SEO is a weird field. Many people who I see writing about SEO talk about the importance of following every technological update and “industry shift.” While it’s true that technology has changed—especially the addition of AI to search in the last few years—fundamentals stay the same.
One that stretches back to the very beginning of optimizing for search engines is getting your titles right. In search, titles should very clearly say what the piece is about. They shouldn’t be oblique, they shouldn’t aim to be mysterious. Leave that for social media.
No, in search people are looking for answers to specific questions, not looking to amuse themselves. In that light, you have to be direct and literal. Your title should be like the one-line description a card catalogue might have of the subject matter of a book. The title should allow someone to assess the page or post’s content quickly.
To put it another way, the title needs to tell the use, “click this, it won’t waste your time.”
Still, the battle to make titles literal and direct rages on.
Yesterday, a client at a larger DC-based think tank asked me to help them make this point to their authors and editors. So we looked at all of their posts in 2025 and created a quick comparison of “witty” titles vs. posts with very direct, literal titles. The results were exactly what the last 25 years of SEO best practices could have told you.
A quick aside: I was able to create this comparison so quickly thanks to using MCP servers, a tool for AI models to be able to interact with data. In this case, we used Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs MCP servers along with Claude Opus 4.5 to look at thousands of posts in a minutes. This would have taken half a day of sifting through separate data sources just a year ago.
The Data Doesn’t Lie
Without using exact titles—our client ask that we don’t single-out their content or their authors—here are real performance numbers comparing titles where the main topic appears after a colon or literary allusion versus titles that lead with the main topic:
“Witty” Title Patterns
| Title Pattern | Clicks | Impressions | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Literary allusion followed by actual topic | 213 | 113,000 | 0.19% |
| “Balancing Act” metaphor with topic buried | 1,894 | 112,000 | 1.69% |
| Vague insider reference | 1,283 | 197,000 | 0.65% |
| Title referring to subject by first name only | 1,527 | 59,000 | 2.58% |
Topic-First Title Patterns
| Title Pattern | Clicks | Impressions | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poll: [Topic] Remains [Finding] | 11,199 | 504,000 | 2.22% |
| [Organization] [Action] [Specific Detail] | 13,078 | 215,000 | 6.10% |
| [Country] Claims [News Event] | 7,559 | 244,000 | 3.09% |
| [Organization] Refuses to [Action] | 9,004 | 98,000 | 9.23% |
The literary allusion title generated 113,000 impressions, so Google showed it to a pretty large audience, but only 213 people clicked. That’s a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.19%. Not great, Bob.
Meanwhile, a straightforward news title with the keyword first achieved a 9.23% CTR. Same website. Same audience. Different title structure.
Why This Happens
Google searchers aren’t scrolling through social media, not are they looking through the table of contents of academic journal or a magazine. They’re not prone to click on something because the title shows wit or that the author is highly literate.
In other words, searching is a not a lean-back-in-your-armchair, looking-to-be-amused sort of activity. It’s a lean-forward-at-your-desk, let’s-get-sh*t-done sort of thing.
There’s quite a bit of formal study of this topic, much of it under the banner of “Optimal Foraging Theory.” The best introduction to this is field is probably the 2003 Nielsen Norman Group article Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster. There are also academic treatments of this subject like What are you looking for? and Deep Learning of Human Information Foraging Behavior with a Search Engine if you really want to get into the nitty gritty.
My quick synopsis is that Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT) posits that when using information systems like search engines, human beings enter in a “foraging” state, trying to maximize their information gain while minimizing effort.
Optimal Foraging Theory tries to break down what’s happening in that foraging state using concepts like “information scent,” profitability (return on search effort), and “satisficing” to explain the almost manic way that users that ruthlessly sift through lists of resources like search results.
Knowing this, we can supply the signals searchers are looking for to maximize our chances of receiving the coveted click. We can do things like:
- Front-Load the “Scent” – Users focus heavily on the first few words of a title. If their specific search term isn’t there, they may skip the result entirely. If we put the main topic of our article in the first few words of the title, we let them know they’re on the right trail.
- Avoid Clever Titles – Titles that contain literary allusions, puns, or a play on words create “cognitive friction. ” When a search is in the gatherer mindset, they have a very low tolerance for this sort of mental load. So we need to minimize the information “handling cost” and choose clarity over creativity. A clever title is like stripes on a zebra, it confuses our would-be hunter and they move on to a more easily-discernible silhouette.
- “Satisficing” the User – Coined by Herbert Simon, “satisficing” is a portmanteau of “satisfying “and “sufficing.” This describes the users’s tendency to pick the first option that is “good enough” rather than the absolute best. So, again, cleverness gets you nowhere because the user isn’t looking for the most witty, most smart, or most erudite result. They are looking for the equivalent of a McDonald’s on a cross-country trip—a reliable solution to their problem.
- Profitable Descriptions – To continue the hunter/gatherer metaphor in the direction of hunter, the descriptions below your title help to confirm that your page is worth the effort. The calculus in the mind of the user is always “What will I get if I spend the energy to click this?” You have to make your page the equivalent of an injured gazelle—a near-guaranteed meal.
Quick Google-Specific Rules
In addition to the broad framework that OFT gives us, there’s a few Google-specific things we should keep in mind:
- Keep Titles under 60 characters – Google truncates longer titles with an ellipses or rewrite them entirely. So if you want to control what users see, keep your title at or below that 60-character limit.
- Create a Keyword-First Meta Description – If users see their search term repeated in both the title AND the description of your page, they will see your page as a good return on their click investment. If your description is under 160 characters, Google won’t truncate it and it’s less likely to rewrite it.
- Leverage Your Branding – It’s fairly simple to get a Google-compliant favicon and website title in place so that your brand can serve as an additional signal to users that your page is worth their time. If this isn’t in place, work with your technical team to get this done—it’s literal two lines of code.
- Throw in Breadcrumbs – Another simple technical lift is using breadcrumbs. These will replace the often ugly and hard-to-read page paths in Google results like this:
https://example.com > en-us > article > regulatory-pol...
with this:https://example.com > Regulation > Consumer Protection
Which adds even more “scent” to your result.
How TopicalBoost Solves This
TopicalBoost, our WordPress plugin, makes creating title tags and meta descriptions that put keywords first easy.
When an editor finishes a draft, TopicalBoost:
- Scans the article using NLP to identify key topics
- Ranks topics by search volume and difficulty
- Generates multiple title and meta description options featuring the focus topic prominently
- Lets editors choose and tweak the best option
This results in titles that and descriptions that are both editorially sounds and search engine optimized.
This sort of post-by-post optimizations, along with the schema markup and internal linking that TopicalBoost facilitates, is why our clients have seen traffic increases of 60%, 80%, and even 130% within 90 days.
The Bottom Line
Witty titles may impress your editor, but they don’t impress Google’s algorithm or—more importantly—the human beings using search to find answers their pressing questions.
These difference aren’t marginal. The difference between a 0.2% CTR and a 6% CTR is the difference between 200 clicks and 6,000 clicks on the same article.
That could be the difference between your research reaching a niche audience and shaping the national conversation.
Put the main topics first, be direct, and save the cleverness for the content.
