Google’s Latest Title Update – Traffic Down Across the Board

Instead of using the pre-approved HTML tag, Google may replace the title that searchers see with text that features prominently on the page, whether that means <H1> tags or text that has been made more obvious through style treatments (size, font, etc.).

These changes have so far resulted in a widespread fall in the click-through rate from Google’s SERP to websites.

This might be due to many SEO companies and in-house web designers relying too heavily on the use of <title> tags and neglecting how users experience the website,  although – particularly in e-commerce – the <H1> tag can be used in ways that don’t relate to the page at all. 

This image demonstrates how certain Amazon product pages have been affected.

Some sites experienced a CTR decline of 15% (and a loss of over 6,000 clicks!) (1), though it appears that as SEOs and website developers adapt to creating more user-friendly pages, the impact might end up being minimal. 

After all, Google have been going “beyond HTML text to create titles” since 2012 (2), though not quite this radically.

Only time will tell how drastic this change to Google’s SERP will be, but be sure to keep up to date with the Known Locally blog to follow the developments.

(1) https://twitter.com/lucatag2015/status/1430880996791046147
(2) https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2012/01/better-page-titles-in-search-results