The Best Title Tag Length for SEO (Latest Data) (2024)

What’s the best title tag length for SEO?

From our research, meta title tags should be between 50 to 60 characters long, or up to 575 pixels. This length is associated with higher search clicks and is less likely to be rewritten by Google.

Did we make these numbers up? Of course not – it’s science! Read on to understand how we arrived at these figures and how to best optimize your title tag for Google.

Do shorter or longer titles bring you better rankings and traffic?

Which title do you think is more likely to result in better rankings and traffic –

<title>Keep Your Titles Short</title>

<title>Make Your Titles Long Because Google May Use All The Words For Ranking Purposes. In Fact, Google Will Simply Rewrite Longer Titles, So It Really Doesn’t Matter</title>

The answer isn’t simple. Not only are titles a confirmed Google ranking factor, but they also influence how many people click on your web results in Google search.

In this article, we’ll explore howmeta title lengthplays into your title’s overall effectiveness. Specifically:

1. How much of your title tag will Googledisplay?
2. Howlong of a titletag will Google index and use for ranking purposes?
3. How often will Googlerewrite your SEO titlesbased on length?
4. Most importantly, does title lengthimpact rankings and traffic?

Additionally, we’ll cover four best practices for title length to follow, based on your circ*mstances.

How Much of Your Title Will Google Display?

Google’s desktopdisplay limit is 600 pixels. If you meta title is longer than this, Google usually only displays the first 600 pixels of a page title, which is roughly 60 characters.This length helps to avoid longer titles being cut off, or rewritten, in search in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The minimum Google displays is typically 30 characters or 285 pixels.Titles shorter than this are often rewritten by Google to make them longer.

But the 600-pixel guideline can be misleading for many reasons:

• Over60% of Google search trafficis mobile, not desktop
• Mobile search has longer and more varied title lengths, depending on the user’s device
• Even on desktop, the display limit isn’t always 650 pixels
• Google changes this limit with some frequency

Consider the graphic below, in which we measure 4 different pixel lengths for the same URL using different devices and search queries.

While we don’t know the exact upper limit, we’ve seen Google display titles up tonearly 1000 pixelsin length on different devices.

The problem comes when your titles exceed the display limit of the user’s device, Google will only show part of the title in order to make it fit.

So even though the evidence suggests that the 600-pixel limit is somewhat arbitrary, there is one very valid reason to keep your titles beneath this limit:it helps guarantee Google won’t truncate (shorten) your title with ellipses…

Takeaway #1: Keeping your title beneath 600 pixels is the best to ensure Google displays your entire title. In fact, this is the number one way practice toprevent Google from rewriting your SEO title tags.

How Much Of Your Title Tag Will Google Use For Ranking Purposes?

First things first:Google defines no limitas to how long your title can be. In fact, they say they actually have a limit, but it’s really, really large. Importantly, Google can read title tags that are longer than 60 characters, and will typically index the keywords contained in them.

Experiments have shown Googleindexing titles over 1000 characters.

This is important because we know Google uses keywords found in your title tag for ranking purposes. This means even if Google doesn’t display your exact meta title in search results, they can still use the words found in your title to rank your website.

Does this mean you should add additional relevant keywords to your title, making it extra long?

Not necessarily.

Within the strange science of Natural Language Processing (NLP), shorter fragments of text may, in some cases, be easier to understand than longer titles, while extra words can sometimes add ambiguity.

So no magic bullet. We also looked at how title length might impact rankings and traffic (we’ll get to that in a minute) but for now, simply know that Google doesn’t care and will process however long of a title you give it – to a point.

Takeaway #2: There is no penalty for long title tags. In fact, Google will index the keywords in your title even if it’s really long.

How Does Length Impact Google Rewriting?

If your title is too long, we know Google will shorten or rewrite it to fit within its results, often by showing ellipses at the end, like this…

To understand how often this happened and to find out if title length influenced Google rewriting titles in other ways, we recently conducted astudy of 81,000 title tagsin Google search results.

The data revealed that not only does Google rewrite long titles 100% of the time, but they also rewrite extremely short titles with almost the same frequency.

Google rewroteextremely short titles(those between 1-5 characters long) over 96% of the time. Typically they did this by adding more words to make the title longer.

Medium-length titletags had the smallest chance of being rewritten by Google. Meta titles 51-55 characters in length were rewritten only around 40% of the time.

