The Meta Title is one of the most important places where you should insert your main keyword if you want a page to rank as high as possible. Many SEOs advocate that you should place it at the start of the title. And I used to agree with that, until most SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) became a list of bland titles that can hardly attract a user to click.

As you probably know, CTR (Click Through Rate) is mostly a position game. The higher you rank in the SERPs, the more clicks you get. And if you have a title that is as bland as the rest, you’ll probably never get more clicks than the pages that are ranking higher.

My Experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a little experiment, to see if I could make my titles more appealing by turning to copywriting headline formulas.

I began my research and found a few headline formulas I decided to try. I found 7.

Next, I picked my pages. I picked 21 pages in total that got at least 10 clicks per week and were ranking around the middle of page 1.

The Results

I ran the experiments for a week and I considered a success only those pages that got a 10% increase in CTR. I also ensured that the increase in CTR was not due to an increase in rankings. Out of the 7 formulas, 4 got me a noticeable increase in CTR over the course of a week, which I will share with you below.

The Only [SEO Keyword Phrase] Made Exclusively to [Most Desirable Outcome or Benefit]

I fell in love with this formula as soon as I saw it because it is so powerful. As you can see in the example below, it increased the CTR by around 25%, even though there was also a slight decrease in rankings.

Unfortunately, this is also the hardest one to use for 2 reasons.

First of all, it only works for short keywords. If you try to use a long-tail keyword, you’ll quickly find yourself exceeding the maximum character limit (50–60 characters). In a couple of cases, I even removed ‘Exclusively’ from the title to make it fit. Don’t forget that you also need to add a benefit at the end.

This takes us to the second reason why this formula is difficult to use—you need to do some research to find that benefit or desired outcome. Also, if you chose the wrong one, it’s possible to see a decrease in CTR if users are not searching for that particular desired outcome.

Here are some examples of how to use this:

The Only Productivity App Made to Reclaim Your Focus

The Only Travel Backpack Made to Lighten Your Load

The Only Pet Food Made Exclusively for Allergy Relief

What Everybody Should Know About [Keyword]

I found that this formula works great for ‘what is X’ keywords. Until now, my favorite way to use those keywords was ‘what is X and how to Y’, where Y was part of a related keyword (Example: What is alt-text and how to write one).

On the other hand, this formula goes way beyond just ‘what is X and how to Y’. It promises you way more information.

As you can see in the image below, the CTR increased by more than 50% but, at the same time, the rankings also went up a bit.

I know that in the beginning, I said that the Meta Title is one of the most important places to add your main keyword, but as I mentioned in a previous article, Google is looking beyond the keywords. And if you write the article in a way that explains ‘what is x’, you won’t have any problems.

Here’s the [Best Adjective] Way to [Keyword]

I found this works great when you have someone searching for how to solve a problem they have.

Let’s say that someone is searching for something like ‘how to stop procrastinating’. Once you have your keyword, you need to figure out an adjective that works best with this keyword. In our case, that would be something like easy since procrastinators are afraid of doing difficult things.

So the final title is: ‘Here’s the Easiest Way to Stop Procrastinating’.

Sure, you might say that it’s not the exact keyword, but Google has gotten really good at figuring out the query search intent, so I’m very confident that this title would have no problem showing up on the first page.

This headline formula helped me boost the CTR of the page below by a bit over 30%.

[Keyword] in X minutes

This is another formula that I fell in love with instantly. I found that it works best with ‘how to’ keywords. For example, ‘how to delete Instagram account in 2 minutes’ is a great title.

Obviously, minutes are not suited for all titles. ‘How to learn Spanish in 5 minutes’ doesn’t seem credible enough — it will be considered clickbait. So, depending on the case, just use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc.

Below are my results with this headline formula. I initially did not want to add this page to the test because it only received a few clicks. However, this page intrigued me because it was ranking very high, but it had a terrible CTR.

Looking back, this can be an excellent example of how powerful these formulas are. Changing the meta title almost tripled the CTR.

How I Write SEO Titles That Are Not on Page 1

As I said, these formulas are great for ranking on page 1. I use a different technique for new articles or old ones that are on pages 2, 3, or lower.

For those, I write a meta title containing as many keywords as possible. I wrote about how to use the technique in this article.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, if you want to increase your CTR rate on Google Search, try incorporating these 4 headline formulas:

· The Only [SEO Keyword Phrase] Made Exclusively to [Most Desirable Outcome or Benefit]

· What Everybody Should Know About [Keyword]

· Here’s the [Best Adjective] Way to [Keyword]

· [Keyword] in X minutes

I’ve tested these formulas myself and got an increase in the CTR by more than 50% in some cases.

These headlines work only if you’re already ranking on page 1. Otherwise, you should optimize them for Google using the method I explained In my next Blog