um some kind of like a loom video preface or a written preface or just reviewing it with them on a call is a great way to get client feedback if you have clients that really um are super particular about um about their um page titles and meta descriptions it's about 50 I'd say at our agency 50% of our clients never want to know about this stuff this is why they hire us and 50% want to review it of the 50% that review it most don't provide any feedback they just approve it so to speak um and within uh you know maybe 10% of our clients actually get in there and get really nitty-gritty and try to Wordsmith and change things around um and are a little more particular there so that feedback edit process is really um helpful and if if you're working with a team um this is where a team is awesome so our copywriter will send this back to me and uh and then I'll be the one on feedback and editing if there are a lot of revisions needed I might send it back to her if it's just me sort of adding my um take or my Art and Science kind of combo to it then oftentimes I'll just make the edits um and and be on my way and uh and really ready um to to get these live so here are kind of the things that that we tend to do but the number one is spell check um the only time I get frustrated you know essentially with our team is when these aren't spell checked because what ends up happening is a client catches um a typo in the search engine results page and the typo came from us and so that that can be a concern um and that's just one of those Basics that we want to get right step six is implementing these um on the website so when we Implement these on the website um this is really the easy part it depends on your content management system and if you don't know how to do that you can just Google like the name of your content management system and Page titles or something and you'll get instructions like how to implement these in Shopify or how to do this in WordPress um so it's you know a lot of copying and pasting essentially to get those in there um you could have a developer do it um if you have a developer on your team um it'd be a kind of a uh maybe a bit of a boring task for them but they uh certainly could get this done for you uh as needed and um and then you're kind of in a in a great spot so I want to talk about um taking this to the next level and then we'll open this up um for questions the first thing I want to note is we've been very like Pro on the power of page titles and meta descriptions but you do have to accept that Google does not have to use these it is not ad text like you get with Google ads so when you write this ad text in Google ads it's exactly what Google's going to use when you write a a page title and a meta description Google has the opportunity to use it but sometimes they don't use it so you um you know in those cases where you see Google um redoing something you let's see Refuge point is my example here when this happens um you might decide uh to make some changes to the content and so um I recently had a client um note to us that we used a phrase that they don't like to use anymore um atrisk refugees they were sort of wondering how this came through um in uh in the in the meta description when they've already notified us not to use that and so um we came in and we were like oh no you know we we probably made a mistake here and I went in um and looked at their um at the content on their page and it's kind of let's see um and I looked at it and we actually didn't use this and I'm using the uh Chrome extension that you can't see unfortunately but I double checked and The Meta description never uses that text and so instead what happened was Google is finding this phrase on their own page um and so let's see if they still have it on here so we found the content actually on their page in a key place and so Google's sort of skipping using our um well-written meta description and seems to prefer um this copy on the page so if the client wants that phrase out of the vocabulary then um here to guarantee it more we can't use it in a place like this or we have to be willing to accept that Google May skip over what we wrote and and choose to um and choose to to create their own meta description or their own page title so that's something to just be aware of it doesn't mean there's not value here it just simply means um it just simply means that this is an opportunity to um educate a client if you see something that that isn't quite under your tight control um and Google's doing its own thing the other thing we talked a little bit about is um when you do this as a tuneup so you already have a site going um you may not want to start from square one so if I was doing this for our own Pathfinder website um I wouldn't just start totally at square one because I know we've done some uh not great but or maybe I should say just not consistent we haven't treated our own website like a client project but we have added page titles and metad descriptions as we've gone and so there is um certainly some Traction in here so what would I do if I want um if I want to to kind of review this um I would go to a tool called screaming frog and you can download this um on your uh onto your uh computer it's um a a little software you can get a free version that lets you crawl smaller websites up to kind of medium sites you have to buy a paid version if you want um the full craw but there's a lot of ways to make lists like this it'll actually crawl the whole website and then you can export your current page titles and meta descriptions sort of import them into a spreadsheet like this and then you can work on um revising and improving them without starting from the ground up um so a lot of times if I'm doing this project um for a client with existing traction and some existing SEO work um that's the direction I start is doing that scan um getting my sheet organized so it just is like all of this listed out and then um and then it's pretty easy to to take it from there so um those are a couple little last things I also have my contact information here um Lindsay at Pathfinder SEO um feel free to reach out with questions that may come up um when you get going and uh and otherwise let's open this up to questions and see um how things are going on on your end whether your question is on page titles and meta descriptions or something more General en and SEO I'm more than happy to to dive in thank you so much Lindsay that was really helpful really great actionable presentation I feel like um for folks that are doing this daily our our agency owners out there that are building websites and and dealing with all this page workk and I know Heather um someone who's been watching on YouTube with us was mentioning that you know it's becoming more and more apparent that page title and meta description um are things we need to pay attention to to help with click-through rate for for our clients right exactly it's it's just one of those areas and I'd say if you don't offer any SEO services to your clients and you do one thing for them in this category as you launch a new website just customize the homepage page title and meta description don't leave them with like home-brand or something like that or sometimes we'll see clients get in the index like a blog post this is a generic blog post template whatever like just just tune up like the very simple stuff that you can do in five minutes um and then you can figure out you