Google's John Mueller said that tweaking your title tags after your site was impacting by a quality update won't make a big different in your rankings. But yes, changing your title tags does help you rank for the desired change you made in your title tag. But those are two different questions.
Marie Haynes pointed this point out in a post on Twitter:
What do you think of this? John says changing titles on a page are not likely to make a significant difference if you've lost rankings.https://t.co/FaN1iC2yM2#GoogleHelpHangout pic.twitter.com/XvzvdoL24s
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) May 20, 2021
This question was asked at the 57:11 mark into that video:
(Q) Is changing titles and meta descriptions to any kind of effect?
(A) I think you can use some of that to tweak things a little bit. But if you're talking about ranking changes so strong that you're seeing them overall, then I think just tweaking titles and meta tags are not going to give you what you're looking for. Tweaking titles and meta tags makes it easier for us to recognize what is actually on a page, but it's not going to change the overall visibility of the website significantly.
John clarified that this response was specific to the context that the site dropped due to a quality issue and in that case, tweaking your title tags won't help the site rank better in that case. Here is John's tweet on that:
Yeah, I think this question was in the context of a site that dropped significantly in rankings. At that point, tweaking a title is not going to get things back to before.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 21, 2021
For normal sites in stable situations, of course changing titles can change how a site appears in search.
So if you see your rankings drop off a cliff, jumping to change your title tags won't do much for you. But if your rankings are fine and your title tags aren't really hitting searcher intent, changing those title tags can make a big difference for you.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
