How to craft the perfect headline for your blog post?
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The world of digital marketing is booming and hence the need to generate new ways to attract potential consumers. Crafting a perfect and appealing headline is one of them. There are thousands of blogs online, but according to research, amongst the blogs that are present on the internet, 65% of blogs are not even visited. The two main reasons we can derive for this to happen are the low ranking of the blog and the unappealing title of the blog. It is obvious that until your blog ranks, it won’t be visible on the search engine result page and your audience will not be able to see it. Even if you have managed to rank your blog and make it visible to the viewers, what are the chances that it will be visited by them? You must be under the impression that you have written very engaging and high-quality content and it will gain you a lot of visitors. But have you ever thought that will the viewers be even willing to visit it? Your content may be unique but the headline you crafted may not be appealing enough to attract visitors. So, here is the thing you need to remember that just writing high-quality content is not enough, it will only be valued and appreciated by the viewers when they visit and read it. Hence, with relevant and high-quality content, a perfectly crafted headline is also important for writing a blog. Therefore, creating an effective headline is necessary.
Your blog headline plays an important role in ranking your blog as well as increasing the traffic of your website by making the viewers visit it. This blog will help you understand how can you create a perfect headline.
A perfect headline should be SEO-friendly for the crawlers and also appealing to the users. To make your headline SEO-friendly and rank your blog on the Google search engine result page, usage of keywords in the title is necessary, which we will be discussing further in this blog. Moreover, when you are writing a blog headline, it should be so appealing that users should not only click on it but also go through the content written in it.
Here are some steps you can read to craft the best catchy headlines.
Learn the popular headline formulas
Many bloggers and marketers have already done a lot of research and compared the performance of different types of headlines. As a result, they have come up with some of the trending headlines that people are most likely to click.
Some of the most trending headlines are listed below.
- Number headlines
The readers are mesmerized by lists. So, starting your blog title with a number is a great idea to help your headline stand out. The human eye is automatically drawn to digits resting beside the text. Numbers, lists, or digits also give an idea to the readers that what type of content is written in the blog and provides them a quick scan of the content.
Examples of number headlines
- ‘5 tips to rank better in google’
- ‘6 amazing facts about web designing’
- ‘10 reasons to hire a Local SEO company’
- ‘13 ways to leverage technology’
- ‘5 secrets of healthy aging’
- ‘10 ideas for selecting the blog topics’
- ‘9 trending techniques of app development’
- ‘4 impactful SEO strategies’
- ‘15 methods to attract visitors’
Tips, facts, reasons, ways, secrets, ideas, techniques, strategies, facts, and methods are some of the most important words, you can use to craft headlines.
- How to… headlines
These are simple but most impactful headlines. If your audience is searching for how to do something, then creating a headline that will let them know that their queries will be addressed in this blog gets the most important points. How to… headlines usually are very useful for attracting people as they address their queries.
For example, many people are concerned about their weight and want to get rid of their obesity as early as possible, so you can write a blog with the title ‘How to lose weight in just a month’. The people searching for ways to reduce their weight will definitely visit this blog.
- Personal experiences headlines
Headlines that share your personal experiences are most likely to be visited. It tells a story and makes the viewers curious about how you came across it. For example, ‘How I stopped checking my phone and using it effectively?’ This headline will make the users curious to know what you actually did.
- The Secret… headlines
As we learned curiosity plays an important role, so we can build headlines triggering this emotion. The headlines telling secrets are the best example of it.
- Resource related headlines
If you are writing informative or lengthy blogs, you can craft their title begging with the word ‘ultimate’.
For example, ‘the ultimate guide to rank better on Google’.
Include target keywords
As discussed above to craft an SEO-friendly headline incorporating target keywords is a must. This will help the blog to rank better and generate traffic. Usage of relevant keywords makes your topic understandable to the users as well as the search engine. People usually search for many queries on Google. These queries also act as long-tail keywords that perform better than the focused keywords. So, you use those queries as your title too.
When you go for focused keywords, define your primary and secondary keywords. So, the structure of your title should be:
Text <primary keyword> text < secondary keyword>
For example, in the title ‘How to write SEO-friendly title that will generate traffic’; here, ‘SEO-friendly’ is your primary keyword, and “generate traffic’ is the secondary keyword. Crafting your title in such a way will make it more compelling to the users.
Learn more about how to approach keyword research and how to search keywords for creating content.
Keep the title short and sweet
Your post title will be the title tag that appears in the search results; therefore, it is good to keep it below Google’s display limit of 70 characters. So, that the complete title will be seen on the result page. Lengthy titles will be overwhelming as well not seen completely on the result page. This increases the chances of viewers skipping those blogs as they won’t be able to read the whole title.
But you should also not keep the title too short as it will not be appealing to the viewers.
For example, ‘Writing a great title’ and ‘How to come up with a good title’ are the headings with the same intent but the second one is more appealing than the first. So, it is better to craft a heading with a moderate length. Some bloggers believe an ideal title to be of eight to ten words, which is a good thumb rule.
The content marketing strategies keep emerging every day, so it becomes difficult to keep a track of what works and what doesn’t. But writing high-quality content is always important and headlines are an integral part of this content. The headline plays an important role as it is the first thing read by the viewers and hence it should be crafted well to be able to create a great impact on readers and push them to read the content further.
Remember that becoming a great blogger is a long process and writing a great blog post headline is a part of that process. It takes time and effort to come up with a great headline and become effective at it.
But the point is, you only get one chance to impress your viewer and as your title defines the content you have written in the blog; it should be impactful.
Want more ideas! Here is our blog on how to find blog topics that might help you.
