Help with title for SEO purposes

Marketing
1

Hello!

I run a website that hosts a directory of music teachers. We did not have a strategic plan for SEO at the outset, and realize that the site is not optimized properly. That being said, our site has been ranking well for some keywords. I need to make a change in our page titles and wanted to get some advice on what to do to maintain the rankings we already have and boost others.

Each teacher is given their own profile page where they can list as many instruments as they like. The title tag grabs the first two instruments and creates a title that reads this way:

Instructor Name, instrument 1, instrument 2 lessons in city
Example: Scott Moore, piano, organ lessons in Greensboro, NC (this is from a former teacher…no longer on the site)

I’m targeting “instrument lessons in city state”. When I searched for “piano lessons in Greensboro NC”, he shows up on the 2nd page of Google. When I search for “organ lessons in Greensboro, NC”, he shows up high on the first page of Google. I recently changed the order of his instruments and notice that organ results are moving lower and piano results are moving higher.

I assume that is because “organ lessons in Greensboro NC” shows up as one combined keyword, whereas piano is separated by another word in our title. The problem is that most people put their primary instrument first in the list. If they enter other instruments, their SEO for the primary instrument is reduced.

Which of these three options would be best for SEO (at least short-term)?

  1. In title tag list only one instrument: “Scott Moore: piano lessons in Greensboro, NC”
  2. In title tag list backwards using current format: “Scott Moore: organ, piano lessons in Greensboro, NC”
  3. List two instruments with full description: “Scott Moore: piano lessons in Greensboro, NC | organ lessons in Greensboro, NC”

I want the option that is going to hurt us the least and help us to at least promote the teacher’s main instrument. I would like to avoid removing the secondary instrument if at all possible as we’ll show up less often in Google. I’m open to your thoughts and suggestions other than what I listed above. Thanks in advance for your help!

2

I believe that from an SEO perspective, the last option would be the best. Exact match with the query is essential.
But you could also make individual pages for each instrument, if you also have unique content for it.

3

Thank you for the feedback! That’s what I was leaning towards.

4

I am also agree with nekyian and suggest 3 option but if its not work and as you say you have to at least teachers’s main instruments than go for 1 option.

5

According to me option 3 is best because of two reason. first it’s the exact match of query and other is it’s targeting more than 1 query in search result. I mean to say as we know Google uses like query so if its the kw of 3 phrases Google will consider the page for all combinations of 2 phrase search query too

6

Thanks…I will definitely give it a try!

7

None of the above. First of all: drop your name. Unless the name in itself has brand recognition, it will only drive you down on serps.
Site url would be music-lessons-Greensboro.whatever and each teacher would have next level /piano-lesson-jameston or /organ-lessons-summerfield

8

Title shouldn’t be longer then 35 characters long. The more keywords you put in title, the better, and try to put them in the beginning of the title. The closer keywords to the beginning of the title, then more searchable it is for search engines.

9

Do you have any sources that are qualified to underbuild this?

10

There are many sources - wonderful Seomoz website and their free beginners guide, web marketing for dummies, SEO for dummies etc.

11

I usually get my information from sites like SEOmoz.org, but my main source is my personal experience. SEO is more of an art then a rule follow, so you need to try ot everything to figure what works for you.