Does trying to rank for 2019 terms in advance have any merit?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: CTR has absolutely no impact on rankings in Google. None. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. They use cick data to evaluate their algorithm performance, not Website quality.Hence, racking up a lot of clicks in advance of the competition won`t help you in the long run.That said, being "first found" has intrinsic advantages outside the algorithms. People are more likely to recommend a site they find in search results.On the other hand, if you`re just counting on the year and not really creating content that is any good, people will ignore your site. Most people don`t click on the first result anyway.It`s something to experiment with but remember that the listing in the search result is only a promise of what is to come. If the content doesn`t deliver on the promise it won`t matter how many people click through or why they clicked.
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  Khurram Aziz: Interesting point of view Michael, there are many experts who would disagree with your assertions about CTR. Not to mention, your belief that most people don`t click the first result anyway - where did that come from? Obviosuly I`ll be making the content as high quality and relevant as possible
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  Michael Martinez: Khurram Aziz "there are many experts who would disagree with your assertions about CTR"
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  Khurram Aziz: Well Moz and others have told me CTR is a factor: https://moz.com/.../does-organic-ctr-impact-seo-rankings... and search engine land produced a cohesive study https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ctr-ranking/254631/ But regarding search engine ranking position and CTR - it might be true, that "most" people who type in a search result click pages listed 2-100... But the page listed at number 1 still gets the MOST CTR overall https://www.smartinsights.com/.../comparison-of-google.../
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  Michael Martinez: Khurram Aziz As I said, their experiments are unscientific - and Google flatly contradicted their claims. You can believe them if you wish. We don`t need to argue about this back and forth.
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  Michael Martinez: " But the page listed at number 1 still gets the MOST CTR overall "
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  Perry Bernard: I agree with Michael Martinez on comments of being wary of experiments and results presented on SERPs behaviour and rank. All this is guesswork at best. None of it is ever proof of anything, and if they find any kind of evidence, it`s usually correlations. It`s like saying "lower socio-economic populations have higher rates of smoking as a habit and correlating higher rates of lung cancer, therefore poverty causes lung cancer." NO.
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  Dave Elliott: I tend to work on between 20 and 25 percent of people click on the first result for non branded queries based off an awr study. So basicly agree with micheal. That said if your site matches intent it`s better to rank 1st than 2nd. In answer to your question there`s plenty of good reasons to be ranking for 2019 keywords already. People are looking at booking thier summer holidays for next year for example. It depends on your niche. If you are selling 2019 products then do it. If you are trying to rank for `best (whatever) 2019` then it won`t do anything