On the other end of the spectrum, title tagsover 70 characterswere rewritten nearly 100% of the time, as no title can go over Google’s 650 desktop display limit.

Keep in mind that because Google display limits are longer on mobile, you can expect mobile titles to be rewritten with much less frequency. In fact, it’s entirely possible for Google to display completely different titles on mobile and desktop devices, sometimes with slightly different meanings.

Takeaway #3:If you want to reduce the chance of Google rewriting your title, your best bet is totarget 51-55 characters.If your visitors primarily come from mobile, you can typically use longer—but not shorter—titles than this before Google starts rewriting.

Does Title Tag Length Impact Traffic?

All this is good and fine, but what we really want to know is: does title length have anymeasurable impactonrankings and traffic?

In fact, as SEOs, we have several studies available thatdo, in fact, show a clear and convincing relationship between title length and overall traffic.

While the evidence is compelling, none of the studies we looked at—including our own—can prove actual cause and effect.

For example, aBacklinko studyof 5 million Google search results showed that titles between 15-40 characters earned amuch higher click-through ratethan longer or shorter titles. The difference was significant too, with titles in the “sweet spot” seeing earning close to36% more clicksthan those outside the range.

But a higher CTR for specific queries doesn’t necessarily mean more traffic overall, as it’s possible, in theory, for longer titles to rank for more queries overall.

Another studyby the Etsy Engineering team decided to look at how title length impacted overall traffic instead of CTR. Testing 1000s of pages using a strict scientific protocol, they found that shorter title tag variants performed better by earning more clicks overall than longer titles.

Their theory as to why this happens is that shorter titles using focused keywords tend to be more “tightly relevant” (paraphrasing) to the user’s search query.

In fact, bothGoogleandour own title optimizer toolrecommend removing unnecessary boilerplate from your title when it isn’t relevant.

Finally, we took a look at our own dataset of a quarter-million URLs to see if we could find any relationship between title length and overall traffic.

The results show a clear trend:

1. Traffic washighestfor URLs with a title length of around55-60 characters in length
2. Short titleshad thelowest traffic overall
3. Long titleshad more traffic than short titles, butnot as much as medium-length titles

Now, several reasons to take this data with a grain of salt:

• The data is quite noisy. We threw out outliers by focusing on URLs in the 75% percentile.
• Even though we examined over a quarter million URLs, Google serves billions of search results per day. We realized quite quickly that we would need a substantially larger dataset to make predictions with any accuracy.
• This study shows no cause and effect. The URLs with the highest traffic also were the most common. It’s quite possible that savvy marketers are optimizing titles to these lengths on purpose.

Takeaway #4:Every known SEO study to date shows a relationship between short-to-medium titles and higher traffic. While cause and effect aren’t clearly understood and the optimal length isn’t 100% clear, the evidence suggests keeping your titles between 50-60 characters max.

What About Meta Description Length?

While not covered in this study, the recommended length for an SEO meta description is between 140 and 160 characters. This length is best to avoid being cut off in search results.

While meta descriptions can be 300 characters or longer, including the hidden parts, the ideal length should depend on your main goal, to provide value and encourage clicks.

4 Title Length Best Practices

Based on the information we’ve discussed, here are four best practices for title length to follow:

1. Keep it under 600 pixels: Doing so ensures your entire title displays on most devices, reducing Google’s chances of conjuring a rewrite. Generally, this translates to a character count of about 50-60—voila!
2. Embrace long titles (sometimes): Shorter titles may outshine their lengthy counterparts in terms of traffic, but there’s no SEO penalty for going long. Fear not! Google will index your title’s keywords, even if they remain hidden in search results.
3. Target 51-55 characters to avoid rewrites: To slip past Google’s rewriting radar, aim for a title length of 51-55 characters. For mobile-focused traffic, you can often go a bit longer without repercussions.
4. Hone in on relevant keywords: Concentrate on using the most pertinent and significant keywords in your title. Shorter, laser-focused titles have demonstrated superior traffic performance, so shoot for 15-40 characters whenever feasible.

How to check your meta title length?

Fortunately, many SEO tools will automatically calculate title tag length for you. Options for checking title tag pixel length include:

• Paid: Screaming Frog will calculate thepixel length of all titlesfound in a crawl, which you can easily export.
• Free: Both Paul Shapiro’sSearch WildernessandClimb Marketingoffer bulk title tag pixel counters