Managing the look of your website’s listing in the search results of major search engines is an essential element of SEO.

Can you visualise what your titles and meta descriptions look like in organic results, and have you considered how that might be impacting your click through rates?

If you’ve been neglecting your SEO and particularly your Google title and meta description recently, now might be the perfect time to optimise the way your websites appears in search result listings.

Google has made a major change to the organic results column, significantly increasing the width of the column in the main search results by about 100 pixels, whilst the width of features in the right hand column remains unchanged.

So what does this mean for organic results listings?

It means you now have more room for a longer title and meta description. Even though this may seem like only a minor change to the SERP, the smallest change can actually see some of the biggest results.

Your new title length is now 70-71 characters instead of the previous 50-60, which originally saw the title cut off by ellipses to hide trailing content. This new length is at least enough space to fit in another keyword or two, which has the ability to seriously improve SEO.

In addition, meta descriptions have been increased to see 100 extra characters per line – a huge opportunity to add in a few extra keywords here too, helping searchers greater understand what your page is about.

Top Tip!

For any changes you make, be sure to monitor the results. Test the performance of new keywords against your old title and description to see how your stats compare. Test. Improve. Test.