Remember back in the day when you walked by a newsstand and were stopped by a headline on the front page? More than likely, you bought the paper to read the article. That’s how newspapers depended on sales – the sensationalism of their headlines.
That still holds true today. However, now more than ever, this applies to your blog. There is content overload everywhere. You’re not just competing with your industry competitors for a social media user’s attention. You’re competing with the kids, grand kids, friends, family, other pages, and people they’ve liked, politics, breaking news, causes, etc., etc., etc. Moreover, you want your enticing heading to stand out in the search engine results page (SERP) — you want to get that click-through, which will lead to a conversion. Add to that the AI search bots, but they look for something different. They’re looking for CONTEXT.
Elements of Good Headlines:
They…
are written for the human reader with the search engine in mind. It has to have the focus keyword of the article in it, yet its main purpose is to entice the reader.
have the right number of words – not too long that it gets cut off in the SERP.
have to have the 4 types of words: Power, Emotional, Common, and Uncommon.
What?!
OK, here’s a cool tool that will help you write awesome, powerful, enticing headlines. For free, you get 10 credits a month.
Consequently, it will give you a score for your headline. Ideally, you want to get over 70. What’s more, it’s free, and you can try rewording your headline until you get a high score. Sometimes inserting or removing a word or two will make the difference. However, don’t break your brain trying to get a 90 each time. Sometimes, just because of grammar, you’ll be in the 70s. As long as it makes sense to the human reader and it’s the topic of your article, go with it.
Additionally, be wary of not sounding like clickbait. Too much sensationalism without the delivery in the article will hurt you in the long run.
What do the AI Search Bots look for?
The AI Search Bots are looking for context. They are answering questions. Thus, they look for what’s known as the “entity” or topic. For example, the title of this article has both “headlines” and “blog”. Basically, the AI bot wants to know what this is about. Check out my articles on AI Search:
Giselle Aguiar is a social media, inbound and content marketing strategist and trainer helping business owners learn how to leverage the power of social media marketing, increase traffic to their websites, generate leads, increase brand awareness and establish themselves as experts in their fields.
