TrafficTriageDoes Adding 'Best' to a Title Help SEO? 10 Pages Measured
By Ugur Saritepe · October 4, 2026
Does adding "best" to a title help SEO? On my site the word splits every list page in two. Queries containing "best" sit at position 6.9 with a 4.0% click rate. The same pages' bare queries sit at 9.5 and 1.7%. The effect is real and it is large. The title is not what is causing it.
The question, as it was asked
game-scout.app is my games directory and the site I use to test things before I say them here. On 2026-10-03 I was trying to work out what an "improve an existing page" routine should actually do, and I started with one page that earns impressions and almost no clicks: the hunting games list. Here is the exchange.
lets for example examine hunting. Can we do anything about hunting page to improve position on our targetted queries like best hunting games ps5 etc
queries for /best/best-hunting-games, 90 days, split by whether the query contains "best"
"best" queries pos 7.5 CTR 1.89% bare queries pos 10.05 CTR 0.48% 55% of the cluster
Same page, two intents, and the bigger one is the one we serve worse.
Can you check few example pages to see if we have best superlative or not and how they react agaisnt queries ? I am not sure if that has real impact on queries
That doubt is the right one. One page can be a coincidence, and a split in our own data says nothing about why it exists. So I measured it two ways: across the site, and on the live results pages themselves.
Ten pages, one split
The pull is simple. For each list page, take the 28 days to 2026-09-29, filter the queries to those that contain "best", read the totals, then filter to those that do not and read them again. Ten of our list pages had at least 100 visible impressions on both sides. Every title on those ten begins with "Best".
page "best" queries bare queries
impr clicks CTR pos impr clicks CTR pos
detective 451 50 11.1% 5.17 2,042 126 6.2% 6.57
trucking 1,452 80 5.5% 5.16 1,580 12 0.8% 9.26
space 580 27 4.7% 6.91 1,883 51 2.7% 8.61
police 508 24 4.7% 6.06 1,634 17 1.0% 7.81
samurai 318 17 5.3% 6.84 1,506 13 0.9% 9.83
fishing 1,195 38 3.2% 6.80 2,693 34 1.3% 9.01
flight 1,287 28 2.2% 8.65 2,989 27 0.9% 10.75
hunting 1,013 17 1.7% 7.26 1,849 7 0.4% 10.17
medieval-fantasy 451 6 1.3% 8.80 708 10 1.4% 10.25
lego 814 37 4.5% 7.76 327 0 0.0% 28.57
all ten 8,069 324 4.0% 6.94 17,211 297 1.7% 9.51Position is better on the "best" side on ten of ten pages, by 1.4 places on detective and 4.1 on trucking. Click rate is higher on the "best" side on nine of ten; medieval fantasy is the exception at 1.3% against 1.4%. The bare side is also the bigger side: across all fifteen list pages I pulled, bare queries were 70% of the visible impressions. So the demand we serve worst is the majority of the demand we can see.
One control. Our five "games like X" pages carry no superlative in their titles, and they barely receive "best" queries at all: games-like-elden-ring took 19 impressions on queries containing "best" against 364 without in the same window. The word in the title does steer which queries a page is shown for. That part was never in doubt. The question is what the word does once the page is shown.
Where the bare slots go
To see the mechanism I ran the same search twice on a US phone, with and without "best", for four of the pages. The thing to count is not our position. It is how many list-format pages are in the top ten at all, and what holds the other slots.
US mobile, 2026-10-03 (trucking 2026-10-04) bare -> "best" topic our slot list pages in top 10 store / product pages hunting absent -> absent 0 -> 1 2 -> 2 fishing 9 -> 10 1 -> 4 3 -> 2 samurai absent -> 7 2 -> 4 2 -> 0 trucking 7 -> 3 1 -> 1 3 -> 3 Reddit at position 1 on all eight result pages.
Adding "best" to the query adds list pages to the results. On fishing the bare search has one list in the top ten, ours at 9; the "best" search has four, with a ranked YouTube video at 2, Eneba's list at 3 and a second ranking video at 6. On samurai we are absent from the bare search and at 7 on the "best" one. On trucking we move from 7 to 3 with no other list page on either side. What fills the bare slots is the PlayStation Store, Amazon, Target, Walmart, release trailers and a Facebook group asking which game to buy.
This is the same finding, from the other side, as the answer-shape test I ran in are listicles good for SEO: a query that asks for a ranked set clicks on a ranked set, and a query that asks for something else does not. Here the modifier that turns one into the other is a single word, and I can watch Google change the results page when it is added.
So does the word in the title do anything
Two things are true at once and they are easy to confuse. The word in the query changes which results page you are on. The word in your title decides whether you are a candidate for the list slots on that page. What I cannot tell you is whether "Best" in our titles adds anything on top, because every competing list page on all eight result pages also carries "Best" or "Top". There is no list without it to compare against.
What I can tell you is what did not work. On 2026-08-28 we retitled six of these lists toward the entities appearing on their results pages, with a click-rate target written down in advance. When we graded it on 2026-10-03, five of six missed. Police went from 1.48% to 1.82% against a 3.5% target, two pages went down, positions improved on four and click rate did not follow. The title moved what we are shown for, a little. It did not move who sits above us on the bare query.
The one ranked page with a measurement of its own, SearchPilot's 2024 test, added "best" to the start of product-listing titles on an e-commerce site and reported an 11% rise in organic sessions at 95% confidence. That is consistent with everything above and it answers a different question. It measured the title side. It does not say which queries gained, and it does not look at what else is on the results page. Google's own starter guide gets closer to the point without numbers: think about the words a user might search for, because "some users might search for 'charcuterie', while others might search for 'cheese board'". The two words land on different results pages. So do "hunting games ps5" and "best hunting games ps5".
