Now is a better time than ever to have your SEO writers take relook at your website’s title and description meta tags!

Google has made a significant change to the length of titles and descriptions by increasing the width of the search results pages from 500px to 600px, allowing an increased space for more characters to be included in your titles and descriptions.

These new and exciting changes will definitely make it easier for SEO writers and website owners to write better and more informative meta tag descriptions and titles.

Titles Tags

More space in title tags means more opportunity to optimise a page’s CTR and SEO performance. You can now include more enticing call to actions and stronger  keywords (these go bold when it matches a user’s query) which will help with a page’s rankings.

Title tags were previously only 55-60 characters but have now been increased to 70 characters which is an extra 10-15. Now it will even let you squeeze in an extra character (to make it 71) depending on the letters you use (characters such as l and i are small characters that use less space).

While the increase from 60 to 70/71 it doesn’t seem like much, most writers will agree that even a few characters makes a big difference when selecting the right words for your title.

Meta Descriptions

Meta Descriptions work together with the title. They do not influence rankings (as they are more subject to spamming than titles – due to increased length), but have a significant impact on CTR.

Descriptions that are currently 100 characters or less are showing up with a single description line in the search results. So it may be a good time to rewrite those now as the new change will reduce your results mark in the search results.

Meta descriptions have been increased by 16-20 characters per line – which means the new description length per line is 100 characters. It has also been extended from two to three lines. Description tags were previously 160 characters, but when a three line description is displayed it can come up to about 278 characters. That is a very significant increase, and creates a great opportunity to include more info for your searchers.

Links to further reading

https://www.thesempost.com/new-title-description-lengths-for-google-seo/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-titles-and-descriptions-2016/163812/