Reminder: Fix Your Shitty Title Tags

Summary: Click through rate (CTR) is definitely a ranking factor.

As part of a recent project, have been taking keywords that have performed well on one site, hiring writers to create new articles targeting those exact same keywords, and then putting the articles up onto a second site in the same niche.

Most of the articles on the original site were ranking like 20th or worse before having links built to push them up to the top of the SERPs. The new site's articles are consistently pushing themselves up to the first page for the same terms--often up to 4th, 3rd, even 2nd and 1st position--before any offpage or link building has been done.

The main difference between the new and old articles is that the new articles have the clickbait-y-est title tags possible. Ex:

• Old Site:
  • How to Buy Shoes
• New Site:
  • How to Buy Shoes | 76% of Athletes Do This...

That damn keyword is already at #4 on the new site. The old site's article was on the third page until we threw some (quality) links at it. And that's not even a garbage keyword--the original article's brought in 86+ conversions in the past year or so in a niche where the average conversion is ~$320 revenue/~$200 profit.

Added five words and an ellipsis to the title tag and got results comparable to what the original article got from being fattened with links for several months. Kill me. Five fucking words vs. $x,xxx of link building.

Have been seeing CTR become increasingly more important lately. Pages with rich snippets (specifically the star rating ones) have been skyrocketing to the top as well.

Get'cha title tags together (also meta descriptions -- fix that shit, too). It will pay for itself many, many times over.

WTF no one comment on this? This is bible, come on fxxkers!

Yup !

Click through rate (CTR) is definitely a ranking factor, And If You Optimize Your Title It Can Boost Your CTR

Free Proxies said:

No it is not a ranking factor

For sure it boosts traffic because your clickbait makes more people click, but no one has provided a case study to prove that CTR actually increases ranks of your website.

CTR optimization increases traffic, for sure.

This is not a ranking boost.

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It's a trend that is true across 50-ish pages on the site mentioned in the original post. And the biggest discrepancy between the new and old site is that the new site uses better tricks to increase CTR. The OP describes a case study that gives more than plausible evidence that suggests that CTR leads to higher rankings in the SERPs. This post is based off of SERPBook (tool for tracking SERP positions) and manually checking SERP results; isn't based on traffic.

And you're right, it would be nice to have a more extensive study on the topic, as there are a few other potentially confounding variables. The one that comes to mind is bounce rate. While this post isn't necessarily definitive proof; good luck getting proof of anything in SEO.

Also, don't you have a cage fight on the proxy forum to attend to?

Free Proxies said:

cage fight is currently taking place via PM as cyber bullies like @proxygo operate in the dark and not in public.

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RIP. That was the best thread going on right now. I'll put the popcorn away.

Free Proxies said:

Ok I will block idiot from sending me messages now so he has to post in threads

Click to expand...

Seems like this is taking place all over the forums for some reason. Not just this one thread. :/

dr_0x said:

Seems like this is taking place all over the forums for some reason. Not just this one thread. :/

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No cage can hold a fight with proxygo.

Nice and simple little trick.
Bookmarking this.
Thanks for the share, op.

I'm all about this! Same format too. Clicks equal more conversions are all

Great info. Time to make some changes.

Clickbait is great everywhere, except somehow it's become a huge thing here recently, and I hate it. Buuuuut, it works!

so dank, thanks! I Notice when glazing over results I always gravitate towards numbers 89 00 99 79 etc.