Google Update and What That Means for Your Website

Today I’m talking about Google’s recent changes to title tags and what it means for your website.

According to a few SEO professionals, late last week, people started noticing that Google was re-writing title tags (or page titles). Here’s the Search Engine Journal article. For those that don’t know, those are the blue links you see when you Google search something.

This is big news.

Google has never done this before. Page titles were something you could control in the SERPs (search engine results pages) within your code or content management system.

Google has traditionally only opted to rewrite meta descriptions when they felt it was helpful. In fact, they alter meta descriptions almost 70% of the time.

At the time of writing this, Google hasn’t made an announcement about it. But, I think there is a lot we can learn from this change:

1. Relevancy – a change in a title only makes sense to communicate to the searcher that a page is possibly relevant to their query, even if the default title might not suggest it.
2. Readability – A lot of people mismanage or don’t manage their title tags well at all. By controlling these in the SERPs, Google can increase readability and experience for search engine users.
3. Click-through rate – If this becomes a part of an algorithm update and is not just a little testing by Google, then click-through rates are bound to be volatile. The best way to combat that and even capitalize on it? Have a great page with a great heading structure and truly amazing content.

Want some amazing content ideas?

Turn a single question you get at the point of sale into a long-form, deep-dive blog post.