Different Title Tag and Page Headline

[essdee]

My editorial team won't budge with their headlines which are excruciatingly vague ... But I have managed to convince them to let me optimize the title tags and the URLs.

Is this sub-optimal or are there some benefits to having a title tag that varies from the page headline or what our dev team calls the "reader friendly" title?

For example...

Their headline: Increase Your Retirement by 20% with This Safe, Simple Strategy

My title tag: Compound Returns: How to Increase Your Retirement 20%

Thanks for the help,

E

[danatanseo]

I think there could potentially be great advantages to having a different title tag from the page headline. The title tag gives you the opportunity to boil that headline down to its most important parts.

The title tag should avoid stop words. Think about the title tag as if you were a librarian. I don't know how old you are, but remember in the old days when you had to ue a card catalog to search for things? You never used words like "for, and, the, at, with"  etc.  Those took up space on the cards and made things harder to find.

Here's a hypothetical example. The "reader friendly" title of the first Harry Potter Book was:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Do you know how most people search for that book? (Library or Online, doesn't matter) - right, they search "Harry Potter - Book 1"

Okay, so the best title for the page would be "Harry Potter Book 1"

You did a good job at eliminating stop words from your title. However, also be cognizant of the character limitations in Google for displaying titles. You are good with 53 characters. I'd say 59-65 absolute max. Otherwise, you risk being truncated in ways you don't want/

A word of caution. That "%" sign at the end of your title could pose a problem for some engines. It might be better to spell out "percent."

I really hope this is helpful!

[Debdulal]

_Great effort. Just make sure that the Page header and Title tag are not conveying different meaning. Title tag should be using main keywords and this tag is predominantly used for search engines, whereas page headers should be used for general visitors. So, there is no harm of going a bit creative with this page header. _

[essdee]

Great tips, thanks. And the percentage sign... never thought about that.

[essdee]

Thanks for the reply. Both answers show that there is no harm here and potentially a lot of benefits.