Google’s Newest Update: The final nail in the coffin for lazy SEO?

According to a recent post from Search Engine Journal, Google is making the move to modify how they process and display Page Title Tags. As I’ve talked about on this blog a number of times, the belief was that the Page Title was the most important element of On Page SEO.

With this news, I can confidently say that it looks like it is no longer the case. I’ll cover the signals I’m personally putting together and testing.

Let’s tackle this first: What does it mean?

Traditionally, the Page Title was the piece of content that (mostly) generated the link within Google that led their user to your website. Of course, this has bounced around over the years, but for the most part, it was important to make sure this element was well optimized with keywords, within Google’s quality guidelines, and etc.

Now, it appears that Google is using the on-site signals like H tags and content to generate a link specific to the users specifc query.

Pretty dang cool, right?

Now, I will admit to my heart sinking for second because the Page Title has been such a critical point in SEO. Given a few minutes to process this though, I actually find myself MORE excited about the SEO process.

This is further proof that Google is drifting more towards Machine Learning when determining who ranks where on the SERP.

Today, I’m going to share three strategies we’ll be rolling out with this change in mind.

First: We’re going to keep business as usual with how we treat Page Titles.  

You may be thinking “wait what??!?” with this one, but there’s a very specific reason.

Yes, Google may not give as much weight to what is written in the title tag. But, they may still give weight to he element being properly implemented. So instead of a specific page signal, they may start looking at how Page Titles are handled as a whole sitewide.

Another way of looking at this is that they’ll scan your site and see how well you are within their quality guidelines overall.

Second: We’re going to focus on what the font selections & design elements look like. 

If there’s one thing Google has really improved over the years it is INTENT. They can actively render and understand what each element of a web page means and what impact they have on the end user.

As a result, Google has made it clear that they are going to use your font treatments to determine what it is that you mean in what you’re writing.

Third: We’re going to expand the LSI Formula for each targeted page. 

Based on what we’re seeing, it seems like Google’s objective is to make better decisions and display what your website is about based on what someone searches for.

This means adding more context using the old school SEO content writing methodology Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This will allow Google to paint “the big picture” and more fully understand what it is that your page is about.

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about this. It’s almost the nail in the coffin for SEO shortcuts once and for all.