The positioning of keywords in the title has been a long debated point in SEO. The SIA ran a few tests on it some time ago. James thought that it would be a good time to retest it and check if there are changes.
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Test 425. This is a retest. It's keyword placement in the beginning, middle and end of the title. This is from James and what he tested inside of here is the middle and the ends that can help you out. The beginning was tested naturally just because that's where it was inside of his setup.
The keyword is in the beginning and he just moved it around and apply the – and moves the keyword from here into the middle and there to the end. What happened was surprising. The lead keyword in lead of the title tag is a correlating factor inside of a lot of terms and you could see that running a software like Cora or Surfer or POP lead the title off with the keyword or lead keyword matches (what it says in Cora) but in this case he got it bounced it up to one and two with the middle and putting it in the middle and the end.
Maybe that's a transition that Google was going towards because in SEO, typically, he's going to put it in the front, right? So, if I am trying to anti-SEO the algorithm putting it in the end, in the middle and giving it some added weight is certainly a possibility. What I would invite is this test to be run across ten sites now instead of just the standard one here and see if that's continuous across the board before we declare it's a thing.
You can take the recommendations of James here or just look at these for yourself and say that putting the keyword in the middle of your title tag is probably a good way to go. You do see a bounce here a little bit. At the end of it they went right back up again. So, the keyword in the middle stays – it's pretty consistent. I would say, moving the keyword into the middle and testing that across ten sites and then we can probably call that a little bit of a trick that you can apply and see how it works especially if you're stuck.
If you're like at three and you definitely want to get into one but you don't want to remove the keyword put it in the middle or somewhere and see how that goes out. That would be pretty cool to do.
James recommends that use it on the end too but the pattern here wasn't as consistent with the middle as it was with the end. It kind of dropped down then went back up. Dropped down and went back up. Whereas the middle was consistently the top three. So, I would go with the middle first until we can test across multiple sites to see if that's something that's going to continue on with the pattern.