Hey everybody it’s Rich SEO Guy and in today’s post, I’ll be showing you how to write a headline that will raise your CTR (Click Through Rate). My clients asked me this question from time to time and I’ll show you the tools I use as well as some tricks I suggest that works! All right without saying anymore let’s begin. If you’d like to watch the video version of my post you can check out how to write headlines video.
Why Do I need to Raise my CTR?
At the end of the day, it’s all about conversions. With organic searches, what’s going to matter are eyeballs to your website. The best way is through listings and if they’re boring, bland, and lackadaisical then you won’t get clicks. It’s that simple. Whatever product or service you’re selling won’t ever get to a chance to convince anyone why they need you. Let’s see an example below for “how to write headlines for blogs” and what goes into a listing.
Above are the top 4 listings Google highly recommends to their users for that specific keyword phrase. The first thing you’ll notice is how click-worthy they are. There are different strategies and you’ll see them laid out here. These include Top/Best x number subject, how to’s, and guides. Those tend to do very well. And within these listings are the Title and Metadescription. This post focuses on headline titles but if you’d like a guide on metadescriptions shoot me a message and I’ll get it going.
Step by Step Headline Writing Guide
Step 1: Write Down Your Objective
Let’s give you some background information. Let’s say you plan on starting a boho style e-commerce site and you want to attract clients with information they may find helpful. The first step is to your phrase like this, “For my blog post I want to ____________.” Fill in the blank with a descriptive objective.
The reason it’s imperative is going to be clear when you open your keyword research report because it is going to be overwhelming when you see all the keywords out there. In this scenario, your objective would is “I want to create a post that will help boho fashionistas.”
Step 2: Choose your Keyword
The second step would be choosing your keyword. Here’s an example of a keyword report I made for one of my clients. If you don’t have one shoot me a message and let’s discuss. If you’re using a different tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush, the same concept applies.
What you want to do is to filter for the middle or the longtail keyword. With SEMRush or Ahrefs, what you could do is filter by word count. Generally, 3-4 words for a middle term and anything greater than 4 words would be categorized as a longtail.
If you want to be a little more creative then I suggest going with the middle term but if you’re lazy like me and time is of the essence then filter for the longtail keywords. The longtail keywords are already partially done for you since the search intent is more clear. Remember, your primary objective is to create a fashion guide. I say this because it’s easy to be overwhelmed with all the keywords and lose focus. Whatever your objective is going to be key and that’s what brought you here to the keyword research report.
Let’s look through the keywords and find the ones that have both high volume and low competition. As you can see the report’s already ranked from the highest volume to the lowest so we do not need to scroll too much. Looking at this I like ‘how to wear boho bandeau’ at 170 searches a month and a competition score of 71. If you look right above it ‘how do wear boho headbands’ sees 40 searches more but it’s slightly more competitive therefore will go with the easier one.
Step 3: Open Headline Analyzer
Now using this tool called the headline analyzer by Co schedule let’s try to come up with an awesome headline. What it does is analyze your headline within seconds and assigns you a score from 0 to 100 (100 being best). It tells you the headline type, the ideal number of characters, and the right amount of words so it doesn’t get truncated in the SERPs. In addition to all these great features, it’s also free which is a major plus for me. All you need to give them your contact information and the tool is all yours.
For the example of the Boho Store, let’s do ‘How To Wear Boho Bandeu | The Look You’ll Love’. Once it finishes analyzing the generator gave us a headline score of 76. It also covered all our bases with word balance in common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. Typically you can spend all day trying to get it to a high 90 but because time is of the essence what you really want is to get it in the green which is anything above a 70.
Pro tip: Anything above a 70 is good to go 💪🏻
Step 4: Check the SERPs
There are two problems checking the SERPs solve. The first one is if you’re looking for inspiration or have no idea whatsoever to write for a headline. The other is to see what works and what doesn’t much as I did at the beginning of this post. Type in your targeted keyword and see what pops up. Chances are you’ll get an idea as to how competitive the keywords are based on the title and metadescription optimizations (or lack thereof). You also want to check their Domain Authority score. If the top 10 are high then it’s going to be competitive and some are low, then that tells you got a chance of entering the first page.
Check Zeo SERP Preview
Another tool I like to use is the SERP Preview Tool. After using the Headline Analyzer for some time, you will get a good idea of what kind of headlines rank well. When you get to that point then a tool I like to use is the Zeo SERP Preview tool. It may not analyze your headline but it shows you what your headline and meta descriptions look like in real-time. What I like is it shows instantly in both desktop view and mobile view which is pretty cool.
Summary
And that’s all folks! We’ve come to the end of the post and if you found it helpful please share my post or leave a comment if you’ve got a question. I promise I’ll have more like these if you found it helpful. As you know I’m looking to start my own agency and with your support, it would make my life goal closer to reality. Thanks for reading and take it easy!
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