The Presence of Keywords in the Page Title and URL is Crucial

As well as the length of URLs and page titles, I tested them to see if the presence of the keyword that the webpage was attempting to rank for would have an impact on higher rankings.

The results were similarly conclusive.

The assumptions that I’d make to explain why this is the case have less to do with the keyword’s presence in the page title being a strong on-page SEO factor, but rather having a relatively large influence on the click-through rate of the search snippet.

Probably the most obvious reasoning behind this would be that the searcher will gain immediate affirmation that what they’re searching for will appear within the webpage displayed. I can’t stress enough the importance of paying attention to this.

An interesting (and free) tool to measure the impact of changes made to page titles is Tom Anthony’s SERP Turkey tool. If you’re interesting in running some tests then I’d highly recommend checking it out.

The story remains the same for the presence of keywords in the URL. If anything, this is a little more conclusive, especially in the #1 position.

There’s an added reason why I believe this can be more influential, and that’s the fact that any mentions of a keyword in the URL will be shown in bold, which draws their attention to it more than those not mentioning the keyword. Just look at this example when I search for “SEO Tips”.

You can quite clearly see the added emphasis placed on the phrase “seo tips” within both the URL and the meta description.

Action: 

Go through your existing content and make sure that the primary keyword you’re targeting is included. For any new content that you produce, try to ensure that the keyword is used within the URL. Avoid updating URLs of existing content because there are greater risks associated with doing this than the potential reward.