It’s important to know how to write an engaging blog post that leads prospects through the buyer journey, but none of it will matter if the headline doesn’t convince them they need to read your blog post in the first place.
Whether people come across your blog post while scrolling through their social media feed or conducting a Google search, guess what’s the first thing they’re going to see? The headline.
Like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover, and if your blog is your book, your headline is the cover and you’d better believe people are looking at the headline to determine if reading your blog is worth their time. Keep in mind that we live in a world with more content than we could possibly consume even if we did nothing but consume content. That means your content needs to stand out from the crowd in order to attract the attention of your target audience, and the headline is your best shot at achieving that goal.
So, what does your headline need to have to attract prospects and lead them through the buyer journey?
Table of Contents
- Use Keywords in Your Blog Post’s Headline
- Use Numbers in Your Blog Post’s Headline
- How to…
- Use Hyphens and Colons in Your Blog Post’s Headline
- Research the Topic to Check Out the Competition
- Make It Negative
- Get Emotional in Your Blog Post’s Headline
- Test Your Blog Post’s Headlines
- Write Different Headlines for Different Channels
- Write Subheadlines for Your Blog Posts
- Conclusion
1) Use Keywords in Your Blog Post’s Headline
The first thing you need your content to do is get in front of your target audience, and one of the best ways to do that is to figure out what search terms they’re using and include those search terms in your content – specifically your headlines.
As with any keyword you use, you want to make sure the keyword/phrase you use in your headline has a fairly high search volume, but a low enough competition score to give you a chance of showing up in searches for that keyword.
It can be tempting to try and cram as many keywords as you can into your headline, but stick to just one main keyword/phrase for your headline to avoid overcrowding. You can save the rest of the keywords for the body of the blog post.
In addition to researching keywords, you can also use a topic generator to see what kinds of questions people are already asking about a certain topic. My favorite is Answer the Public.
2) Use Numbers in Your Blog Post’s Headline
People love a good list (and so does Google), so any time you can include specific numbers in your headline, you should go for it. For example, this blog post has 10 tips you can use to improve the headlines of your blog posts, so that would be a good number to include in the headline, except I decided to go a different route for the headline of this blog post, which I’ll explain in the next section.
3) How to…
When people want to know how to do something, they’ll often search for tips on how to do it themselves before making the decision to hire someone or buy a specific product. That means headlines that start with “How to” are more likely to show up in searches, and they’re also more likely to catch the attention of readers.
Blogs should provide value (save the sales pitch for the sales page). People don’t come to your blog for a sales pitch, they come either for information on a particular topic, or to make sure you really know what you’re talking about before they make a purchasing decision. Regardless of their reason for reading the blog post, you need to make sure it provides value, and your headline needs to convey that.
Another version of the “how to” headline is the “3 ways to” or “9 reasons why” headline, which we covered in the section above. They’re two different ways of headlining a blog post in list form, so it doesn’t matter much which one you choose, as long as your blog post follows through on the promise you made in the headline.
4) Use Hyphens and Colons In Your Blog Post’s Headlines
One study found that headlines that included a hyphen or a colon had a significantly higher click-through rate than headlines without them. One way you can implement this is by putting your target keyword/phrase at the beginning, then use a hyphen or a colon to separate it from a slightly longer explanation of what readers can expect from the blog post.
5) Research the Topic to Check Out the Competition
You should always thoroughly research every topic you cover on your blog, not only to make sure you haven’t forgotten any key points, but also to see what has and has not already been covered on the topic.
While you’re doing that research, take a look at the headlines. If they organically showed up on the first page of Google, they’re probably doing something right, so look at each of them critically to determine what tactics they used that got them to that spot. You’ll probably see some commonalities between some of the headlines that reached the first page of Google, in which case you’ll want to pay attention to what those factors are and see if you can include them in your own blog post headline.
6) Make It Negative
Headlines that convey a strong emotion tend to get the highest click-through rate, and while positive emotions perform well, negative emotions perform even better. That’s probably because we’re constantly being told to “be positive” in our communications, so some of those happy-go-lucky words have been overused: best, awesome, etc.
Instead, try to turn it into a negative. Instead of saying that you can give them tips on how they can make their lives better, suggest they’re doing something wrong. Headlines that contain strong negative words, such as “not”, “don’t”, or “never” tend to perform the best. We’re much more likely to investigate how/why to stop doing something that could be hurting us than to learn how to do something new, even if it makes our lives better.
7) Get Emotional in Your Blog Post’s Headline
Effective marketing strategies are all about appealing to the pain point you’re solving for your customers, and the need to leverage that pain is never more necessary than when you’re writing your headline. They won’t click through to your blog post unless they feel they need to, and the best way to make them feel they need your content is to appeal to the pain they already feel.
This is probably at least part of the reason why negative headlines tend to get the highest click-through rates, but don’t forget that what you’re really selling is a solution to their problems. Try a few headlines that promise paradise and see what kinds of results they get, which leads us to our next point…
8) Test Your Headlines for Your Blog
As with every other part of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to make sure you test your headlines again and again. First, before you publish anything, take what you think is your best headline over to CoSchedule’s headline analyzer to make sure the headline is as strong as you think it is.
Once you’ve run several headline options through the headline analyzer, take the two with the highest scores and use your newsletter subscribers to split-test the two headlines. Divide your newsletter subscriber list into two and send a different headline to each subsection of your subscribers – the one that gets the highest click-through rate is the one that should go on your blog.
9) Write Different Blog Post Headlines for Different Channels
While your newsletter subscriber list can be a great way to test your headlines, it’s also important to keep in mind that some headlines work better for certain channels than others. For example, the best headline to publish on your blog might not be the best headline for social media, so you’ll want to write unique headlines for each channel so you can be sure to get the most out of each channel.
You can also use CoSchedule’s headline analyzer for this part. Once you have several headlines with solid scores, it’s time to put them to work on all your channels.
10) Write Subheadlines for Your Blog Posts
Finally, don’t forget that the main headline of your blog post is just the beginning. Each blog post should be divided into sections and broken up with subheadlines and images. Each subheadline should also be optimized with some version of your target keyword/phrase, pack an emotional punch, etc. Not all of the rules that apply to your main headline will apply to your subheadlines, but a lot of them will, so again, be sure to run each subheadline through a headline analyzer and only use the ones with the best scores in your content.
11) Conclusion
Considering the fact that your headline is the shortest part of your blog post, you might be surprised to find a good headline needs to include so many parts. Keep in mind you can include various parts into the same combination of words (for example, your keyword/phrase can also be emotional). If you have any questions about crafting the perfect headline that we have not already answered here, feel free to reach out. We’re always here to help.
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