5 ways to make your blog titles stand out & drive engagement
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
David Ogilvy, Copywriter
The two characteristics of a good headline are specificity and emotion. They need to be written with your audience in mind, and use emotional language in order to influence behaviour. Here are five tips to help you do just that.
1. Use power words and numbers to create emotion-led headlines
Your readers are HUMAN, this means that all of our decisions are driven by emotion. Decisions like ‘should I read this blog’, ‘do I trust the source of this information?’ ‘ Is this a brand I want to listen to’, “do I want to buy this product?” are all emotion-led.
Even if you are a B2B marketer.
So, it makes sense that blogs using emotional power words in their headlines usually see better conversions.
Power words are words that have strong meanings and trigger an emotional response. They are persuasive words that encourage a reader to take action. They should be considered in all marketing, but specifically:
Blog titles
Email subject lines
Ad creative
Landing pages
They can be seductive, emotional, or sensory. Take a look at some example power words. Research also shows that blog headlines that include numbers (like this very blog) generate 73% more social shares and engagement.
2. Do keyword research, using tools such as Google Keywords Planner
Before you start writing any website content, identify what keywords you want to be visible for. Keyword research helps you identify what your audiences are searching for online.
First, start with identifying the subject of your blog – and then do a complete brain dump of all of the search queries and keywords that your audience may be searching for around that topic.
Then, take to Google and research that topic to see what already comes up, and what is suggested as related search terms. Create a list of potential keywords for you to hone down on later.
Use keyword research tools to define the specific keywords that you want to target with your blog. There are a variety of tools available for varying budgets:
SEMRush
Ahrefs
Moz
Google Keyword Planner
SECockpit
KWFinder
Keywords Everywhere
For creating relevant blogs for your audience, I would recommend using ‘long-tail’ keywords – these are longer search terms that are more specific - for example ‘business blogging’ instead of ‘blogging’.
3. Have a consistent tone of voice
Now that you have defined your audience, and identified which keywords you are targeting with your blog – you need to ensure that you speak consistently with your brand tone of voice.
You don’t want to confuse people by sounding like a different person with each blog post you write.
I would recommend defining your business's tone of voice and then creating a visual prompt to keep by your desk as a reminder of how your brand speaks. This could be through creating a brand persona, or having some word prompts reminding you of how to sound in a conversation.
Are you: knowledgeable, reassuring, authoritative, funny, calming, exciting, or laid back?
After creating the bones of your blog title so you know what the CONTENT and KEYWORDS should be, then look over it to ensure that the TONE matches you. You want readers to keep coming back for more, so make sure that you are memorable.
By being yourself, you are unique – not sounding like the run-of-the-mill blog churners out there in the sea of content.
4. Keep them short – headlines should be under 60 characters or less
WHY?
Readers have incredibly short attention spans – there is so much noise out there that we decide whether we want to dedicate our attention to something in a split second. Unless we engage them, the average attention span is just eight seconds.
The headline is one of the critical first elements that help readers decide if they want to click and stay on your site. 60% of readers don't read past the headline.
Hubspot found that blog titles under 60 characters and using between 8-12 words performed better when shared through Twitter. It also means that when shown on Google SERPs (search engine results pages) the entire title is included, and not cut off.
If you ever want to check how your blog title will be displayed on search results, use SEOMofo.
5. Use AI for idea generation, then add personality and refine
AI tech can be great as a virtual assistant for your content marketing. I’m talking about Chat GPT and similar. Use it as your research and ideas personal assistant in the first stages of writing your blogs. Ask it for ideas for blog titles around your topic and see what it comes up with - then use that as a starting point to build on.
One thing you need to remember is that ChatGPT and similar are only pulling content from what’s already out there. It isn't creating unique ideas. It doesn’t have a personality. It doesn’t do market research, speak to your audiences, or know your brand inside and out. However, it can learn from your tone of voice (spooky huh?), crawl the internet for similar titles already out there, and just give you a place to start that isn’t blinking cursor syndrome.
Take some ideas from the AI, then apply all of the above concepts to it to refine it into a cracker of a blog title.
AI tech is here to stay, so use it to your advantage. I think it’s going to be a great helper for making us more time efficient, and less time spent procrastinating instead of starting that blog you told yourself you would do.
