Written by: Matthew L
May 1 2014
The title tag of your page is meant to describe the topic of that page in a nutshell, now in 55 characters or less according how much space Google allows to display your title in its search results. It was longer at a suggested 70 character or less title up until around Feb 2014 (Title length moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag).
The title tag of the home page has the even harder task of summing up your entire site.
Title tags of the major Online Travel Agents (I’m including Meta Search in my OTA definition here) operating in the Australian market are shown below.
You could compare the title tags of the home pages of the major players in any market to arrive at that markets key offerings to its customers.
I did this to help try and work out what the title tags for the Hotel.com.au and Getaroom.com.au sites should be and why we stand out from competition or how we can differentiate from the competition. Sometimes the differences are hard to communicate, possibly because they are hard to find! Possibly because they are the ‘intangibles’ which are harder to describe.
Unfortunately most of the top OTAs still have a meaningless string of keywords stuffed into their titles eg Hotels.com ‘…Cheap Hotels Discount’. Wotif.com has the ‘instant confirmation’ line – which is so 2010.
Interestingly the most well written titles are probably from the two best performing (in terms of growth) OTA’s at the moment Trivago and Booking.com.
Wotif.com: hotels, accommodation, motels, serviced apartments, B&B – Online hotel bookings with instant confirmation
Travel: Cheap Flights, Hotels, Packages & Car Hire | Expedia.com.au (67 characters)
Hotels.com Australia – Hotels, Accommodation, Cheap Hotels Discount (67 chracters)
Booking.com: 454,198 hotels worldwide. 28+ million hotel reviews.
trivago.com.au – The world’s top hotel price comparison site with over 700,000 hotels
Compare Hotels – Best Hotel Deals Guaranteed | HotelsCombined
I still think the core benefit or the reason for the existence of OTAs is comparison, comparison of features, comparison of location and comparison of price. If you know you want to stay the Hilton in Sydney why would you bother with an OTA? Possibly to check the price, or check the price of the Swissotel on the next block? If the OTA collects the money from the customers credit card I suppose they are taking some payment risk away from the hotel which does have its benefits. I’m getting into a whole different topic here.
Version 1 – Hotel.com.au one site to compare and book the best hotel and accommodation deals guaranteed. The Search is Over!
Version 2 – One site to compare and book the best hotel deals guaranteed. The Search is Over – Hotel.com.au
Version 2 is definitely punchier but I had to take out the ‘accommodation’ keyword. Version 2 still comes in at 95 characters or 65 if ‘The Search is Over – Hotel.com.au’ is truncated – 15 characters above Googles new title tag suggested limit.
Ok version 3 – Compare and book the best hotel deals guaranteed. The Search is Over – Hotel.com.au