Putting the keyword first helps a little, and less than it used to. Studies have long found that titles leading with the keyword tend to rank slightly better than ones burying it at the end, but that is a correlation, not a guarantee, and the effect has been fading for years as Google has gotten better at reading a title’s meaning regardless of word order. Google processes the whole title and can tell what the page is about whether the keyword sits first or third. So front-loading is a mild edge, not a lever that moves rankings on its own.
The more useful reframe is that a title’s job is now split between two readers, and the algorithm is the smaller of the two. The bigger one is the person reading down the results, deciding whether to click. Front-loading the keyword genuinely helps there, because the words a searcher is looking for jump out faster when they lead, which can lift click-through. But that only holds while the title still reads naturally. The moment you twist the phrasing to jam the keyword into the first slot and the result reads awkwardly or robotically, you trade a tiny ranking nudge for a real loss of clicks, and clicks feed back into how Google judges the page over time.
So the verdict is yes, but conditionally. Lead with the keyword when it fits a phrasing a human would actually click. Don’t contort the title to do it. A clean, natural title with the keyword slightly later will almost always beat a stilted one that front-loads the term at the cost of readability.
When you write the next title, put the keyword early only if the sentence still sounds like something a person would say. If forcing it forward makes the title read like a search string, leave it where it falls naturally and let the clarity win the click the position would not.