Yes Your Title Tags Suck
Yesterday Google changed the game for webmasters, and I think it was a great change that will improve a lot of websites. Of course there will also be webmasters screaming but such is life on the web.
Yesterday Google let webmasters know what pages get impressions and more important the amount of clicks on those pages. You may be saying what's the big deal about this. Well lets do a little digging, say you have a page on blue widget that is showing 5000 impressions a day (I know most people would love that) but the end user only clicks on the results 5 times. A very low percentage that I don't even feel like doing the math for. This tells me that the user either wasn't looking for your type of widget or your title tags and meta descriptions suck.
Odds are your page title says blue widgets and nothing else. Your meta description tag is probably non existant and search engines are grabbing any content from your page and it looks jumbled and uninviting to the end user. Sorry but odds are this is the cold hard truth.
Now lets see, what do you think is gonna happen to this page that only gets 5 clicks out of 5000 impressions. I would bet that page gets a lower spot in organic search results since users are not finding that page as relevant over and over again.
I admit I only spent a hour looking at one of my sites that rank well and I was amazed at what I was looking at. I found about 25 things that I could change ASAP and make my site much better for the end user. Although the search engine guru's may tell you meta tags are dead I will be using and have been using them on my sites. It only takes a few seconds to include them so why not include them.
Now this is also good news for people not creating spammy pages. Those spammy pages and sites will naturally disapear as webmasters improve their websites based on info found in the new Google webmasters tool section. I will be interested on reading up on this more. Do yourself a favor and log in to webmaster tools and look at your best site and then your worst site you will see why your worst site is ranking badly.
Come back and let me know what you found.
Eric Nagel says
Wow… I was 1st for a keyword and was getting 43% CTR. Now at spot #2, only 17%.
Maybe the new #1 spot is getting a better CTR, which is why I’m at #2? More than just backlinks…
Vinny says
Eric that is the exact thing that made me write this post. I am waiting to read up on what the experts are thinking