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Wow, thank you all for your insights. I really appreciate the feedback. I have not been removing the primary key phrase the page is optimized for. However I have removed the business name which also is a key phrase. For years my title tag formula was “key phrase | business name” ie. Las Vegas Wedding Chapels | Vegas Weddings. Using this example what I’ve done is kept Las Vegas wedding chapels dropped the post ( | ) and Vegas Weddings (business name) to utilize those extra character spaces for a more enticing title tag to increase click through rate. In some cases I may have dropped the Las in Las Vegas to also create more space. Questions: 1. Any additional feedback with this new information? 2. What do you think about the potential for google seeing the initial formula as keyword stuffing even though it is the business name? Vegas Weddings happens to be one of the most searched keyphrases. I am not certain that the average positions actually dropped as a result of these changes. It may have been related to a big misfortune we had with google my business listings earlier this year.  I will look even deeper into this to see if i can make more precise conclusions from the statistics. Either way all this information is highly valued. While Im on that topic, does anyone actually know if the search console/google analytics average position stat does or does not factor in the organic placement within google my business? Thank you all so so much!

You can't do this from a rankings POV but you may be able to do it from a CTR POV, as you specify in your question I reckon that if there is a way to do this, it's probably this: https://marketingplatform.google.com/intl/en_uk/about/optimize/ What this will do is serve traffic equally from Google, to two different versions of a web-page. The question is, when it does this magic - will it alter the SERP titles on Google's front end? I'm not certain, whether it's quite that advanced - but I'd at least give it a go If that fails just run some PPC ads as a testbed and use the page title text you have written, as the ad-title (I think there is such a thing). Then you can see which gets better CTR from ads. Since PPC ads and SERP snippets have a broadly similar format (at least the text ones do, for the most part) it could be a good testbed

Very helpful. Thank you so much Patrick.

Thank you Chris!

This has been such a great thread, I decided to add a little more information on my problem redirect and a personal theory.... When I redirected domainA.com to keyworddomain.com, domainA.com had been on the web for nearly ten years with #1 rankings for its products for almost that entire time,  The domain had lots of mentions had, lots of domain queries and a great history with google. When you do a 301 redirect, I believe that only redirects a fraction of your assets.  It is only a mechanical redirect of the file names on your server and search engines know how to follow it and attribute links. However, I do not believe that a 301 transfers all of the mentions of your brand that appear on other sites or the domain queries that you have been receiving, any social value and other off-page assets that search engines might give you credit for.  (I don't know what they can do about local, since that is never a concern for me.) So the more work you have put into your site related to branding the greater your loss will be when you walk away from the domain.  When I put my site up on keyworddomain.com Google's followed the 301s but had every right to ask.... "WHO IS THIS?"... This new domain was a Nobody. No one asks for it  by name through the google seach box, nobody is typing the domain in the address bar of the Chrome browser, the name is not mentioned in association with all of my products on many other websites, in blogs and in forums.  I lost all of those assets and that is why I personally believe the rankings dropped. Robert gives great suggestions for an attempt to reclaim some of these "other offsite assets".  I think he has good ideas that I did not do. People rarely if ever talk about these "other offsite assests" so we are ringing their bell here.

Hi! Thank you for the further insight. I do not have that particular phrase as one of my campaign keywords. I thought I was only able to have 5 keywords so I stayed away from long tail key phrases that are not as lucrative for us. I have a better understanding of the on-page report cards now so I should be able to disregard grades as needed and gain insight where it is due. Again, thank you so much!

Thank you!!