What is your experience with duplicating keywords in meta titles?

[Guest]

Hello, there!

What is your experience with duplicating keywords in meta titles? I know the theory, I know it's not recommended to do it but this time let's not talk about theory. I am curious about practical things.

I'm asking because I did some tests for a specific website. I gained better results for some pages after duplicating the main keyword in meta title. I'm not sure if it's because of this or for some other reason, so I'm wondering if you've experienced the same thing.

I guess that Google's AI isn't as humanized or advanced as they claim. The off-page side is a good example, I think. There are a lot of websites that rank purely because of spam backlinks.

What do you think? I appreciate any idea!

[Michael]

Keyword placement in titles have little impact on rankings. Click-through rate is far more important.

[Chris]

If you run an online shoe shop, then it makes perfect sense to use the primary keyword, ie "shoe/shoes" across most of your pages.

But if you were an online clothes retailer, it no longer makes sense to duplicate that keyword on pages about hats, for example.

What I'm trying to say (and perhaps failing) is that it really does depend on the products you're selling.

I can't help but feel that many people overthink the whole Meta tag issue. Keep tags clean, make them describe what's on each page, and concentrate on writing persuasive tags that attract clicks in the SERPs, rather than worrying about duplication problems.

Users have a range of options when looking at search results. Make yours the one that sounds great, delivers what the user is looking for, and (eventually) exceeds expectations.
Everyone's happy.

[Jayne]

If you're creating cornerstone content and adding valuable internal links then words will be duplicated across many titles. The fact that it's in the titles doesn't mean you're duplicating the content and that's what really matters. Each page should be different, serving to a different context, a different intent or a different question to ensure each page serves relevant information. The main page with the focus keyword is then fed by the smaller contextual pages.