Search Engine Optimization is an umbrella term that comprises countless factors and aspects that affects one’s website in one way or another. It is also an ever-evolving phenomenon in the digital marketing world that keeps developing itself to facilitate better user-friendliness for search engines.
By using MarTech’s new domain as a case study, we are studying Google’s title tag changes and the issues faced by other SERPs that are affecting MarTech.
SERP Title Change Fallout and Improvements
The SERP title change of Google affected the mission page of MarTech significantly since August, which resulted in the occurrence of irrelevant alt text from the header logo of the website that ultimately made the title read “MarTech is Marketing Logo” on the Google search results.
To combat this change, multiple attempts were made, such as updating the title tag every few days and re-checking the results, resubmitting the mission page using Google Search Console, and adding internal contextual links. After spending months monitoring the SERPs and editing the page, the MarTech’s title tag was finally updated to the chosen version, saying, “What is MarTech? MarTech is Marketing”.
The original chosen page title was “What is MarTech?…… This is MarTech.” However, our SEO experts believe that as per Google’s algorithm, this particular title tag was not clear enough for the users, and to highlight the main topic of the page, some adjustments were made. It was also a clever way to add both the questions and the answer in the same title tag so that searchers will be more interested in the page and will view the page to learn more.
We were excited to see the new changes by Google in the SERPs of this important title of the page. However, after studying the effects of the real changes on MarTech search performance thoroughly, we were able to see the true impact of the SERP title alteration of Google.
In early November, Google edited the title, and after that, the website witnessed a huge drop in the organic clicks on the page. We compared the two results when first Google updated the title tag to when our update title page was reflected. After the comparison, we found that the CTR of the page dropped from 3.1% to 1.7%, and the total clicks on the page also decreased by 41% when compared to the previous period.
Fortunately, after Google displayed the new title of the web page, the search numbers were looking much better.
Issues of Site Structure
Apart from the changes to the major page titles that affected MarTech’s SERP display, we also noticed other consequences that were more associated with the issues of site structure. The consolidation of MarTech Today and Marketing Land was also affected because of Google’s chosen site links for the MarTech domain.
The Mission page on the MarTech website is certainly an important one, and the other displayed links play a secondary role for the website, and as the hierarchy goes down, those at the bottom become even more irrelevant. However, we noticed that Google considers these pages to be important compared to the top-level pages.
This concludes that a horizontal structure doesn’t always work for your website, and it is certainly not enough to help Google recognize the hierarchy of pages that you chose for your website.
Sending Site Structure Signals to Google
You can conveniently address the old site indicators by ensuring the new signals convey the right information about your site layout. Here are some of the common tactics used by our SEO professionals to provide a clearer view of Google.
Fleshing out content on top-level pages: The topics and categories that originally only featured the associated costs and the header text were updated by adding a more relevant content blurb at the top to highlight their importance.
Adding breadcrumbs to articles: Apart from featuring the top-level category for MarTech pages, we also added more information for the crawlers by rolling out breadcrumb links to each article.
Internal linking: Internal linking is crucial to improve page rankings, and we can not emphasize it enough.
The Bottom Line
If you’re planning to revamp your website design Toronto, consider Edkent Media. This digital marketing agency firm offers a variety of services, including SEO, PPC, web design, social media management, content marketing, and email marketing. The company employs sharp designers with proven track records. As a result, you can expect high-quality results.
