What are good blog post titles? We’ve all been there. You spend the best part of a morning agonising over creating the perfect, most unmissable blog post. It ticks all the boxes of your content strategy in terms of being relevant, informative, topical to your readership, keyword-rich and rounded off with a punchy call-to-action. It’s time to hit publish, but you still haven’t come up with a compelling blog post title.
A blog by any other name would smell as sweet, but would it do an effective job in enticing readers to find and engage with it? This post weaves in findings from the Content Marketing Institute and offers some tried and trusted methods of effective blog post title writing.
1. Research keywords
It might require a radical change in the way you develop content, but try to come up with blog post titles before even starting to write. Assuming your SEO strategy is already in place, take the time to align your blog headlines with overall SEO tactics. If you’re struggling to decide between two words or phrases, turn to Google AdWords keyword tool for guidance.
2. Place keywords at the start of titles
Another SEO best practice tip is to use keywords at or near the beginning of your headline; readers tend to make the decision on whether to read on or not before even getting to the end of a post title.
3. Don’t mislead just to encourage clicks
However tempting it might be to create sensational headlines, this practice is best left to the tabloids. Blogs that fail to live up to dazzling titles will only alienate and confuse readers, resulting in the dreaded high bounce rate and possibly damaging your online reputation. Interestingly, CMI research finds that titles including people or brand names experienced 47% less traffic than average titles. Focus on topics and statistics that apply directly to your target niche and the right people will be far more likely to engage.
4. Create numbered list titles
Despite inwardly groaning when I see yet another numbered list blog post, if it’s relevant to my interests I simply can’t help but click. And it seems I’m not alone: blog titles that begin with a number outperform the average by 45%. The results are better still when a keyword is added before the number, as exemplified in the title to this post.
5. Don’t struggle alone
Composing killer blog post titles is a labour of love. You need to create something compelling, communicate what the blog content is about, include keywords and adhere to your brand’s keyword strategy. There’s only so much time a person can spend tied to a thesaurus. If you’re really grappling with finding the right words, there’s no shame in turning to your editorial team, sales team or even frontline staff for ideas. You’ll probably be amazed by what a fresh approach can achieve.
Over to you
Do you have certain tactics that you apply to creating blog post titles? How are they working for you?
