Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers?

Do you leave it until the last minute to write your blog titles?
Are your headlines an afterthought?

One of the weakest areas of my blogging is my headline writing. I try, I really do and I know I’ve improved over the years but I also know I’m still not writing brilliant blog titles.

Your blog headline is important wherever it appears. On search engines, it’s your title that will encourage readers to click through, it’s what we share on Twitter when we share a post. On Facebook it’s less prominent but it’s still a strong selling point.

Over the years I’ve read bundles of articles on writing better titles, I’ve tried lots of tools and I’ve picked up some tips. I just need to put them into action.

I’ve picked six of these tips and tested them in this week’s episode of the Blogcentric podcast. Today’s title is one of 3 that I selected from my experiments.

Listen to 6 Tips For Creating Better Blog Titles Below

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Let’s start with the basics:

Your headline needs to accurately reflect the content of your post.

It’s easy to get carried away and write a headline designed to get people to click. Of course, people will click but if your post doesn’t reflect the promise in the title they’ll leave again, really quickly.

I’ve made this mistake. I recently updated a lot of my Facebook advertising posts and changed the headlines for some of them. I was focussing on writing good headlines and didn’t stop to think if they completely matched the post.

One of those was for a blog post about the 20% text rule for Facebook ads. The title I can up with was ‘How To Beat The 20% Text Rule for Facebook boosted posts’

It was a comment on my blog that pointed out that this was misleading. My post showed you how to comply not how to beat. I took on the feedback and changed the blog title.

Click bait headlines are also bad for getting readers. Both Google and Facebook will penalise your content if people who visit your site leave immediately. It suggests that your content didn’t match the promise.

Here are just a few bits of advice I’ve gleaned over the years for writing better blog headlines:

Headlines that work should:

Include your keyword
Include power words
Include emotion
Talk about mistakes
Include numbers
Include ‘how to’ in the title

In my experiment, I tried each of these tactics. And I used this podcast episode as a guinea pig.

1. Keywords

I’m not going to go into detail on selecting keywords today, that’s for a future episode but you should have a list of key phrases that you’d like to get found for on Google.

These keyphrases are a good start when you are looking for content ideas. I did some basic keyword research recently to brainstorm topics for this podcast.

My keyphrase for today’s post could be:

‘blog title ideas’
‘blog titles’
‘catchy blog titles’
‘blog headlines’

According to my research, it’s important that I include this in my headline. And according to the Search Engine Optimisation plugin I use I should put it as close to the beginning of my post as possible.

Here goes:

How To Generate Blog Title Ideas for you business
Writing catchy blog titles for your business blog
How to write catchy blog titles

There’s a really cool tool I use ‘Emotional Value Headline Analyser‘ that gives my headlines a score, on how emotive my headlines are. The idea is that the more a title taps into emotion the more likely you are to click.

A good score is over 30%. Apparently this is the level of professional copywriters.

A very good score is over 50%. This makes you a giften copywriter.

How did my 3 titles fare?

How to generate blog ideas for your business gets a score of 33.33%
Writing catchy blog titles for your business blog a lousy 12.5%
How to write catchy blog titles – it also gets 33.33%

Based on this I tried 2 more:

How to attract readers with catchy blog titles is better 37.50%
How to attract your ideal readers with catchy blog titles 40%

That final one is the winner of round 1

2. Using Power Words

I searched the internet for the term ‘Power Words’ but found very little to define it. The internet does seem to agree that they are effective at getting people to take action.

So if I can’t define power words how can I find out what they are? I found this post from Boost Blog Traffic that lists 317 power words and I chose 5 of these from the list.

Conquer
Magic
Tantalising
Jackpot
Confessions

Here are the headlines I created and their emotional value scores:

Confessions of a lazy blog headline writer 14.29%
Hitting the blog title jackpot 20%
How to inspire magical blog title ideas 28.57%
How to conquer blog headline writing 33.33%
An insiders guide to writing better blog titles 0%

‘How to conquer blog headline writing’ was the winner here but not as impressive a winner as the last round.

3. Include emotion

I found this kind of hard but here are the 3 I came up with:

Are Your Blog Titles Letting You Down? 28.57%
Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers? 50%
How to brainstorm blog title ideas that keep your readers coming back for more. 28.57%

There’s a clear winner in this round:

‘Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers?’

4. Mistakes

Writing about your mistakes or common mistakes is a good tactic to get people clicking in. Readers want to know that they aren’t making the mistakes.

I know this is effective, I recently listened to an episode of the ProBlogger podcast “5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO and What to Do About Them” and have been feverishly working away at rectifying my mistakes ever since.

I only tried one headline here. This post isn’t about mistakes so it was hard to come up with more.

My Biggest Blogging Mistake – Blog Title Neglect 0%

I know I could do better if I was to write a post focusing on mistakes. But there is no score on this tip for me.

5. Adding Numbers

List posts are everywhere, I bet you can’t scroll through Twitter for longer than a minute without finding one. I already use numbers a lot. Not just because they work in blog titles but also because they help me write.

If I know I’m writing a list post I have a built in structure to work with. This post has 6 tactics so it is relatively easy to add a number to titles:

6 Ways to write better headlines 16.67%
6 tips for writing better blog titles 0%
6 Secrets for sensational blog title ideas 28.57%

I like that last one. It didn’t score well but I’m going to choose it anyway as I like the alliteration.

6. Include ‘How To’ in the title

I know this works, my how to posts and tutorials always appear in my top trafficed and shared posts. I already added ‘how to’ to title ideas above and one of those was a winner so I’m not going to add more.

The 3 titles I’ve chosen are:

Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers?
6 Secrets for sensational blog title ideas
How to attract your ideal readers with catchy blog titles

I’ve chosen option 1 as my main headline but am alternating between the 3 when sharing on social media.

Thanks to CopyBlogger for this great post that in part inspired today’s podcast.

Summary

Here are the six pieces of advice I followed:

Include your keyword
Include power words
Include emotion
Talk about mistakes
Include numbers
Include ‘how to’ in the title

And the results:

I created lots of potential titles during the process. I fed each one through the ‘Emotional Value Headline Analyser’ and chose 3, mostly high scoring titles.

How to generate blog title ideas for your business
Writing catchy blog titles for your business blog
How to write catchy blog titles
How to attract readers with catchy blog titles
How to attract your ideal readers with catchy blog titles
Hitting the blog title jackpot
How to inspire magical blog title ideas
How to conquer blog headline writing
An insider’s guide to writing better blog titles
Are your blog titles letting you down?
Could your blog titles be losing you readers?
How to brainstorm blog title ideas that keep your readers coming back for more
My biggest blogging mistake – Blog title neglect
6 Ways to write better headlines
6 tips for writing better blog titles
6 Secrets for sensational blog title ideas

And the winners are:

My plan is to create 3 good headlines that I can use when sharing my blog posts on social media. Here are the 3 I chose from the list above.

Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers?
6 Secrets for sensational blog title ideas
How to attract your ideal readers with catchy blog titles

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Your Challenge:

Follow my process and create 3 titles for your next blog post.

I’d love to hear what you come up with so if you want to share leave me a comment below with your headlines and let me know which one worked best.

Could Your Blog Titles Be Losing You Readers? – Blogcentric #18

Listen to 6 Tips For Creating Better Blog Titles Below

Let’s start with the basics:

Your headline needs to accurately reflect the content of your post.

Here are just a few bits of advice I’ve gleaned over the years for writing better blog headlines: