Emoji do not damage search engine optimisation. But ought to they seem in your content material? 😐

Attention all SEO professionals: John Mueller struck again.

This time, our favorite Google Search Advocate brought words of wisdom regarding the presence of emojis in webpage titles, meta descriptions, and the content itself.

He said that if you want to use them, go ahead. Emojis will neither harm nor help you SEO strategies.

Mueller revealed this update during the Google Search Central SEO office hours hangout from January 28. And although it was an interesting fact to know, one question remained in my head.

You can include emojis in your pages, but should you really do that?

Here are two points to consider:

1: Using emojis can be a waste of your time 🤡

Yes, they are cute and funny. But since emojis will not do anything to help you rank high on the SERPs, what is the point of using them?

As an SEO professional, you do not want to dedicate valuable hours to optimizing pages for things that will not bring positive results.

Plus, the SERP is always changing. If Google simply decides to stop showing emojis in searches, all your great work with them can be replaced with weird code information or blank squares □.

On top of it all, Google’s algorithm is already rewriting a significant number of page titles simply because it thinks it can create better headlines than you.

This means that your precious emoji in the title can vanish or become something else, according to Mueller:

“We don’t show all of these [emojis] in the search results, especially if we think that it kind of disrupts the search results in terms of, it looks misleading perhaps, or those kinds of things. But you can definitely keep them there, it’s not that they cause any problems.

I don’t think you would have any significant advantage in putting those there, because at most what we try to figure out what is the equivalent of that emoji and maybe use that word as well, kind of associated with the page.”

2: Emojis in titles can increase your click-through rate 👆

Let us say that you are using emojis in titles and meta descriptions and they are not misleading or spammy at all.

Do they have a chance to improve yours click through rate (CTR), generating more traffic to your pages?

Some SEO experts believe so, although there is no clear data out there to back it up.

What we know is that almost every single online consumer likes to use emojis when they communicate. actually, 36% of millennials consider that emojis express their thoughts and feelings better than words.

So, depending on your business, it might be a great idea to include emojis to boost the visibility of your page on the SERP and attract the attention of readers.

For example, if you have a pizza shop, and you want to pop on the radar of someone who is searching for “🍕 near me”then you can write versions of your title using the pizza emoji.

It is all a matter of having a hypothesis and putting it to the test.

The company split signal, for instance, did an experiment to investigate the impact of a drink emoji (🍹) in the title of a recipe page. The result was a higher CTR and an increase in organic traffic of 11.3%.

Wrap Up 🔚

So, where did we end up?

Emojis can make your business more friendly and approachableeven if they do not directly contribute to the success of your SEO strategies.

As we mentioned, it is impossible to be 100% sure that your emojis will show up in search results, but if they do, they can be a positive influence on your CTR and traffic.

It really depends on your business, your market, and who you are trying to reach.

In this sense, here is a tip to better understand your audience: check out our interactive generator and build your buyer persona to learn every single aspect of your ideal customers!