I normally recommend adding your brand name at the end of the title tag throughout the site (especially if the brand name is short, catchy and unique).
The main reason for that is that it helps for branding (people consistently see the name pop up in SERPs). If the brand name contains a keyword, the tactic also results in some unexpected long tail.
I really saw no downside: in the worst case the name is just cut off in SERPs (if the title turns out to be too long). Keeping the name closer to the end made sure all title tags were unique.
However last week I came across this interview with Neil Patel talking about how he managed to boost rankings of TechCrunch.
One of the first things he did was to remove the word ‘TechCrunch’ from the page title template, so that instead of “Post title – TechCrunch”, it became just “Post title”.
Neil’s explanation that it made all pages unique, besides:
They already ranked high for the word “TechCrunch”. Why would you need to use this word throughout the whole site? [refer to the full interview for this part]
This encouraged me to bring it to discussion here.
And please share your opinion in the comments!
