Did you know that the single most important part of your German automotive repair website, other than your content, are your Title Tags?
What are Title Tags?
They are part of the html code in your site that show up as the heading or title of your listing when someone does a Google search for your service.
These tags are the first thing that Google or any search engine sees when it goes to index your website so you want to have your best keywords for each page, as well as any city that you service or are targeting, in the title tags.
What’s a good Title Tag example?
So a good title tag for say a BMW repair page for a shop in Brooklyn, NY would be: BMW Repair: New York, Manhattan, Brooklyn, NY. This helps the search engines to understand what the page is about so your keywords need to be relevant to your content as well. Think of them almost as parts of a table of contents in a book it tells you what page to go to and what each chapter is about.
I often see websites with just the keywords, no city names in the title tags, which is great if you are marketing a product or service on a nationwide level but not for a local repair shop that should be targeting people within a 10 mile radius. You will not show up in a local search most of the time without putting a city name with your keywords in your title tags.
Something else that I see a lot in title tags are people leaving out the brands of cars that they service they will put auto repair Los Angeles as their title tags so again great if you are a generic auto repair shop that works on domestic cars in Los Angeles. You have to combine the car brand, your main keyword like REPAIR or SERVICE and the city or cities you are targeting if you want to show up for a relevant search.
Sometimes just having the right title tags can get you to the first or 2nd page of Google depending on how competitive your market is. Without the correct title tags Google will not know to show your site to the people that are searching for what you do.
Title tags should normally be less than 70 characters long so that the entire tag fits on to the results page when shown on a Google search. If your title tags have a keyword in them that matches what someone is searching for then Google will make the keyword bold and highlight the search term which makes it even more enticing for someone to click on.
Make sure that each page’s title tags are unique and match your content you do not want to have multiple pages of the same website with the same title tags this can often times confuse Google of which is the most pertinent page to show in the search results.
What’s a Meta Description?
A meta description goes hand in hand with title tags and is usually found in your websites code right below your title tags. It is basically a short summary of what is to come on your website page and shows up on a search term listing right below your title tags.
This is another opportunity for you to sell people on why they should click on your listing and not the other 9 on the page. The description should include your keywords and cities and briefly explain what they will find if they click on the link and go to your web page.
Meta descriptions should be 160 characters or less so that your entire description will show on a Google search page studies have shown that good title tags and matching meta descriptions can significantly help your click through rate.
These two items are key features that are so important to your on site search engine optimization and really should be the first place that you start. Do your keyword research and make sure you choose the best keywords and cities for each page of your website this will pay huge dividends in the near future. There are obviously many more factors that go into SEO and to getting your website to rank at the top of page one for a Google search but this is a great starting point.