What this changes about picking work
The practical cost is in how I size an opportunity. Hunting shows 4,726 impressions in the window and 42 clicks, and the usual arithmetic says a page at position 8.8 with that many impressions is leaving clicks on the table. But 64.6% of its visible impressions are bare queries where no list page holds a top-ten slot. The reachable pool is the "best" tier plus whatever list slots the bare page carries, which today is one to three of ten. For hunting that is roughly 1,700 impressions at position 7.3, not 4,700 at 8.8, and the competitors that matter are Eneba and two ranking videos, not the Reddit thread at position 1.
It also changes what I would edit. The hunting page is indexed, its canonical matches, its vitals are fast, its title is 43 characters with the core words in front, and it is drifting up on its own from 9.4 on 2026-09-01 to 7.3 on 2026-09-29. Nothing on the page is the constraint. What changed is the results page: it is now built around Way of the Hunter 2, which the trailer in position 6 says arrived on 2026-09-29, and Hunting Simulator 3, and People Also Ask carries "What is the name of the new hunting game available on PS5?". Our list has six games and the newest is from 2022. That is a roster problem, visible only from the results page, and no title would fix it. The per-query read behind that comes from the page-selection post, where the head query's own position was the one signal that separated losing pages from holding ones.
What this does not tell me
- The split covers visible queries only.A query filter in Search Console drops the anonymized rows, so hunting's 2,862 split impressions are 61% of the page's 4,726. The hidden 39% has no side.
- "Contains best" is a string match.It does not count "top" or "good", so some list-intent queries sit on the bare side and make it look slightly worse than it is.
- The results pages are single days on US mobile. Three were read on 2026-10-03 and trucking on 2026-10-04. They move, and the hunting one moved the week a new game shipped.
- One site, 28 days, one genre of list.Games lists share a results page with stores and trailers. A "best accountants in Leeds" page shares it with map packs and directories, and the slot arithmetic will differ.
- The title's own effect is not isolated. Every competing list carries the same word, so this post shows the query mechanism and cannot show a title mechanism on top of it.
What we have not done
We have not refreshed the hunting list's roster. The session that produced the numbers above recommended adding the two new releases, one FAQ answering the People Also Ask question and a request for re-indexing, with a 21-day read written down first. I chose instead to turn the example into a weekly routine that picks one stale list, reads its results page and proposes the roster change. That routine exists in a pull request that is not merged, its schedule is disabled, and the hunting page is unchanged since 2026-07-26 apart from the title. If the first refresh ships, this post gets a dated follow-up.
How to run this on your own page
- Pull the queries for one page and split them on your superlative.In Search Console, filter to the page, then add a query filter containing "best" (or whatever your title uses) and read position and click rate. Flip the filter to "not containing" and read them again. If the two sides look alike, this post does not apply to you.
- Search both phrasings on a phone, in your main country. Count the list-format pages in the top ten on each. Note what holds the other slots: stores, videos, threads, official pages.
- Size the reachable demand. Superlative-tier impressions, plus the bare-tier impressions scaled by the share of list slots on the bare page. That number, not the page total, is what an edit can move.
- Read what the list slots contain before touching the title. If the pages above you name games, products or releases your page does not, the fix is in the roster, not the title. If they do not, it is a position problem in a slot you already hold, and the comparison-page read shows how badly a format can lose when the incumbents are forums.
If you want the indexing and raw-HTML side of a page checked while you are at it, the free triage report runs eight checks from the URL alone. The rest of these measured reads are in the AI-assistant SEO series.
FAQ
Does adding 'best' to a title tag help SEO?
It helps you rank for the queries that contain 'best', and those queries behave differently from the bare ones. On ten game-scout.app list pages over the 28 days to 2026-09-29, queries containing 'best' sat at position 6.9 with a 4.0% click rate while the same pages' bare queries sat at 9.5 with 1.7%. The word in the title is not separable from the word in the query, because every competing list page on those results also carries 'Best' or 'Top'. Keep it if you are a list. Do not expect it to win the bare query.
Why does my page rank for 'best X' but not for 'X'?
Because the two searches get different kinds of results. On four live US mobile result pages we checked, adding 'best' to the query raised the number of list-format pages in the top ten from 0 to 1, 1 to 4, 2 to 4 and 1 to 1, and pushed store pages, trailers and product listings down or out. A bare query like 'hunting games ps5' is mixed intent, and Google gives those slots to stores, videos and forum threads. Your list competes for the list slots, and there are fewer of them on the bare query.
Should I remove 'best' from my title to rank for the shorter keyword?
No. The bare query's slots are not going to list pages whatever your title says, so dropping the word would most likely cost you the list-intent queries and win nothing. On our site the one page whose bare queries were a majority of its visible impressions, hunting, had 1,849 bare impressions at position 10.2 and 7 clicks. Rewriting its title would not change who occupies positions 1 to 8 on that search.
How do I check this for my own page?
Pull the queries for one page from Search Console and split them on the superlative your title uses. Compare average position and click rate on each side. Then search the bare phrase and the 'best' phrase on a phone, count how many list-format pages are in the top ten on each, and note where the stores, videos and forum threads sit. The pair of counts tells you how much of the bare demand a list can reach at all.
The pair of searches is the whole test, and the hard part is counting slots by hand on eight results pages. Create a free account and the MCP serverlets your assistant run both phrasings, list who holds each of the top ten slots and which features sit above them, and set that next to the page's own query split from Search Console, in one message. The four pairs above took eight lookups and a table I filled in myself.
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