Posted by Dr-Pete

Google’s recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new, data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool…

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Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)

Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:

Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only intended as an approximation of actual Google results.

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How the redesign impacts titles

Google’s redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before and after the redesign:

The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After the redesign (bottom), it’s lost six full characters. The old guidelines no longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.

It’s harder than it sounds

You may be thinking: “Ok, so gimme the magic number!”, but unfortunately it’s not that easy. While we try to set a reasonable length limit as a rule of thumb, the reality is that Arial (the title font) is proportionally spaced. Put simply, different characters have different widths. For example, the following two titles are both exactly 40 characters long:

As you can see, these two 40-character titles cover a wide range. Let’s break down what’s going on here…

(1) Narrow letters are narrow

Ok, that’s probably obvious, but let’s just put it out there. The first title is full of lowercase l’s and i’s which take up relatively little space. Meanwhile, m’s and w’s take up quite a bit more space. In this font, three lowercase l’s are actually narrower than one lowercase w.

(2) ALL CAPS take up more space

Capital letters are wider than lowercase letters – again, not a big surprise. All-caps titles also tend to be hard to read and are the visual equivalent of shouting. In some cases, like “LEGO” above, capitalization is important and necessary. In other cases, like “BRIDGEWATER COMMONS”, it’s just noise.

(3) Width varies with the query

Google highlights (bolds) the query keywords, so a longer query will bold more keywords. Bolded characters take up slightly more space. So, even if you found a title that just squeezed into the width limit, the actual display of that title would change depending on the keywords searchers use to find it.

(4) Cut-off titles have less characters

Google is cutting off titles with CSS, and the browser appends “…” whenever a title is truncated. So, a title that’s just slightly too long and gets cut will actually be shorter than a title that barely squeaks in under the width limit, due to the additional space required by “…”.

Data from real-life searches

In order to really understand what’s happening to title tags in the wild, we need to collect the data. So, we set about looking at real searches to understand where title tags were getting cut off after the redesign. Before I get into the methodology, I’d like to thank Bernt Johansson, founder of Swedish SEO firm Firstly for his generous help in hacking together this particular jQuery monster.

We looked at page 1 search results for 10,000 queries. Since not all SERPs have 10 results, this resulted in 93,438 total search results. An encoding error caused some issues with special characters, requiring us to toss out some bad data – this left us with 89,787 titles to work with. Query highlighting was preserved from the original searches. This data was all collected from Google.com using English search queries.

Since Google is truncating the titles using CSS, we have to replicate them as rendered (not just look at source code). Once the titles were extracted, each of them was displayed in a browser (Chrome on Windows 7) at the same size and width as a Google desktop search (18px Arial in a 512-pixel wide <div>). Then, a somewhat bizarre combination of JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX and PHP stored the display length for analysis. Due to minor variations, our display lengths could vary from Google’s by ±2 characters.

Means, distributions & confidence

Sorry, it’s about to get mathy up in here. Let’s look at just the titles that were truncated by Google, to find out how their lengths varied. This leaves 28,410 titles for analysis. I can tell you that the mean (average) length of those titles was 57.7 characters, but don’t run off just yet. If the distribution of these lengths was normal, then setting the mean as a reasonable limit would mean that half of the titles at that length would still get cut off. That’s hardly ideal. Also, this doesn’t account for the titles that weren’t cut off.

Just out of curiosity, though, let’s look at the overall distribution of cut-off title lengths (post-cut-off):

The good news is that this distribution is roughly normal, peaking at about 57-58 characters. Post-cut-off title tags ranged in length from 42 to 68 characters. Here’s a title cut off at 42 characters:

Again, all-caps titles take up more space, and the query (“anywho reverse lookup”) is fairly long. Here’s a title that makes it up to 68 characters after being cut off:

In this example, the query is short (“Giftster”), the title only has two capitalized words, and there are quite a few lowercase l’s and i’s in play. Keep in mind that all of the lengths in the graph above are after the cut-off. Gifster could probably get away with 1-3 more characters beyond what’s displayed. We also need to consider the pre-cut-off length and account for the ellipsis.

