Title tags people actually click
Fifty title rewrites, before and after. What moved click-through rate and what was just rearranging words.
Maya Okafor
Head of search research
A title has one job in the results: tell a searcher this page is the answer to what they just typed. Most titles are written for the site’s own navigation instead.
What worked
Putting the searcher’s words first. Adding a concrete number. Removing the brand name from the front. The median CTR gain across 50 rewrites was 3.8 points.
What didn’t
Clever wordplay, emoji, and all-caps. They drew attention in testing and lost clicks in real results.
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