You wrote the perfect article and you’re wondering whether a certain keyword should be included in its title or not? And if it’s included and consists of more than one word, is there a strategy to heighten your chances of getting a ranking in Google’s News Boxes? With the help of the Trisolute News Dashboard, we looked at data from 2022 to answer just those questions!

But first, a note on keywords in article titles and its impact on length and display in Google. As SEO news expert Barry Adams points out in The 5 Article Headlines Google Cares About, “There is less space available for a heading in Google’s regular search results than there is for article headlines in Top Stories and other news elements. As a result, the recommended length for SEO titles is shorter.” While Adams says headlines in Top Stories boxes can be between 70 and 85 characters before getting cut off, for titles that appear in organic search results (those using the <title> tag) the character limit is typically between 55 to 65 characters.

The Data

As a basis for this analysis we took data from the Mobile and Desktop News Boxes and examined how many rankings there were in total in the year 2022, which were, to no surprise, quite a lot (a whooping 188,375,195 on desktop and 120,525,067 on mobile, to be exact!). Therefore we had to dig a little deeper: We asked ourselves how big of a difference it made in terms of News Box-rankings whether a publisher had included a keyword in an article’s title in a certain kind of way.

Is the keyword in the title or not?

There are three different categories in which to evaluate whether a keyword is included in an article’s title or not: ‘Exact’, ‘Distributed’, or ‘Single’. To illustrate those more clearly, let’s take the keyword ‘hogwarts legacy’:

• Exact: The keyword has to appear in the title exactly as it is.
  • “Hogwarts Legacy: The new action role-play everyone is obsessed with right now” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “Hogwarts gets a new legacy” → The keyword is not in the title (because of the words in between ‘Hogwarts’ and ‘legacy’).
  • “You can discover the legacy of Hogwarts in this new game” → The keyword is not in the title (because the words are in the wrong order).
  • “Hogwarts as it has never been seen before” → The keyword is not in the title (because the word ‘legacy’ is missing from it).

• Distributed: All parts of the keyword (in this case ‘Hogwarts’ and ‘legacy’) have to appear somewhere in the title in the correct order.
  • “Hogwarts Legacy: The new action role-play everyone is obsessed with right now” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “Hogwarts gets a new legacy” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “You can discover the legacy of Hogwarts in this new game” → The keyword is not in the title (because the words are in the wrong order).
  • “Hogwarts as it has never been seen before” → The keyword is not in the title (because the word ‘legacy’ is missing from it).

• Single: At least one part of the keywords has to appear in the title (in this case either ‘hogwarts’ or ‘legacy’). If both keywords appear, the order is irrelevant.
  • “Hogwarts Legacy: The new action role-play everyone is obsessed with right now” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “Hogwarts gets a new legacy” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “You can discover the legacy of Hogwarts in this new game” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “Hogwarts as it has never been seen before” → The keyword is in the title.
  • “Choose your legacy in this new action role-play” → The keyword is in the title.

Findings from 2022

With those criteria as a basis of our evaluation, we went on to take the numbers of News-Box-rankings with the keyword appearing either exact, distributed or single and put it into relation to the total number of News-Box-rankings in 2022. We did this both for Mobile and Desktop-rankings.

Since there are overlaps in those scenarios, concerning the classification whether the specific keyword is in the title or not, the percentages exceed the 100%-threshold if added up (for example: the title “Hogwarts Legacy: The new action-role play everyone is obsessed with right now” would fall under all three categories).

Here’s what we found out:

What does it mean?

It comes as no surprise that the category ‘Single’ generated the most rankings both for Mobile and for Desktop-News-Boxes – after all, if you have an exact match in your title, the single keyword will automatically be represented as well. What is more interesting is the fact that the number of News-Box-rankings which had no keyword at all in the title came out as low as it did. Only around 11% of the titles that generated a ranking had no keyword, which, compared to the 88 to 89% which did have at least one part of the keyword in their title.

Based on our data we can safely say that it is beneficial for your rankings to include at least one part of the keyword in your articles’ title. Now say you want to include the whole keyword, not just a part of it. Looking back at the chart above, focusing only on the columns under ‘% Exact (Average)’ and ‘% Distributed (Average)’, the difference in numbers is really not that severe. For the Desktop News Box, the ‘Exact’ percentage is lower than the ‘Distributed’ one by only 5.99 percentage points and for the Mobile News Box by 5.64 percentage points.

But what does that mean?

Well, basically it can be said that it does not make a major difference for your chances of ranking in a News Box whether you decide to leave your keyword whole, with no other words in between, or if you split it up when putting it in your articles’ title. What does matter though, is that at least one part of your keyword has to appear in the title somewhere.

Conclusion

You’re not yet part of the News Dashboard family? Request your FREE demo today and find out how to optimize YOUR titles for the News Boxes.