The title tag is the line of text Google shows in its search results, in the browser tab, and in any link preview anywhere on the internet. It is, without exaggeration, the single most-read sentence on your shop. More people will read your title tag this month than will ever read your About page in its entire existence.
And yet. The title tag is, on most shops I audit, an afterthought. It is generated automatically from a template the platform shipped with. It is full of dashes and pipes and the shop’s name, repeated, as if Google might forget. It is, in a word, squandered.
The lie of the dash-pipe-dash convention.
Open a fresh Shopify install. The default title tag template is something like: {{ product.title }} – {{ shop.name }}. Sometimes with a pipe instead of a dash. Sometimes with a tagline tacked on the end, also with a pipe.
This is fine in the most basic sense — it does the minimum job — but it is no more thoughtful than the way a hotel concierge greets every guest with the same scripted welcome. It tells Google nothing about the category, the material, the place of origin, the style, the occasion, or any of the other things a customer might actually search for. It tells Google your product’s name. Which Google already knew, because it read the URL.
What the title tag should actually do.
Three jobs, in this order:
- Name the thing in language a stranger would use. (“Solid walnut three-shelf bookcase” — not “The Edition.”)
- Place the thing within a category Google understands. (“leather notebook,” “beeswax candle,” “sourdough starter.”)
- Earn the click by including one detail that distinguishes you from the four other shops on the same results page. (Place of origin, material, an unusual size, a hand-made claim, a price hint.)
The shop name comes last, if at all. The customer is searching for a thing, not for you. They will discover you after the click, and the click is the conversion that matters at this stage.
A small worked example.
Take a candle shop. The shop is called Bevelled. It sells beeswax candles, hand-poured, in Sussex. One of its products is a tall pillar candle, scented with lavender, that burns for forty hours.
Default title tag: Pillar Candle – Bevelled. Twenty-six characters. Nothing useful.
Better title tag: Lavender beeswax pillar candle, 40-hour burn — Bevelled, Sussex. Fifty-seven characters, well within Google’s sixty-character display limit, and now containing five things a customer might actually search for: lavender, beeswax, pillar candle, burn time, Sussex.
The Goblin would, if pressed, prefer the version with the shop name removed entirely — but Bevelled is a memorable enough name that earning a little recognition every time the title is rendered is, on balance, worth the four characters it costs.
The mistake to avoid.
Keyword-stuffing. The temptation, once you understand what the title tag is for, is to cram in every possible search term. Lavender beeswax pillar candle natural eco hand-poured 40-hour Sussex artisan. This reads as a list, not as a description, and Google has been wise to this trick since approximately 2009. The title should still scan as a sentence a human wrote.
The Goblin’s rule of thumb: read your title aloud. If you would not say it to a friend who asked what the product was, it is too long.
The title tag is the cheapest improvement on most shops. It takes ten minutes per product. It compounds with every page view, every search, every share. And almost no one does it properly, which means the small amount of effort buys you a disproportionate amount of advantage.
The Goblin will not, in this article, fix yours for you. He will, however, in an audit, and he will do it twice — once for the listing he found you on, and once for the one he secretly thinks should rank instead.
— The Goblin, in defence of an underused field.