If you have ever done an SEO audit, you know that all audit tools have a section for meta title length. In the SEO community, the recommended length for your meta titles is around 60 characters. The reason is that, Google result pages will clip titles that are “too long” to fully display. The question that comes to mind is, does Google consider what comes after the clipping? Is the title clipping just for display purposes or does Google stop considering what is contained after the “...”?
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
Basically what we are looking at is, when you do a SEO audit, one of the things that come out in the audit is too long met titles. It is a section in every SEO tool where it tells you if you have meta titles that are “too long”. What they are talking about are meta titles that are probably either more than 60 or 70 characters, depending on the tool you are using. The reason they call them too long is that Google will clip the results in the serps. Your meta title will have an ellipse in the end (…) and it won’t display the rest of your title. So, with tools recommending that you need to change that, the question in my mind is, is that because Google ignores everything beyond the ellipses. In this test, we see if Google ignores it or reads it. We put a target keyword beyond the clipping, beyond the (…). In the serps, you cannot see the keyword. It does not exist anywhere else on the page other than in the meta title and beyond the area that is shown. If the page indexes for that keyword then we know that Google is reading beyond that point. That is exactly what we got. Google is reading and factoring in things that are clipped in the meta title.
I think this has really cool implications. Let us say that there is a misspelling that you would want to rank for but you do not really want that seen on the page. That is something that you could put on the (…). Let’s say there is something that is off-brand. Sometimes, you will have a keyword that you would want to rank for where people in the industry call it one thing an that is the correct thing to call it but people who are your potential clients might call it something else because they are not educated in that industry. You could put that term that you really do not want in your copy because it is not really the right term, you could put that in the (…) so that it doesn’t interfere with the copy or usage of the word but you could potentially rank for it. Something else that I can think of here as well is if you have a page where you must target multiple keyword locations. It is a one service page but you are targeting two places. You could put those multiple places beyond the (…) and you actually get those cities, locales, neighborhoods, etc. Still in the meta title but you could have the title that is more service oriented or product oriented where you do not want people to be necessarily turned off because they are in one city and not the other but you have to use the same page for both, that would be a great way to do it as well.
The other thing where I want this concept is in those SEO audits, why do you need to change your too long meta titles, a much better way to go about things is to see if you are actually getting harmed in your click through rate. You can do that in Search Console. Pull up the page and look at the keywords you are ranking for, do a little click through rate analysis and see if it is harming you in the first place. If it is harming you, that is an opportunity to change your meta title whether it is too long or not. I think that is a better way to look at whether or not to change your meta titles not simply because they are too long and some tool says that you should shorten them. You should actually do a click through analysis to see if you are being harmed by that. You should probably be doing click through analysis anyway and that is something that we talk about a lot in the Tuesday Chats. That is a better decision making tool rather than an SEO audit that says your meta titles are too long and you need to shorten them simply for the sake of that.