During the Q&A portion of a John Mueller hangout, one webmaster asked about question-oriented titles and the best way to optimize for them.
Because of the vagueness of the question, John was not 100 percent sure regarding what the webmaster was going for.
But he explained that you should not use exact-match questions in your page titles. Questions can change very quickly, and you don’t want to lose traffic because your question changed.
Make sure you know what your users are searching for and that you address the intent behind the query.
It’s up to you if you want to match the query one-to-one, but be aware that you could end up losing traffic later when the query shifts.
This occurs at approximately 28:47 in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
Okay, then what can you say about the effect of question-oriented titles such as what, how, which, and who are in the content? In terms of being comparable with semantic search engines?
John (Answer) 29:03
I don’t know exactly what direction you’re headed with this question. So it’s hard to say. In general, I would recommend focusing on things like, like keyword research to try to understand what people are actually searching for.
And if you want to match that one-to-one, then that’s kind of up to you. I always find it a little bit risky to try to match these queries one-to-one because those queries can change fairly quickly. So that’s something where I wouldn’t focus so much on well, Google is understanding this content right away, therefore, it’s good but more thinking about like, what is a long-term thing that you want to achieve with your pages?
And how do you want them to show up in search? And sometimes that means having some question answer content but not always.
