On-page SEO / meta titles

Most of you are ignoring this and it's the reason why your website isn't ranking on Google or AI Search. I've easily audited hundreds of websites, probably more at this point, and this is one of the most common issues that comes up.

This is the number one thing to optimise on your website before you do anything else. In fact, you don't even have to do anything else.

As long as you do this one thing, you're already gonna be miles ahead of what you were. Don't get me wrong, there are a load of different thing things that you can put into your page content that are gonna help you rank.

But the single most important one is your page's meta title. And a scary amount of you leave this completely blank or they leave the default one that the website platform is set for them.

And this is the biggest ranking signal that you can send search engines so that they know what your page is about. It's the main thing they see about your page before they actually access the content on it...

Most of you are missing this when it comes to your website SEO, and it's one of the most important things to get right. The most important element on your page, your meta title, which is what shows up here in the browser bar, absolutely must be optimised for your target keyword.

Assuming this page is trying to rank for property maintenance services, that's what we should be seeing in the meta title. The priority text on this page should be the fact that it's about property maintenance services, and then the services that are offered within that.

So plumbing, heating, they're not in any of the headings on the page. So when search engines are trying to figure out what your page is about, the first thing they're gonna do is look at the meta title.

Well, this is giving them. Then they'll go and look at the headings to figure out what sections you've got on your page and what it's about.

Again, this is giving nothing. And the worst thing is, this is the homepage.

It's the most priority page on the site...

Your site has got two major issues that you need to address if you want any chance of ranking. First, nobody is searching for NYC portrait and wedding photographer.

They want a portrait photographer or a wedding photographer. You need a page for each of these, but there is no point doing any of that until you fix this issue.

Where is your meta title? I go into this in depth in the SEO Clinic, but when it comes to what you should have on your pages, this is the most important on page SEO ranking factor.

Even if you do nothing else, you've got to add your keywords here.

I mean, like, where is the context here? There's nothing.

Let's have a look at what you're telling. Oh, my goodness.

What is going on here? Right, so this is your meta title.

It's arguably one of the most important on page SEO Elements. The closer your target keywords are to the beginning of it, the we've got four completely random, it seems words before you're giving context.

That you're a tile store. And not even the type of tiles, just apparently the Web's top professional flexible tile store.

Who is searching for any of this? Empty h1s.

I'm not surprised. Your product pages are arguably worse.

Like, what's going on here? For context to tell me what you actually sell?

It's just the product name over and over again, and then some other random stuff. And we finishing it off with a load of AI Slop in the description.

There is no point bothering with SEO if your page is missing even 1 of these things. There are 3 things that your pages need if your site is gonna have any chance of ranking on Google, ChatGPT, or any other search engine.

The first one is an optimised meta title. This is the most important element on your page that search engines use to figure out what your page is about and what they should rank it for.

It's also the first thing that users see about your page in search results. It's gonna make them decide whether or not they're gonna click.

If you go into your page's Rank Math settings, they'll tell you what more you can do to further optimise it. If your site has already got optimised page names, there is another option that lets you automate it in Rank Math SEO.

Drop that page name into the template and then add some other things to improve the click through rate. If you've used AI to write your content, you need to make sure that you're not just lifting quotes out of AI that have actually come from another website...