How to get the page title you want in Google search results

Page titles are something that we see daily in search results. They’re one of the first interactions with your audience and is your opportunity to let them know exactly what your business/brand is and does. However, many businesses and organisations struggle to get Google to display their chosen messaging in their page titles.

So, how can we change this?

How page title generation has changed

In August, Google introduced a new system for generating page titles for web pages. This new system uses the content from the chosen website i.e. the main title/headline (H1), the other text on the page and anchor text, so that it can produce page titles that describe the page content best and show this in search results, regardless of the particular search query.

The reason for this is? Many page titles weren’t describing the page content effectively, while others were too long, repetitive, keyword-stuffed or not populated at all – which are all bad practice. You can read Google’s best practice guidelines when improving search result snippets here.

What does this mean for my website?

If you’ve provided what Google sees as good-quality page titles for your web pages, then Google will continue to display these and this new system won’t affect you. An audit of your website page titles would be beneficial to check for missing and duplicate titles, or titles which are too long to be shown in search results.

Google is putting more focus on your visible page content. Pages with little content and headings that haven’t been optimised won’t provide meaningful signals, which in turn won’t allow Google to generate an effective page title to reflect the message you want. In this case, writing bespoke page titles would be beneficial to improve your click-through rate for the pages you want to display in search results.

We are here to help

If you need any help reviewing your website’s performance and appearance in search results, or want help improving your website’s visibility, contact us today for a chat.