Google's Title Tag Recommendations

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Well, hey Devin, nice to see you this morning. I think—

Hey there, Hans.

Nice to see your wife dressed you as mine did me this morning. It turns out we're like the Bobbsey Twins here.

Yeah, yeah, they must have called each other and made sure we were wearing the same thing today. So that's pretty funny.

Yeah. So our topic this morning is about title tags and there's some news from Google that I want to mention. But first, a quick review here. I'm, as the older guy here, I'm the historian of the company to some degree. I was doing SEO before it was even called SEO. We were just worried about showing up on Yahoo because Google didn't exist yet.

What's Yahoo? Yahoo.

Yeah. That's how old I am. But title tags have always been a very, very important topic for doing SEO. To me, it's sort of like a primary, it's like the first place you look. And that's for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, the thinking has always been that as ranking signals go, putting a keyword in your title tag or two keywords, that's like the best place to put it because it tells Google— it's sort of telling Google what your website is about. So if you want to rank for that keyword, the best place to put it is right in your, in your homepage title tag. Secondly, Google has traditionally, you know, if you look at the search results, you want click-through rates. It's like writing an ad, right? So you want your search result listing, your organic listing, to be attractive to people so they will click on it. And so the nice thing has been that you could write a title tag and Google was almost 100% of the time would take that title tag verbatim and use it as the headline on your organic listing for when your page did show up on the organic listings. And then of course the meta description tag was used to write the copy, the body copy that goes below the headline. And so therefore you'd be kind of like the same as writing a Google ad. And you'd have the liberty to kind of craft it the way you want it. Now, Google was less, I guess, reliable about utilizing the description tag verbatim, but the head— but that for the headline, they almost always use the title tag. And now we hear news that Google's going to change all of this. So that's what we're going to talk about today. What is coming and what does it mean to people who care about, you know, what kind of keywords they rank for and wanting their their organic listings to look clickable to people and draw a high click-through rate. So what's the upshot of this? Can you tell us?

Yeah, and actually this is something Google has already been experimenting now at the time of this recording, have been experimenting with for a couple months at least. But what's happening is that Google in their infinite AI wisdom is assuming whatever the page content is and then rewriting title tags accordingly. You know, there's a lot of SEOs that bow at the altar of John Mueller, who's, you know, Google's King Pumbaa of all things search, right? So I think a lot of people look to what he says, and recently it was brought up or discussed with a little bit more detail from John Mueller about just the title tag rewriting, what the thought process was behind it, what and, and what SEO should be focused on. And I think historically SEOs have really been, all right, you pick your primary keyword, maybe you have a secondary keyword on a page, you write the page title in such a way to make sure both, both of those keywords are included, and then a pipe, and then, or a separator of some type, and then the brand name. And that's, that's historically how you kind of optimize pages.

Yep.

What John Mueller recently was talking about is that Google Based on their algorithm and the information of, uh, in the Google search, one of the options that you have is People Also Ask, right? And then it has questions that are relevant or seemingly related. Google and their algorithm took some of that information to help imply about what searchers were actually looking for the first time. And so they've been using that data that they've been collecting to effectively help better understand and serve results higher up the first time. And so as part of that process, what Google is now also doing is they are taking their understanding of the, the page topic and what, you know, just what the page is about, and then they are rewriting a title in such a way that if it is truly the best content, making some minor adjustments to the titles to see if the click if the person actually searching will then end up clicking on the result or getting the answer that they need. So it's really fascinating. I mean, there's certainly— I think there's a lot of art to this. It doesn't seem like it's particularly a science anymore. You know, back in the day for Google search, it was, yeah, just pick your keyword, put it right in the page title, and boom, you're going to rank for it, right? And it's that simple. And obviously you need to have it in the content as well.

Well, you have a phrase around it typically, you know, right?

Sure, sure. And you had to make sure there was a certain density involved, but effectively, right, effectively that was the way that you would get ranked. Now, now there's a lot more focus and emphasis on making sure that the content is understood and that it generally has a kind of central tenet or theme to that particular content on the page and making sure that Google does understand it. So yes, the use of keywords is still highly relevant. But I think what Google is attempting to do here is to try and better serve the content based on the intent of the searcher and test their clout for rewriting titles to see how effective it could be.

