When is it ok to have title longer then 55 characters

[donsilvernail]

I am doing a site audit for a potential new client. The previous web design company used very long titles like this

(Case Management | Client Advocacy | Expert Witness | Legal Support | Medical Consultation | Pennsylvania and Michigan)

117 characters.

This is the title for  a services page. What is best practice here. To me this is key word stuffing but it is relevant to the clients page. Is it alright to grossly overdo the title character limit for the sake of keyword optimization?

I would probably do something more like (Medical consultancy services | company name with location)

What do you all think? Looking for a quick response!!!

[Jubaer96]

First of all, you need to optimize your site for Better User Experience. As you described your title, it's not looking nice.

You better customize it by creating several para and using those keywords in different H2 tags. It'll give you good SEO value as well.

Or if the site owner wants to keep it same, then you can go Google Webmaster >> Structured Data Highlighter then put different title (within 55 ch) for that specific page in search result.

[donsilvernail]

Hi Jubaer,

The site owner did not create the titles. so a change is not an issue. My question lies more in the idea of titles being over the 55-70 character space. Is it ever a good idea? can it ever help to do this?

The services are listed as h2 on the page.

Thanks for your response

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

First, your title is pretty spammy. You don't need all of that. You could easily make a clean and useful title for your users. Remember, make a title that speaks to the content, grabs the user's attention, and can be summed up quickly with the important keywords up front.

When it comes to location, take a look at your local SEO. There are numerous items like Schema, contact information, citiations, and industry listing opportunities that help connect your website to a location and also helps when it comes to rich snippets. Take advantage of Google My Business as well.

While all of these things in your title maaaaay all be relevant to the content, it doesn't tell me anything, therefore, it's not useful to me as a user, which won't be useful to search engines. Remember, optimize for users, not search engines. Here's a great resource.

Keep the MAIN portion of the title relevance to 55-60. Branding can go over, but leave the important information within that frame.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[donsilvernail]

I thought it was spammy too. Please keep in mind this is a potential client. I raise the question because i want to know if it is ever good to go over the title character count. What instance would it be ok?

You really cleared up any questions I may have about the current title thank you.

[Jubaer96]

Nope. It's never good. The reason behinds 55 chr is, google shows 512 px (accurate) which is approximate 55 - upto 60 characters. So if you put longer title, in the result it'll be shown as ...... at last which isn't friendly.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Donald

Glad to hear I helped!

You really shouldn't ever go over the limit. You want your title to give the user the point of the content in a catchy way and be able to brand it as well with your company name.

If you end going over and can't help it, make sure that only the branding potentially gets cut. If the title is good and matches the user's search intent, they'll click, read your fantastic content, and see the brand.

That's really the only instance that titles should go over the limit, but again, I'm not advocating that!

Hope this helps! Good luck!