So, how do we turn this all into something that’s actually useful? What do we really want to know? Ultimately, we want to find a reasonable length at which we can be fairly confident our titles won’t get cut off. At each length, I looked at what percentage of titles were cut off. Since the distribution is fairly normal, longer titles were (as expected) more likely to get cut off. Here are the cut-off lengths at five different levels of confidence:

• 80% – 57 characters (81.6%)
• 90% – 56 characters (91.6%)
• 95% – 55 characters (95.8%)
• 99% – 53 characters (98.7%)
• 99.9% – 49 characters (99.9%)

Since character lengths are integers, we can’t hit the 80%, 90%, etc. marks right on the money, so these are the closest numbers (the actual percentages are in parentheses). Maybe I’m biased by my statistics background, but I tend to think 95% is a pretty reasonable level. Put simply, if all of your title tags were exactly 55 characters long, then you could expect about 95% of them to be left alone (1 in 20 would be cut off).

There’s no magic number

I feel comfortable saying that 55 characters is a reasonable title-length limit under the new design, but keep in mind that your title lengths may vary quite a bit. In addition, a cut-off title isn’t the kiss of death – Google still processes keywords beyond the cut-off (including for ranking purposes), and other formats, like vertical results and Google+, may display your full titles. Here’s an example from Google news vertical results:

In this example, the first news result actually displays the full title of the article, whereas the second result is truncated. Ultimately, if you’re really concerned about any given result, you need to see it for yourself. In some cases, a mysterious trailing “…” may even make a title more clickable (I wouldn’t bank on it, but it’s possible).

In many cases, like blog posts titles, it’s not worth going back and revising everything based on this new data. I’d look closely at your core pages, view the SERPs for your target keywords, and make sure that your snippets look the way you’d like them to. Use your judgment, and keep the guideline in mind for future SEO efforts, but don’t start hacking at characters. Google could change the rules again.

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Posted by John-Henry

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment posting and link networks. Fast forward four years >> I now solely create visually engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn’t make this career shift because “link building is no longer effective;” quite the opposite: I changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to move the needle—content helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts of new linking root domains at once.

Over the past two years I’ve become obsessed with content (and Reddit, unfortunately). I’ve started to keep the companies that are producing the best and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have recently started to stick out are Movoto and Airbnb. Both are scaling link acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways. Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.

Before we dive in, both companies are growing rapidly in terms of organic search according to SEMrush:

Airbnb

Movoto

Both of these companies are starting to do exceptionally well in the SERPs, primarily due to either growing (Airbnb) or targeting (Movoto) an audience.

Perception, product, and content

Airbnb and Movoto are both trying to rank for extremely competitive terms, however their content marketing strategies couldn’t be further from each other, and that fact hinges mainly on two aspects of these businesses’ models:

1. The length of the customer purchase journey
2. The probability of repeat purchases

First, let’s think about both of these sites’ customer purchase journeys and their customer lifetime value (LTV). Airbnb is selling rentals, which someone could need multiple times a year. Movoto is selling homes. The price point and level of commitment required from the customer are wildly different. More importantly, people generally only look for a new home during or after a major life event, like marriage, death, having a baby, or getting a new job. On the other hand, you could decide to take a random weekend ski trip at 4:15 p.m. on a Friday and book an Airbnb almost instantly. If Airbnb customers really enjoy their Airbnb experience, there’s a good chance that they will rent another Airbnb and continue to add to the company’s bottom line. However, no matter how awesome a time someone has buying a home, there’s a very small chance that they will decide to repeat the experience anytime soon.

Movoto and Airbnb’s business models differ in the sense that Airbnb is incrementally extracting value out of customers over a long period of time, while Movoto is most likely getting 100% of the customer’s LTV at the first purchase.

For Airbnb, creating their own community is a pragmatic marketing strategy for keeping users engaged. I theorize that’s why most of Airbnb’s content is either about their business, their community of users and hosts, or about their product.

Where Airbnb is winning in content

• Charitable efforts: During Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb community members put up displaced New Yorkers for free, generating 300 linking root domains.

• Really unique homes: Some of the listings on Airbnb are naturally link worthy, like this igloo or this treehouse. As Airbnb grows, and more interesting and unusual listings pop up, these interesting listings will continue to scale Airbnb’s link acquisition.

• Dev blog: Airbnb is up to some pretty impressive stuff in terms of technology and development, and they regularly share their innovations with the dev community. Like this post on isometric JavaScript which earned more than 130 linking root domains.

• Neighborhood guides: These gorgeous neighborhood guides have built 130 links to date, however, they also accomplish a lot more. I asked Dennis Goedegebuure, head of SEO for Airbnb, why they created these amazing guides:

• Product/community blog: Airbnb has a bit of a leg up here in terms of link acquisition. Because they are a prominent company disrupting an established industry, pretty much anything they do is newsworthy. However, when you take a look at their blog, it’s not so much a place for them to market themselves as it is a forum to address critical issues, consumer concerns, and changes with the product. It’s racked up a lot of links over time (1900+ linking root domains), but it’s racked up way more hearts and minds—and most likely converted a fair amount of users into first time renters by alleviating their pain points while researching the product.

