🔎 Does a longer title tag hurt SEO? Short answer NO!
4 quick SEO wins: Title tag experiment, 🎯 high-converting CTAs, local SEO hacks & a free content marketing tool
1. Does a longer title tag hurt your SEO performance? — Our experiment says ‘NO’
What happens if we add a longer page title and H1 on our page? —Will this improve the ranking or have a negative impact?
To find this answer, I did a small-scale SEO experiment by adding a 267-character length of page title. Here’s the page URL: https://10pie.com/cyber-security-roadmap/
Here are the changes I made:
Page title length increased from 53 characters to 267 characters
Updated the same page title as the H1 tag of the page
Also, modified the publishing date to 9 Feb and submitted the article to GSC for re-indexing.
Date of experiment: 9 Feb 2025
SEO metrics checked before making the title and H1 changes:
Total organic keywords ranking in India = 22 (a/c to Ahrefs)
After almost 2 weeks, here’s what I noticed (based on the last 2 weeks vs the previous 2 weeks):
No significant change positively or negatively in terms of organic clicks
The average ranking position has increased from 39.3 to 41.5 (also a slight decrease in organic CTR— for obvious reasons)
Impressions have gone up from 1.94k to 2.27k
Also, noticed that Google hasn’t rewritten the page title yet (which impacted CTR):
The number of organic keywords has gone up from 22 to 23 (no negative changes), as per Ahref’s data.
Summary of the SEO experiment:
I already had a hypothesis that keeping your title and meta description within the limits of 60 characters and 160 characters respectively— it turned out to be true.
There is no significant negative impact I noticed even after 2 weeks.
My understanding and experience say that you shouldn’t be too obsessed with matching the limit of what Rankmath or Yoast plugin suggests.
SUGGESTION:
You don’t need to make your title this long (267-character) just to add target keywords
Try experimenting in small batches before updating the title of all pages— this ensures you don’t take too much risk at a time.
2. STOP using the same generic CTA on all articles 🙏
If you want to increase blog conversion then stop being lazy in using the same generic CTAs.
Here’s an example:
Why it matters:
A generic CTA reduces your chances of converting readers into potential leads, as many users will land on your website for the first time through an article.
Better solution?
Use personalized CTA aligned with your blog topic.
I recently found a website that nails this strategy in their blog articles.
Let’s have a look at their blog page:
Notice the blog topic and sidebar CTA— highly related and personalized CTA
Here’s another example from a different blog article:
Again, the sidebar CTA changes with the blog title— making it related and personalized for the users.
Action items:
Revisit your blog design layout and think of what CTAs or messaging can be personalized and tailored to the page title
If there are hundreds of blog articles published on your site, start with the BoFu topics— these are the pages with high lead generation intent.
3. Local SEO citation strategy for businesses with multiple locations
Here’s the question I asked in our private SEO community:
“Suppose I have a local business providing service X in locations Y and Z. Now while creating citations, many directories or sites only allow to add one business address.
What should be the ideal case here to build local citations?
Should we create 2 separate citations on a directory with 2 different location addresses?”
Here’s a solid advice by 👏 Durbar Ghosh:
If you want to rank in other locations, you will need citations for each one. While it’s not ideal, if necessary, you can create separate accounts—that’s how I do it.
If your email is emailid@gmail.com, you can use variations like emailid+location1@gmail.com to create multiple citations for different locations on the same directory.
An example:
Let’s say you own a plumbing business called "FastFix Plumbing" and serve multiple locations—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
To improve your local SEO, you need citations for each city on directory sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and BBB. Since some directories require unique emails per listing, you can modify your email like this:
📍 New York: fastfixplumbing+NY@gmail.com
📍 Los Angeles: fastfixplumbing+LA@gmail.com
📍 Chicago: fastfixplumbing+CHI@gmail.com
Action items:
List your business separately for each location on key directories.
Use modified emails to manage multiple listings efficiently.
Ensure NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency across all citations.
4. Your statistic page won’t get backlinks if you don’t follow this
A statistics page is a webpage that compiles key data, facts, and figures on a topic.
It’s valuable for SEO as a linkable asset, acquiring organic backlinks from journalists, bloggers, and researchers.
Take this example article on Tiktok statistics filled with a lot of custom graphs and charts:
These types of statistic pages earn organic backlinks over time as journalists and bloggers source data and custom charts from these sources.
These types of statistics pages earn organic backlinks over time as journalists and bloggers source data and visuals from them.
However, you may not achieve the same results for two reasons:
A lack of distribution or traffic to these pages
A boring design with no custom visuals
To attract people to link to your statistics page, you need to invest heavily in design and visuals.
The best part?
You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create beautiful (even interactive) charts and graphs.
Use Datawrapper—it’s completely free.
Here’s an example of a chart I created within minutes just by adding datasets:
Imagine replacing all your data-driven pages with custom interactive charts—it will significantly increase your chances of getting backlinks.
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