When someone searches for something on Google, they’re presented with a list of articles that could potentially answer their question.
But what causes someone to click on a specific article?
More often than not, it’s the title of the article. This means it’s super important to create a title for your article that is appealing for someone to click on.
So, what types of article titles tend to get the most clicks in the Google search results? To answer that question, we can turn to research done by the SEO firm Backlinko.
In a massive study on article titles, Backlinko analyzed 5 million Google search results to understand which types of titles had the highest click-through rates (CTR). Here are the main findings:
1. Titles that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR compared to pages that don’t have a question in their title.
This makes sense intuitively. Since most people are asking questions through Google, it would make sense that they’d click on an article that is phrased as a question.
This doesn’t mean that the title of every article on your site needs to be in the form of a question, but if you’re able to do so naturally then you should.
2. Titles with 15 to 40 characters have the highest CTR.
In a previous tutorial, we learned that any title over 70 characters will get cut off in the search results. But this study shows that you can increase the chances of someone clicking on your article by keeping the title under 40 characters. Less is best.
3. Adding “power words” to your title tends to decrease your CTR.
It turns out that “power words” can actually have a negative effect on CTR. Examples of these types of words include:
- Insane
- Amazing
- Perfect
- Ultimate
- Powerful
- Secret
Backlinko suspects that power words are good for grabbing people’s attention on “noisy” platforms like Facebook, but that they just come off as clickbait in Google search results.
This also makes sense intuitively. If I search for “how to do linear regression in Excel” I’d probably be more likely to click on a title like:
- “How to Perform Linear Regression in Example (With Example)”
As opposed to:
- “An Insanely and Amazingly Easy Way to do Linear Regression in Excel”
The first title seems helpful while the second seems over the top.
4. Meta descriptions increase CTR.
Along with titles, meta descriptions also show up in Google search results. These are the brief descriptions that appear under an article title in Google.
If you don’t provide a meta description for your article, Google will attempt to pull a snippet from your article to use as an article.
It makes sense that articles with meta descriptions written by the authors have higher CTR’s because they’re likely to be a more helpful description of the article compared to the snippet that Google happens to use.
Crafting Effective Titles
Keep these four points in mind when deciding on a title for your article:
- Phrase the title as a question, if possible.
- Keep titles short (ideally, under 40 characters).
- Avoid power words that seem inauthentic or click baity.
- Write a meta description for your article.
And, as always, make sure the keyword that you’re targeting is in the title.
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