• One-off content marketing efforts: The Airbnb Annual Report is an amazing piece of content marketing – but it also speaks to how savvy Airbnb is when it comes to marketing itself. By showing the community how quickly Airbnb is growing (and how much money is out there for hosts to make) Airbnb is educating people about the company trajectory, its product and the future of the industry as a whole – all through beautiful, product-centric, interactive content.

The overarching theme of Airbnb’s content

All of Airbnb’s content keeps the brand, its product and the Airbnb community in the front of the users mind. Airbnb relies on a community in order to function, and because that community is inclusive, empathetic and charitable—it’s one of the most marketable aspects of the Airbnb brand. Airbnb also faces certain challenges—like regulation and challenges from the hospitality industry. Because their business model is still being established, they need those hearts and minds on their side to fight for them and champion their product.

Movoto is taking a different path

Because a home purchase is so infrequent, constantly trying to grow a community through ongoing social media and brand-centric content marketing could get tiresome for readers, especially because those interacting with the brand would most likely have little motivation to purchase a home until a major life event occurs. However, Movoto still needs to scale link building, and in order to do that without building a community of their own, they must engage an audience in a way that causes them to share and tweet the content they produce.

Targeting existing audiences

Movoto creates content that appeals to pre-existing audiences. They are also great at picking their subject matter—they choose topics that are popular enough to be covered in mainstream press, but also appeal to the hardcore niche fanboy sites.

Their most successful content takes some type of pop-culture reference or hot topic, applies it to real estate, and then earns press from both big news sites and mid-level authority blogs. The Harry Potter Hogwarts Property Evaluation Infographic may be the best example of this strategy in action:

It’s earned links from over 140 domains including mainstream sites like Daily Mail, Fox News, and Daily Finance, and it also earned links from fan sites like Nerdophiles, Toy To The World, and Potter Talk.

Movoto is creating and marketing useful, fun and informative content that directly appeals to a particular niche audience—but it also has a larger mainstream appeal. Because Movoto executes content well in terms of information and visuals—they are racking up links and quickly rising in the rankings. They’ve also produced a number of successful interactives, like How Many Legos Would it Take to Build your House, or alternatively How Many Tetris Blocks.

Many of Movoto’s blog posts have earned over 100 linking root domains, primarily due to their ability to target an audience that will engage and share content online. Because they don’t have to structure their communication around a growing community, like Airbnb, they are free to be pretty creative with their subject matter and publish things that are going to get a strong response (like 54,000 shares on Facebook for that post alone).

Community building isn’t for everyone. It’s best suited for communal products

As digital marketers we’re quick to champion new strategies that result in increased traffic, links and social shares—but it’s important to consider how our marketing efforts fit with the overall business model. After all, it’s not just links and shares we’re after, we are all trying to grow businesses in the most cost effective manner possible.

Community building really only makes sense for communal products. So, while it’s the perfect growth strategy for a product like Airbnb, it makes no sense for a real estate site like Movoto. If you’re stressing over social singles and your lack of community engagement—maybe you don’t have a product that the community can get behind and actively support—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, you just need to go elsewhere for your links because that’s what your business model demands.

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Posted by David-Mihm

One of the many things that appealed to me about joining forces with Moz 18 months ago was the empathy that every Mozzer has for business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search. Although it’s generally thought of as less competitive than a lot of other disciplines (like news, video, or e-commerce SEO), the prerequisite set of tasks for success in local search continues to grow.

In the shift from desktop to mobile, local search is fragmenting more than ever, and business listings are an increasingly critical foundation. NAP consistency (establishing a canonical Name, Address, and Phone Number for your business location) is one of the top local search ranking factors every year. Establishing a consistent NAP is vital to ranking in local results. All the link building and social media in the world won’t help a business if Google can’t trust its information, and customers can’t reach it.

Whether you’re a small agency trying to serve dozens of mom-and-pops on a limited budget, or a large brand manager tasked with managing listings for hundreds of stores, the time it takes to ensure the accuracy and visibility of business information is overwhelming. Let alone the time it takes to correct errors, align categories, deal with PIN or postcard verifications, or add missing listings. And it’s often prohibitively expensive.

