Google Increases Title and Description Length – How Should Your Team Respond?

When did this happen? It started at about mid-November. It was on November 22nd when SISTRIX’s dataset started to see the increase, and it was more than 50%. As of December 2nd, at least 1 of the top 10 or around 51% of search results have these longer snippets.

During the past few years, we used to create titles that include at most 55-60 characters. Today, Google has at last rolled out a few improvements and expanded the titles to 70-71 characters. I know it doesn’t appear to be much, but at least you can still fit in another word or two in your title which can greatly help improve its structure and effect.

If you think that your present title is good enough and that you are already content with it, at least you have the option to include your site name at the end part of the title.

Let us say that you have already expanded your titles to make them longer and more attractive than the old ones. Even though your titles are now longer, it does not mean that you will just discard the old one. You still have to monitor the traffic and CTR (Click through rate) not only of the new titles but also of the old ones as this can still influence your SEO.

The organic results for your site can presumably be higher or lower too. That is why you need to monitor them and to keep things under control.

Just in case you still can’t identify the distinctions, let me show you an illustration.

In the second title, Google only shows 58 characters and then truncate the rest. Whilst, in the first title, Google displays 69 characters which denote the full title of that page.

This is the what happens after Google make the changes:

Google did not only increased the length of the titles that are displayed on the search results page, they also make some changes to the meta descriptions.

Google recently updated their algorithm to embrace longer “snippets”, the explanatory text that appears below your organic listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). The previous maximum length was 165 characters; now it can go up to 320 characters or higher.

The image above has indeed demonstrated that Google did a few changes to their desktop page. What’s more, Google did not just roll out improvements to the desktop titles & descriptions. The titles on mobile search were also expanded and are now considerably longer than that of the desktop.

Google has expanded the length of mobile titles from around 55-60 characters to 78 characters. So now the titles on mobile search have 7-8 characters more than the desktop titles.

Let’s take a look at an example from the mobile search results.

Currently, the title being displayed on mobile has 77 characters which is longer than the old one.

We have tried to implement all the tactics mentioned above on our website and so far its impact on analytic traffic and ranking are going so good.

See the screenshot below:

These new changes may not be a terrible thing, particularly for those individuals who are struggling to adhere to the title requirements. Besides, with more character allowance, we can incorporate more watchwords (keywords) into our titles and meta descriptions. Who knows it can lead us to a better ranking, right?

Be that as it may, these changes are still new and Google could change their search result algorithm again. Since this is just a sort of testing or trial, we can’t make certain if these changes are confirmed or not until Google officially announces it. Yet, it is a decent sign for us to know and observe what’s presently happening in the industry.