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 optimizing pages for things that will not bring positive results.
Another thing to remember is how users actually see emojis in the wild. Depending on the device, browser, or just pure randomness (thanks, tech), the same emoji can look totally different or not appear at all. What shows up as a bright, winking face for you might be just an awkward hollow square for someone else. That’s not really the experience you want to give your readers—especially if you’re trying to look credible or, at the very least, professional in 2025.
And sure, maybe you’re thinking about the branding angle. Some companies like to break the mold—little icons in the title to catch a wandering eye, that kind of thing. But there’s not much evidence that a pizza slice emoji ever convinced anyone to click a link about car insurance, you know? At best, it’s a harmless experiment; at worst, it’s wasted real estate in a spot that should probably be reserved for words that actually do something.
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 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.”
