Still Need to Write Title & Description Tag?

[Kingalan1]

My SEO has advised me that Google has stopped using title and description tags for search results and as such, it is no longer necessary to write specific title and description tags.

I see that Yoast seems to pull text to create these tags and sometimes it looks like it reflects the best elements of the content, sometimes it does not.

Should I be asking our SEO team to write dedicated title and description tags or is it best practices  to leave it to the Yoast plugin? My SEO is of the opinion that writing these tags is not a productive use of time as Google will serve results based on the user inquiry rather than the content on his tags. It sounds logical but it would be reassuring to receive further confirmation of this.

Thoughts?"
Thanks, Alan

[effectdigital]

It's true that Google no longer necessarily must use Meta descriptions and Title tags, however Google is still pre-disposed to using them if they are written well. Why let Google crawl all your content, let a mechanical brain 'decide' which snippet (or paragraph) to display - when you can still control it with minimal effort?

If Title tags and Meta descriptions are written badly (poor grammar, keyword stuffed) then Google now can take these elements from your content instead. That's a fall-back though, it's not a reason to 'get lazy' and 'not do stuff'

In SEO, there are no 'magic bullet' solutions (that's commonly said, in our industry). But if there are no magic bullet solutions, that means that there are very rarely, any single changes that massively increase results. If that is true, it means that most factors in SEO only hold a very small (yet relatively equal) weighting

If you follow me on that, you'll see why the small 'seemingly unimportant' stuff is still critical. If in SEO, all factors under your control only make up a tiny sliver of the whole pie - then by saying 'I won't do the small stuff' what you are really saying is 'I won't do any SEO'. But these small, seemingly unimportant changes - are all part of what gives you an 'edge'. When you come up against a competitor of relatively equal standing (and popularity), you might just get ahead. That's what SEO is really for

Imagine you have two car manufacturers stripping down and gutting out their cars for the rally track (maybe one is Mitsubishi and one is Subaru). They go around the chassis, making tiny reductions here and there - so that their car finishes the track less than a second faster than the other. That has value to them, but if the team said "well each of these tiny changes doesn't do much, so let's sit on our butts and do nothing" - the opposition WOULD beat them

The art of optimisation is small, consistent, fractional weight loss and streamlining. That's what it means, not just in SEO but everywhere

If you have an SEO company which is hesitant to do their own darn job, look elsewhere. You need someone who just 'gets on with it' instead of taking your money and making excuses when you pull them up on stuff (although budget is also a factor there, since I don't know anything in that area - I at least have to say that for them)

Meta descriptions don't influence Google's rankings any more, but a search result which has a nicely written description may draw more traffic through from Google without having its ranking position increased. If people see it and it looks more attractive, they may choose that result over the top one. Although Google can 'generate' SERP snippets from your content - since when has generated crap ever been better than hand-written, targeted, authored text? Do you let Google Ads write all your own Ad-text for PPC? No? Then don't do it in SEO

Page titles can still influence rankings. Not as strongly as they used to, but I see evidence every day that they can still make the difference in some small situations. That's what optimisation is, bundling up all the small stuff into a package and benefiting from it. Someone who says "this is too small to bother with" ISN'T an optimiser. Optimisation is attention to detail for small, cumulative, multiplicative gains which snowball over time

Too many people are still selling SEO as a pure marketing package instead of a B.I. & fat-trimming / competitive edge based product

Final thoughts: Yes, write your own page titles and Meta - and don't let people fob you off when you're paying them your own real money. They should be coming to you with things they have missed (it does happen, people are human after all) not the other way around with you having to pick up on stuff, go to forums, aggregate answers. You're doing the research now - that they should have done before they even opened their doors. Everything I have said is (EXTREMELY) common SEO knowledge

[MrWhippy]

Great response from EffectDigital.

[effectdigital]

Thanks as always!

[Kingalan1]

Dear Effect Digital:

Thanks for your very detailed and thorough response. Confirms what I suspected, but with ranking factors in flux great to have this confirmed.

Thanks so much,

Alan

[effectdigital]

Not a problem Alan