That sounds like a dilemma.

The general opinion among SEOs is that shorter titles work better.

Still, most sites include their brand and other text in the title tags such as category, product category, author tag and tag lines. This is known as boilerplate material.

And, according to Cyrus Shepard’s experience coming from millions of title tags, there are four factors that influence whether or not you should include these boilerplate features in your title.

Let’s dive into them.

• Brand strength: Popular companies’ names in the title always perform better than unknown brands, even though people aren’t always searching for that business.
• Relevancy: Make sure that your boilerplate is relevant for the searcher. If it makes sense to put it in your title tag, do it!
• Length: Usually, longer boilerplate and brand words can do more harm than short boilerplate, because they dilute the title tag relevancy.
• Clickability: Words like “Sale”, “Solved”, “Free”, “2020”, and “New” can make your title more clickable, leading to higher CTRs.

These four points should help you answer that question.

If you really must know, though? Test some changes on your site!

But maybe, before testing, you want to evaluate your brand strength and relevancy of your boilerplate.

How to determine your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

“For each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.”

Cyrus shows how to do it in the Search Console:

+ Enter the brand boilerplate as a query filter and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

So, if for instance, your brand receives many queries, it means that you have a strong presence. And so you should include your business name in the title tags. Do this for categories, product categories, or other keywords and the results will tell the relevance of these ones.

But I always suggest, let data talk. In other words, test, test, test!