Google's John Mueller said on Twitter this morning that he doesn't believe that changing the word order of your title tags would impact your SEO and ranking. "If you're swapping the order of keywords in a title, I wouldn't expect that to have an effect on ranking," he said.
Let me explain, he doesn't necessarily think you should test it in organic search. Instead, if you want to see if it makes a difference in your click through rate or conversions, first test it with search ads or social media before you make the change with your actual title tag.
Here is John's tweet:
If you're swapping the order of keywords in a title, I wouldn't expect that to have an effect on ranking. If you want to test it from a user's point of view (which title works best?), I'd try to find other test methods (maybe ads? social media? user studies?)
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) June 8, 2018
I would think that word order of title tags, even with the same keywords in them, do play a role on how that page ranks for many queries but what do I know? Either way, if the CTR isn't there, I do agree with John, test it first other ways and if those work better, then change the word order organically later.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