So as we thought about how to evolve GetListed’s original product, we decided to start by helping solve the fundamental pain point of local search: ensuring accurate, consistent business listing information on the most important sites on the web.

What does Moz Local do?

For a high-level overview, check out this video:

Our goal is to make Moz Local the most efficient option for location management, with an easy-to-use interface and an affordable price point.

In a nutshell, Moz Local allows you to upload a spreadsheet of all of your locations, which we then standardize and distribute to all five major U.S. data aggregators:

• Infogroup
• Neustar Localeze
• Acxiom
• Factual
• Foursquare

and three important local directories:

• Superpages
• eLocal
• Best of the Web Local

for $49/year per location.

After submitting your locations, we provide you with full reporting about the status of each listing (with links to those listings live on the web, where available). We’ll also surface possible duplicate listings we discover across the ecosystem, provide you with the fastest path to correcting or closing those duplicates, and notify you of any unauthorized changes to your NAP that we come across in our local web crawl.

To dive into the product, visit Moz.com/local and download our CSV template. If you currently manage your locations at Google Places, though, you can get a head start by simply uploading that spreadsheet to Moz Local (we accept all the same field names and categories). Full documentation for the product is available here, and FAQs and a deeper description of how the product works are here.

Key features

Upgraded Listing Details page (free to all Moz Community members)

The original single-location lookup functionality from GetListed is still available at moz.com/local/search—and you can also access these Listing Details from your Moz Local dashboard. As part of the Moz Local changeover, we’ve upgraded it with a much snazzier results page and a quicker visual indication of how a business is doing and where you should focus your efforts.

Category Research Tool (free to all Moz Community members)

One of my persistent headaches back when I was a full-time local search consultant was performing category searches for slight wording variations as I was submitting listings across every single local search site.

With that in mind, we designed the Moz Local Category Research Tool to be a huge time- and energy-saver. Start typing the keywords or industry your business is in, and we’ll start refining the list of categories right before your eyes. Selecting a category will then show you how it maps to different search engines or directories when we publish your listing.

If there’s a more specific category on a particular search engine that you’d rather submit for a given listing, simply add it to the Category Overrides field in your CSV spreadsheet.

Duplicate listing notifications

As I mentioned above, we provide reporting on possible duplicate listings in the ecosystem, and where possible, we present you a direct path to closing them. Right now you’ll see a relatively tight set of possible duplicates, but going forward you’ll see a wider possible set to help you clean up old addresses, changed business names, or unwanted tracking phone numbers.

Expanded Learning Center (free to all Moz Community members)

Huge thanks to Miriam Ellis for her assistance in compiling, updating, and editing this greatly expanded version of the GetListed Learning Center. We now offer 41 pages full of local marketing background and best practices. The top pages from the original Learning Center like the local search glossary, marketing priority questionnaire, and the local search ecosystems are all still available.

Features we’re already working on

We’ve already gotten some terrific feedback from our Customer Advisory Board and other customers during a private beta period, and the product we’re releasing today is much better as a result. Going forward, we’re anxious to hear from the Moz community what feature areas you’d like to see us expand into.

Features currently on our list include:

• allowing for the editing of single locations in-app

• building custom-branded and emailed reports

• showing individual listing progress over time

• adding additional search engine and data partners
  (if you’re interested in a data partnership with Moz, please email Ryan Watson!)

I have a feeling it will be a common request, but at this point Moz Local only supports U.S. business locations. International versions of this product aren’t in our near-term roadmap for development.

Thanks all around

There are a lot of people to thank, with such a big product release—it has definitely been a team effort:

• the entire Local Engineering and Inbound Engineering teams here at Moz

• the Marketing and Community teams, especially my “point person” for coordinating those efforts, Elizabeth Crouch

• the Executive Team for giving us the leeway and the budget to build this product

• Derric Wise and Nick Santos for the amazing new branding and look-and-feel

• Josh Mortenson, Elijah Tiegs, and Elizabeth Crouch for our video

• Jackie Immel and Courtney Davis for their help in coordinating our beta period

• our beta testers for their participation and patience!

• the data aggregators and directories who have partnered with us

• the users of GetListed who have given us so much great feedback over the years

I’m sure that’s leaving dozens, if not hundreds of people out—but I’m truly grateful for the support of everyone in the local search community over the years. As with many software endeavors, it’s taken us a little longer to get here than we’d hoped, but we also hope that you in the Moz community think it was worth the wait!

The formal press release announcing Moz Local can be found here.

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