On 24th August Google finally made it clear that they have made changes to how it creates titles for search result listings.
The week before many search professionals had begun noticing some of the differences and were concerned about how the title changes would affect traffic to their sites.
Before this, Google would mostly use the query that the searcher entered in the search box to create the title of the search results snippets. Now, Google has a new system that uses the text that people see when they arrive on a page. This means that Google uses the H1 tagged title from the page.
Google has declared that title changes do not affect rankings, but it is always important to analyse the performance of a website in SERPs to ensure that there have been no negative effects.
People who track SEO often use Google Search Console or Google Analytics to find out search engine performance, but title changes analytics are not recorded in these tools. Luckily some other tools can help you to check out title changes.
Why are Title Changes Important?
Despite Google’s insistence that title changes will not affect rankings it is always important to analyse any correlation between title changes and ranking and the clickthrough rate.
Poor performance should be a prompt for you to change your titles while better performance can help you see what visitors respond well to.
Tools for Tracking Google Title Changes
Let’s take a closer look at some other tools that can be used to track Google title changes.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs can be used to check manually for title changes. You use historical SERPs in ‘Site Explorer > Organic keywords 2.0.’
You will get a list of search results for any given keyword, and you can toggle the switch for ‘target only’ to show the snippet from your website. This will help to retrieve the information quicker. By changing the dates, you can compare the titles assigned and look for any changes.
Rank Ranger
Rank Ranger is an SEO monitoring tool created to monitor URLs and analyse their performance in Google Search. It is based on historical data that is displayed in graph form showing how ranking alters over time.
In addition to the chart, you will find details of all the page titles and description changes. Here is where you will find out if Google has made any title changes.
You can also analyse whether any title changes have occurred at the same time as any ranking changes.
SEMrush
SEMrush does not include a special feature to track title changes, but you can use it to track keywords. You can click on the SERP icon to see keywords that you have been tracking in the Position Tracking Tool.
You can confirm a title change by changing the report date to compare title names.
SISTRIX
SISTREX has a specific tool to track title changes. Use SERPs snippets to find the button for ‘show title changes’.
Tool Providers that do not Track Title Changes
Screamingfrog and Sitebulb cannot track title changes. It isn’t yet confirmed whether Moz and STAT can provide this function.
