Title Tag Change - Drop in Organic Placement?
-
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!!
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Commas in title tags
Hello Guys, Thanks in advance for all who can help me with this I am helping a dinnerware company with their SEO. I told them to change their ambiguous title tags for more specific ones. However, they opted to create some title tags with 2 or three keywords separated by commas. I have attached an excel image illustrating their new title tags.. My question is, will this format be a problem with Google--penalties? The questionable title tags are highlighted in light orange. Thanks! lHH92
On-Page Optimization | | HectorCortes0 -
Showing more Duplicate Title Tags Than WMT
This is yet another question between moz vs google WebMaster Tools. In WMT it only shows 5 pages with a total of 18 duplicate titles. But moz is showing 298. It appears the duplicates are canonical links for the most part. What is the discrepancy?
On-Page Optimization | | jamavan0 -
Title tag terminology on website
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ
I own a website (www.maleribasen.dk), which i'm currently making SEO on. The site actually ranks pretty good, top 1-2 on important searches. The title tag on the frontpage (and lots of other pages too) are "Maleribasen.dk - Buy and sell paintings" (translatated from danish - Maleri means painting). I'm thinking of changing the titles to "Buy and sell paintings | Maleribasen.dk" And then try to use the convention "| Maleribasen.dk" on every other title page. Sometimes use "Buy and sell paintings | Maleribasen.dk" as convention when title is too small. Like the overview of articles would be something like "Articles - Buy and sell paintings | Maleribasen.dk" A specific article would be "How to paint using oil painting | Maleribasen.dk" What do you guys think?0 -
Which Meta Tags would you recommend having on the pages?
Hello, There are so many different meta tags which you can implement to the header of your website and I'm wanting to get people's opinions on which you feel are worth putting in and which are completely pointless? For example: Author Copyright Language Content-Type Content-Language Distribution Abstract Keywords Description Classification Canonical Expires Revisit-after Rating I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions. Kind Regards, Shaun Swales Twitter: Https://www.twitter.com/CryptCommerce
On-Page Optimization | | ShaunSwales0 -
Finding unique title tags for each media coverage page
We have multiple pages for our media coverage, and each page has the same title tag. I know it's important to have unique title tags, but if each page is just a listing of your media coverage (page 1 of 9, page 2 of 9, etc) then how do you create unique title tags for each media coverage page?
On-Page Optimization | | msakakibara0 -
Meta Description Tags and Rankings
Hi there, I have a lot of pages set up on my site but most have no content. If I add the correct meta description tags to those pages, will that help rank for the root domain? I am slowly getting the content added for each page but wanted to see if I could boost rankings in the meantime. http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Example: most of pages under "Services" are blank. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | PMC-3120870 -
Nofollow tags
So on the homepage, should all the links like privacy, contact us, etc...be rel="nofollow" ? I want to get a better handle on passing as much link juice on homepage to important internal pages as I can, and want to get it right. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy1 -
AB Testing - Organic Rank
Hello, Currently We are running an A/B test on a few pages, the footer and the header on our site. I was wondering what is the proper way to do an a/b test so that our google rankings won’t fall and that Google will only index one version at this time? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Tonyd230