Find where Google is rewriting title tags in the SERP

Google sometimes rewrites the title tags for your pages if they think they can provide a better experience for their users. While we can agree that users should have the best experience on the SERP to help users click through to your content, it's not great to lose control of what Google is publishing as a title for your results on the SERP.

Knowing when Google chooses to rewrite titles can be tricky—but if you know which pages they are doing this for, you can update your affected pages' title tags to align more closely with what Google is suggesting. Doing so can improve title tags in Google's eyes, but keep you in control of the titles that appear on the SERP.

Because Conductor collects data for your pages directly from your page HTML, and data about your keyword rankings directly from SERPs, we can compare the titles reported for your ranking pages between the Pages and Keywords reports to identify where Google is rewriting your HTML title tags for their SERPs.

1. In Pages ↗️ (Measure > Pages), click the Share icon and select Download XLSX to download data about the pages driving organic traffic to your site.
   
2. In Keywords ↗️ (Measure > Keywords), click the Share icon and select Download XLSX to download data about your tracked keywords for which you site ranks in search.
   
3. Open the Pages export file in Microsoft Excel, and:
   • Remove rows 1–9, leaving only the column header names and the data below.
   • Remove all but the URL and Title columns. After removing the other columns, these should appear in columns A and B respectively
     
4. Open the Keywords export file in Microsoft Excel, and:
   • Remove rows 1–8, leaving only the column header names and the data below.
   • Remove all but the Keyword, Highest Ranked URL, and Title columns. After removing the other columns, these should appear in columns A, B, and C, respectively.
     
5. With both files open, move the Keyword Performance sheet of the Keywords file to the Pages file.
   
6. In the now-combined file on the Pages Export sheet, add the following columns:
   • Title from SERP
   • Title from SERP Matching
     
     
7. In the new Title from SERP column, enter the following formula in each row:
   =VLOOKUP(A2, 'Keyword Performance'!$B:$C,2,FALSE)
8. In the new Title from SERP Matching column, enter the following formula in each row:
   =IFERROR(IF(B2=C2, "Title Matches", "Rewritten Title"),"Rewritten Title")
9. Apply a filter to the new Title from SERP Matching column to show only "Rewritten Title" results. These are the pages for which Google is rewriting you title tags.
   

Review these results to see if there are pages for which you can update title tags to better reflect what Google thinks should appear for the page.

Note! 

If you change the names of the sheets in the Keywords export file from their default value—"Keyword Performance"—you will need to update the string that appears in the second parameter of the formulas in steps 7 and 8 to the sheet name that it now has. The strings must match for the formulas to work as expected.