Just recently, Google made the decision to implement a longer organic character search result, moving from the usual 10 to now a range of 10 to 15.  While many people have been wondering what good will this bring, the width of Google’s organic search results is something many SEO professionals have expected for a while.

Search Result Titles Have Expanded

Google SERPsGoogle has altered the standard character length to 70 characters, which is an increase of 10-15 characters. On average, this means an additional two to four words can be added to the title tag to make it more descriptive – and obviously, SEO-friendly.

Many organic SEO practitioners watch Google on a daily basis to see what the company will roll out next, and we are seldom disappointed.  The changes often make our job of obtaining solid search results for sites more difficult.

The new title change has made and will make thousands of websites re-think and rewrite their own titles and hence improve the CTR (click-through-rate). Some benefits of this change include more detailed descriptions, catchy titles, and additional searchable keywords.

Some have noticed a change to the space allocated to advertising on the desktop search results page (SERP) (the removal of ads from the right rail of the page) and they have written about how this would make organic marketing more difficult.

16-20 More Characters In Search Result Descriptions

Google SERPs before and afterTitles now get 10 to 15 More Characters in SERPs. What happens when a title or description is too long?  Google simply truncates it and places ellipses at the end. Google uses proportional spacing, and SEOs think in terms of characters, which means that SEOs must develop carefully constructed recommended character lengths. The change  to 600 pixels translates into approximately 10 to 15 more characters available for titles.

Mobile users were not forgotten. Google has also increased title tag lengths for mobile search results (even more than in desktop results). Google has increased the maximum length of the mobile title tag to about 78 characters. This is an extra eight characters beyond the desktop display!

A Final Thought

In the end, these new changes will result in more thought-out SEO keywords and better visibility for those who know how to take advantage of them. And although the changes to the search results vary for non-English character languages, they are the backbone of making Google better, one character at a time.