Title Tag Change - Drop in Organic Placement?

[leslieevarts]

I've been working on increasing CTR my changing the title tag & meta descriptions. Has anyone ever noticed a drop in organic SERPS from doing so? Even if CTR goes up?

It seems to me that if the CTR goes up and user experience in that way is improved these changes should yield an increase in the average position. Would you agree?

Thank you!!

[leslieevarts]

Wow, thank you all for your insights. I really appreciate the feedback.

I have not been removing the primary key phrase the page is optimized for. However I have removed the business name which also is a key phrase. For years my title tag formula was “key phrase | business name”

ie. Las Vegas Wedding Chapels | Vegas Weddings.

Using this example what I’ve done is kept Las Vegas wedding chapels dropped the post ( | ) and Vegas Weddings (business name) to utilize those extra character spaces for a more enticing title tag to increase click through rate. In some cases I may have dropped the Las in Las Vegas to also create more space.

Questions:

1. Any additional feedback with this new information?

2. What do you think about the potential for google seeing the initial formula as keyword stuffing even though it is the business name? Vegas Weddings happens to be one of the most searched keyphrases.

I am not certain that the average positions actually dropped as a result of these changes. It may have been related to a big misfortune we had with google my business listings earlier this year.  I will look even deeper into this to see if i can make more precise conclusions from the statistics. Either way all this information is highly valued.

While Im on that topic, does anyone actually know if the search console/google analytics average position stat does or does not factor in the organic placement within google my business?

Thank you all so so much!

[pilesofpillows]

Leslie, while in theory you are right, Google is still using an algorithm that is very much keyword-driven, and while changing the Meta Description should not affect rankings, changing the Meta Title can and often will have an impact.

I may be old school but I believe the Meta Title should be target keywords focused first, and CTR second, while the Meta Description should be CTR focused first and target keywords second.

If you changed Meta Titles that removed or partially removed the target keywords for those specific pages, I would recommend you add them back. Your Meta Descriptions with the new CTR focus should be ok to stay what they are.

[EGOL]

It is always possible that a title tag change with decrease the relevance and optimization of a page for some keywords.  Changing the title tag can also change the click-through rate.

A few years ago, we were doing some aggressive title tag experiments.  We were changing title tags every few weeks on about 80 pages.  On about the fifth iteration, all of those pages dropped out of the top ten and stayed out of the top ten for a few months.   Fortunately they recovered, we waited a while, changed to our best test results, and the pages have been ranking great for years.

[paints-n-design]

I never saw a drop in Rankings when I was changing the Description. Couldn't be, it's not a (direct) ranking factor. But of course, changing titles should be done carefully.

What seems to be better for CTR sometimes is worse for SEO. The title is one of the most important on-page-factors, so yes - could be the reason.

Maybe you should change one title page with clear losts results and organic traffic back, send to google and check later again.  Then you will see, if changing was the reason, I think it was.