Is putting an email address in the page title a good idea?

[Zippy-Bungle]

As our Contact Us page title was a little short I added in sales@example.com

So "Contact us : Sales@example.com"

We don't get a lot of spam and it hasn't noticeable increased since we did this. Tynt suggests that a reasonable number of people have copied and pasted the email - presumably to contact us

Is it worth experimenting with further or a waste of time?

[EGOL]

I think that this is a good idea.

If you want people to contact you by email then the title is a great place to shout that.

If you prefer email over phone then it is even better to put the email address in such an obvious place.

I do not see any SEO reason against it.

[KevinBudzynski]

Never heard of doing this. The title/meta description is ideally written to match searcher's intent. However, if the searcher's intent is to contact you, this answers that intent quickly (always nice). Also, since the user's intent isn't searching for blue widgets (where blue widget's should be in the title), no seo harm that I could see (may reduce click-through's though--doesn't matter much in this case).

[CleverPhD]

Makes sense to me as well.  Just to be Dr. Obvious, you need to make sure that your email (and phone) are also clearly shown on the page itself.  It drives me crazy when I cannot find contact information easily on a sales page and that is what is preventing me from getting my question asked so that I can purchase.  If you wanted to get some more responses, try an online chat function.   You might be surprised how many people use this to contact you.

Cheers!

[Lumina]

Zippy,

Something that no one else has mentioned is that whether or not this is a good idea depends very much on 2 things:

1. Is Sales@example.com the only means by which a customer would normally contact you?
2. Does your business have a quick sales funnel? (Put another way, is the process between leads and conversions fast in comparison to the average in your industry/region?)

If the answer to either of these is "No", then I would suggest you not add an email in your page title. Typically, you only want to put strong attention on a specific method of contact if that's either your only method, or if that method leads to a significant amount of quick-funnel conversion. Otherwise, you may end up doing more harm than good.

I hope that's been helpful - cheers!

[EGOL]

This is a good thought.

I really don't want customers contacting me.  I want them to read the website.  My biz model is self-service and I have LOTS of content on the website to answer customer questions.   Most of the people who contact me are not going to be customers.  They just purchased used and got a lemon and want to know how to fix it.

But... if you WANT customer content using the title is fantastic.

[benjaminmarcinc]

I do this on my about or contact page, i put my phone, email and even president name so when someone searches for a company it pops up in the SERPs

[Zippy-Bungle]

I really like that point about the quick sales funnel.

We we tried using the idea of leads  but for us they didn't work as we sell industrial goods. Sales cycle is normally 2 weeks for $100k purchases With multiple repeat purchases over the year - but it's fiercely competing with a low win rate. So making it very quick and easy for someone to send us an enquiry on impulse is important.

Forms, ecommerce and telephone don't usefully work - enquiries are usually too difficult and too complex.

Interestingly it's made me consider what the point of our website is.  The SEO part is targeted at the unknown unknowns. Companies who would make good customers if I knew that they existed. but that is actually a pretty short tail because we should know 70-80% of potential buyers. But the rest is really about credibility and improving offline conversion rates.

Which brings me back to the email - am I making it easier for someone, taking out the friction? I think so....

[Zippy-Bungle]

Online chat was a total fail.  We had user voice on the site for a year and no one used it!  Ever.