CTR is a ranking factor: how to optimize your title tags

I’ve slowly started to love Saturday mornings. But not for the reason you might think.

About a month ago I started spending a few hours at my desk each Saturday.

Not to answer emails, check Slack, or anything like that. 

Instead, I dive into deep, creative work.

8:00 a.m.: Wake up, take way too much pre-workout, and head to the gym.

11:30 a.m.: Read, write, and learn. 

4:00 p.m.: Pickleball, see a movie, go out with friends, or something else. 

Between 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. is when the magic happens. I have no distractions and I dive deep into whatever I fancy.

It’s hard to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and it’s these quiet hours that matter most. 

You must make space for this time. Those hours where it’s just you, a hot cup of coffee, dead silence, and a journal. 

When you prioritize your creative space, you come up with ideas to test and strategies to apply. 

For example, I never made time to read Michael King’s Google algo leak article until last Saturday.

Once I did, I found one big theory I could easily test:

Click-through rate (CTR) as a ranking factor.

Give me two minutes and I’ll explain the old way of doing this, why big brands gobble up all the clicks, and what I’m doing now. 

Oh, and at the end I’ll show you the exact results I’ve found.

The old way

Every SEO course will tell you to add your main keyword to the meta title of your page. 

If you’re targeting “best LLC service in Florida,” you’d better make sure it’s in the H1, URL, and meta title.

In addition, common advice suggests your keyword must be the very first text in your meta title. For instance, if you’re targeting “best LLC service in Florida,” then your meta title should be

Best LLC Service in Florida: blah, blah, blah (Year)

The truth is, these two “rules” kill both your creativity and your ability to entice searchers to click. 

All the search results now look the same. 🥱

How the hell are you going to stand out if you all have the same damn title?

There are only two ways:

1. You rank number one and grab the majority of the clicks

2. Searchers recognize your brand

Point B brings me to our next concern.

Big brands 

Since HCU, everyone and their mother has been saying “build a brand.”

While this isn’t bad advice, I believe brands in the SERPs act as a proxy for CTR. Big brands naturally get more clicks because searchers recognize them.

For example, if we search “best LLC service Texas” we see MarketWatch at the top:

I believe MarketWatch is outranking LLC University simply because of CTR. 

I can tell you hands down that LLC University’s article is 10 times better. More people recognize the name MarketWatch, though, and therefore it has a higher CTR, which in turn causes higher rankings.

Hypothesis

I spend a ton of time looking at SERPs for various queries and I’ve found the old way isn’t necessary anymore. I don’t believe you need to have the exact keyword in your meta title. 

Do you need to keep it relatively close? Yeah. But don’t get hung up on including the main keyword exactly as-is and making it the first word(s) in the meta title.

Since we can’t “out brand” the big brands in the short term, the only thing we can test is more-creative meta titles to increase CTR.

My hypothesis:

IF we update our meta title to stop focusing on keywords and deploy better copywriting strategies, THEN our CTR will increase and, in turn, our rankings will improve.

My method:

I decided to roll this out on two of my pages as a quick test. The main idea was to test adding the word you. This is a common copywriting principle. 

For example, I would change the meta title for “best LLC service in Texas” like this:

OLD: Best LLC Service in Texas (August 2024) 

NEW: Find the Best LLC Service in Texas for You

NEW: Best LLC Service in Texas for Your Needs

NEW: Best LLC Service for Your Needs - in Texas

Note: Before we continue, please understand that I know this is far from a perfect scientific test. I don’t have a control group, statistical significance, yada yada. But I don’t think that should dismiss the results.

If anything, the results should tell us to double-down on the strategy and test more.

Results

The first page I applied this strategy to is showing decent gains, but we need to let the test run a bit longer. I made the changes July 31st, and Google started showing the new meta title August 1st (but only on mobile).

CTR on mobile went from ~6% to over 10%, and the spike in clicks reflects this.

Again, I still need more time to see if this sticks, but just a few days of testing shows promising results.

The second page I tested had much more drastic results.

The CTR of the page was sitting at around 1%. Once I updated the meta title, it shot up and now sits at around 11%.

This CTR improvement helped the page go from 150 clicks per day to over 1,000.

The best part? This page is competing against big brands, such as Teen Vogue, Today.com, and BetterHelp—all big websites with brand recognition.

Now, it’s worth noting that I believe some of the CTR increase is simply because we started ranking higher. Average position for our main keyword jumped from 6 to 2.5.

But I believe we started ranking higher because we created a better meta title.

I also believe that Google is rewarding pages that continually update their content. What’s interesting, though, is the fact that nothing else on the page was updated. Literally just the meta title. 

 So here’s what I plan to test next:

• updating more meta titles with the word you
  

• updating more pages to see if the simple act of updating causes Google to rank them higher

If you’re interested in the results I come back with, shoot me an email with the words “meta title” and I’ll create another post outlining the results.

And if you’ve found similar results or have other tests running, let me know. Would love to hear about them.

Your Next Steps

Reading articles and theory is cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for your business?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Identify 4–5 pages that are sitting in position 6–10
   

2. Update the meta title to include the word you
   

3. Track results and see if rankings hold
   

4. Iterate