If you know anything about SEO, it’s probably that you should write optimised meta titles and descriptions. However despite their best efforts, some organisations aren’t seeing their customised meta content in the search results. On occasion, Google will disregard your meta title or description and pick one itself. We’ll look into the reasons behind this, and how you can avoid it from happening.

 

Why meta content matters for SEO

Meta titles and meta descriptions are important for your SEO strategy because they help search engines understand what your page is about. This will help in ranking your website in the search results against similar content. Not only that but they also help users understand what your page is about before they click through, helping improve your click through rates.

 

Meta titles have been classified as a ranking factor for a number of years, and meta descriptions, although not an official ranking factor, are largely implied to affect your SEO performance and your position in the search results too.

 

For a deeper dive into how to write optimised meta content, check out our blog about On Page Content and how to improve it.

 

 

Why does Google override your meta content?

Google generates your page title from elements on the page as well as from signals from across your website. Most commonly, the search engine will read your <title> tag and use this as your meta title. However if Google doesn’t think this title tag is appropriate or relevant enough, it will create its own. 

 

This can be problematic for some webmasters as content that they might have researched and optimised is not being used, and this could impact website traffic and click through rates. 

 

However Google has updated its advice on how to control titles in search results, and at the same time created a handy troubleshooting guide to help webmasters understand why the search engine isn’t using your pre-written meta titles and descriptions. Some of the reasons Google may be disregarding your meta content is:

 

• It’s irrelevant: if your meta title is not accurately describing the content on the page, Google may choose to disregard it
• It’s incorrect: if your blog or page content has been updated but your title hasn’t (maybe the dates don’t match or the topic has changed), it will be ignored
• It’s incomplete: if your title tag looks like it is missing an element, for example there is a hyphen but nothing before it, Google will consider it broken and will not use it
• It’s too similar to other pages: if your meta titles are similar, using boilerplate elements, with little to distinguish one page from another, it may overlooked
• It’s stuffed full of keywords: most marketers should know by now that keyword stuffing is a bad practice, and this will lead to Google ignoring your tag if it contains the same keyword too many times

 

Meta content best practice

 

Make sure that every page on your site has an assigned meta title and meta description. 

Your title tag should summarise what your page is about and your meta description should be a concise description of your page content. Avoid anything too vague – the more precise the better. 

 

Google still advises that if you want to include your brand name, it should be at the beginning or at the end, and separated by a hyphen or colon from the main title. 

 

Beware of SEO plugins and automated tools

 

Some SEO plugins like SEOmatic and YoastSEO allow you to automate the generation of your title tags. You can set a template for your pages, for example it will let you use the H1 of every page followed by your site name: <title> Header 1 – sitename 

 

However this can be problematic if your H1 is very long, is not updated, or if you forget to add a H1 to a page. This can create incomplete title tags like this: <title> – sitename

 

Therefore if you are using a tool to automate your title tags, use a web crawling tool like Screamingfrog or SEMRush to regularly audit your title tags and keep an eye out for any that may be missing or incomplete.

 

Conclusion

 

If you aren’t seeing the meta titles and descriptions you expected to see in the search results, take a look through Google’s documentation and make sure you’re following their best practice advice. You may have missed a crucial step, and solving these issues will allow you to take back control of your meta content.