know how to integrate where how you want to integrate a task like this since it is high value into your offering you don't want to give away this heavy great work for free um but sometimes I'll give away the easy stuff like that homepage page title absolutely I love that tip that's that's really really smart um if folks have questions like Lindsay said you can post them in the comments um and we'll get to them they can be about page page titles meta descriptions or general SEO um SEO questions and I one came to mind and I know we didn't talk about this topic now and we've talked about it in the past but um alt image text and I'm wondering because it came to mind when you mentioned leveraging AI right because that is one of those super tedious tasks because how many images uh illustrations all of that we have on our websites um and we're told over and over again how important alt text is do you have a solution for for that how do you how do you handle that yeah so um this is a really good one and this is like where we do have to just be mindful of budget and like when um a lot of SEO providers get into SEO they you know use a software that like gives them errors and warnings and they chase fixing the errors and warnings and our client like likes to see those numbers go down but like how do you know what's really going to move the needle so if you have a thousand images without alt text um and it's going to go take you 10 hours to go in and customize that is that the best place to work or would you be better off using those 10 hours to write some great blog posts um more often than not when you chase errors and warnings like trying to reduce the number of alt text missing you know stuff and things like that you're doing like SEO maintenance you're not really going to like dramatically move the needle um you're just doing some best practices that I do think are important but not important at the expense of like the Strategic or higher value work um in terms of SEO which would be something like creating new content or a blog post um that being said Altex isn't just important um for SEO Altex is also important for accessibility and so it is an area where um it's not that I'm chasing it down to zero because it's going to dramatically improve the SEO it's also because I want my clients to to perform well within accessibility and I think that matters a lot um and so a lot of times in WordPress um you can do a couple things one you can click through the media library and manually fill in all your alt text and if you have a small website again that's just the easiest solution um to go in and do that um the other thing I tend to do is ask the client if they have like an intern or something especially at the summertime because this is a great project to give to an intern you can train them up in a half hour turn them loose and they can go and Tackle an enormous amount of work um and your client sometimes loves it because you kept their intern busy doing something with value so things are good um if it's going to fall on our agency shoulders and there's a lot um there is uh there have become you know some alt text plugins that leverage Ai and here's one that we've played around with a little bit where we can actually just go in um these are generally paid um Solutions but they'll come in and help you cover wider swaths and use AI to automatically generate the alt text for you if you have a big overhaul type project um so lots of options there um and I do see value in spending time here just not the kind of value where I don't sit down and say okay we did five hours of alt text improvements for our clients or used a plugin like this now let's see what happened in the rankings it's not that direct um whereas the effort with page titles and metad descriptions gets a little closer to like hey I tuned these up um last month am I getting more traction or better rankings this month um so a little bit of a different a different type task yeah absolutely and I love I love that you I I forgot to mention the importance of the accessibility factor of this it's not just SEO it is accessibility um which which is definitely a reason to do it um but yeah like you said it's it's tedious and and if you have an intern virtual assistant someone that can you know tackle tasks and is really good at the the kind of um systematic approach to these sorts of things it's fantastic for that um but it's it is in it is the thing that when you have all of your other SEO ducks in a row that's the top of the report you have 500 images with no alt text right and it's number one action item to to check off the list yeah and there is you know definitely a component of all of this where you have to communicate with your client because um you know we all get like we at our agency and at Pathfinder we get emails from salespeople that don't even look to see that we have SEO services and they're like we provide SEO services and here's this free report and here's what flagged blah blah blah well your clients get those emails too and um they don't know you know what they don't know and so if they're paying you a retainer of $1,000 dollar a month to do SEO and then they get an email like that it's reasonable for them to feel frustrated like why aren't you doing these things isn't this SEO like why why do these errors exist or why are few of my page titles too long and so you do need to bring an SEO or your client on board about your approach to SEO and how you're trying to do like really real world SEO work and that yes you do SEO maintenance and you do c you you know tune these things up and try to to make improvements but bringing all those errors and warnings to zero um isn't going to have the same impact as 10 great new blog posts or um building some new service landing pages or whatever else you might be doing in the real world um that really has sort of um also like cross marketing channel value um that goes beyond SEO so you got to bring your client on board to that concept and strategy otherwise on Blue Moon you may lose a client to one of those sales pitches about chasing um chasing the the stuff that comes out of automated reports yeah absolutely very good advice there um I'm not seeing any questions coming in Heather is mentioning that uh she did a cool thing on chat GPT and I don't think her comment came all the way through but I'm assuming using chat GPT to use uh to get the alt text or page titles and all that there's so many great ways to use that these days and definitely leverage that especially if you're a one person some team or have your resources stretched for sure um absolutely yeah so thank you Lindsay so much for your time we will be back again next month with Lindsay so stay tuned for that U make sure if you're watching on YouTube that you subscribe to our channel so you'll get the updates and you won't miss our future agency hour series uh episodes with Lindsay and other experts for agency owners um and if anyone has any questions if you're watching the recording you can post them in the comments you can reach out to uh myself Emily quickly hire.com or Lindsay Lindsay at Pathfinder seo.com and we will be uh back next month so Lindsay thank you so much and thank you to everyone who joined us live we'll see you all next time thanks Emily bye

Channel: Quickly Hire

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Id: 7W6cftpsLmc

Length: 49min 39sec (2979 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2024