So what should people do? Should they— should people still write title tags? I mean, do we still want to write a title tag and put a keyword in it and things like that? Or should we just throw up our hands and just say home? You know, like you see some unoptimized sites that say home on the on the title tag, you know?

Yeah, yeah. According to John Mueller, the, the general recommendation is write page titles based on what the content of the page is about. So that would certainly imply that there still needs to be thoughtful, thoughtful page titles that are put together. Um, it does also imply that a direct— an SEO-centric keyword strategy of put your primary keyword here and then maybe even a hyphen and then a secondary keyword and then your separator and your brand name. That method seems to be a little bit antiquated at this point, at least according to Google. So I do think, you know, certainly— and again, we're bowing at the altar of John Mueller, so it feels like we kind of have to head in that direction— but certainly just writing with keywords included or not, right? Writing what the page content is about and doing it in a thoughtful way, I think, is certainly is still the best approach here. And, and yes, I would generally lean towards, you know, making sure that your primary target keyword is included in the page title.

Okay, well, let me throw you a curveball. So I've seen some websites that, um, you know, where the home page is mostly graphics and the home page is more of a launching pad into the interior of the site. So there's not a whole lot of copy on the home page that describes what the website is about or what the business is about, that kind of thing. It's really just sort of a, you know, pick who you are, pick what you're interested in, and then dive down this rabbit hole. If Google is kind of parsing the content of the page, presumably they're also parsing the whole content of the site. You know, is it, is it maybe put a little more emphasis on creating at least some content then on the page that, that Google's crawlers can, can go in there and, and parse and figure out what, what, what the site's about?

That's a good question. Um, it's a little tricky to answer that, I think, because there is some context based on how the actual site or the page, that particular home page, is built. As an example, um, what's also, I guess, a thing to keep in mind is a lot of folks are not typically hitting the home page of the website upon a Google search if you're looking for something specific, with the exception of brand terms, right? So if I type in marketvantage.com, assumably we're most likely to hit the homepage because that's where they can learn most about us right away, right? And Google knows that. So I think it does contextually depend on what the actual search is. And this is where I think Google will continue to refine their algorithm over certainly the many coming years and try and just optimize for serving the best page and the best content based on the search. So if you have a homepage that's divided up for, you know, are you a doctor or a lawyer or, you know, an astronaut, right? And then you go about from there. Certainly if Google has some contextual information about me knowing that I'm an astronaut and, you know, I'm trying to find out these things, you know, these astronautical things, it could try and direct me in the right direction before I even hit the homepage in theory and choose my own adventure.

Personalization, which is really nothing new here to really talk about. So is this rolled out already, or is this coming, or is it building over time? We usually— Google sort of launches this stuff like not all at once but over a period of time. Is that kind of what we were expecting to see here?

Yeah, they, uh, so in terms of the title tags, they are definitely rewriting them currently, uh, to what extent is kind of unclear. I think it— there's a lot of tools out there that are having a hard time tracking some of this performance other than, you know, SEOs are doing a lot of manual reviews and then capturing screenshots showing that there are title tags that are being rewritten by Google. But it's not entirely clear at this point how often or how prevalent this title tag rewrite is. At this moment in time, there is no direct method to be able to completely 100% control the the title tag. In some instances, you know, for page content or things, you can write specific lines of code in the HTML that says, you know, certainly don't follow, don't index, but, you know, keep this content as is. And in this case, for the title tags, there's currently no workaround. So Google will choose to rewrite the title as they see fit. So there's not much that we could do at this point other than, you know, if you're thinking about SEO for your website, be considering rewriting the page titles anyways from the perspective of, you know, keeping it focused in terms of your keyword and making sure that it clearly conveys what the page content is about. All right.

All right. Well, I think that's what we know, and it sounds like good advice anyway. And great.

Well, thanks.

Thanks a lot, Devin. I think that's really informative.

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