In Test #290, we looked at adding the question “Who” to the title of a page. After added “who”, we saw an immediate bump but were concerned that the bump was from “who” being the only real word in the SERP. We then added “the” to the control pages and the experiment page dropped to the number four spot.
We felt that we were looking at either random variance (all the pages were then viewed as the same so they were getting sorted randomly), or some form of transitional rank. So, we give this another try to check further if adding a question in the page title can affect rank.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
We have previously done a test where we added who to a page and added a question mark and then we added a “the” to the control. The who moved the page to number one and then we were a bit concerned, we added “the” and it dropped to the number four spot, it dropped all the way down. We felt that we were looking at it again, sort of a minute random variance thing or some form of transitional rank from that test so this is some sort of a redo, if you will.
We got “why” added and “the” added to all the others. Now, we’ve got the “why” at the top. What we are looking for here is these question type words. Long tail informative pages that seem to get a lot of love from Google. What we can see and what we found, which is a lot of fun is that, it took a bit of time, but the why page is now on top versus the “the” in here. This has been run a couple of different times, a couple of different ways, we are feeling pretty good about that.
The one thing we need to check that we do not have here is that there is not something here that the “the” is not making it duplicate. You can see that these titles are all unique, intentionally so, they have random words. They are very unique titles. I feel pretty good about this one, that there is some preference, in this situation, for question words.
If you’ve got a page that is a supporting page, this is something that Andy and I do in our agency – we create supporting pages to support our target pages and often, they are very informative. What is the weather like in New Zealand in August, those kinds of pages can rank on their own and if they are good terms, you can then rank for it, using supporting words, phrases, getting questions in, can be very valuable for the supporting pages.
Maybe not something I would use so much for my top-level page, maybe, but for the supporting page, this is great, and I would do it because I think you can get these pages to rank pretty well, based on a question type word.
Andrew: What is interesting about that is also, you might think that clickthrough rate may impact a page like that, with why in it, vs pages that don’t. Then you have isolated this, without any traffic at all and it still rises to the top.
That is right, kind of the idea with, is there a preference here for question type words, cause the idea is, Google is looking at this serp and is now saying, this one is asking a question, essentially, it is asking a question in the title and it will answer the question in the results, and giving a preference to that.