How to write great blog post titles that boost traffic
Did you know one of the most important parts of your blog post is your title? Yep, you have only a few moments to grab your reader’s attention with your title and get them to actually read the post. If they don’t click on it to read it, nothing you put inside matters.
It doesn’t matter how awesome your content is, or how much it could help your reader. It doesn’t matter what you have to offer or what great affiliate links you have. If you can’t get them to read it, the blog post doesn’t do much good for anyone.
Your title also matters to your SEO. It can determine whether or not you get ranked on google and other search engines. Yes, to make it even more difficult, Your title MUST BE attention-grabbing and have good keywords.
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How do you write great blog post titles?
No worries though, with practice it becomes easier.
So, How do you go about writing a good, attention-grabbing blog post title then? I suggest you start with an ok, working title for your post, create your content, then come back and work on the finalizing your headline, using the tips below.
Make it Interesting and But don’t oversell
You want to write an attention-grabbing headline, but avoid the temptation to hype it up or stretch the truth. While that may get you some extra clicks, there’s a trade-off. You’ll lose credibility.
You need to make good on your promises, or any reader that comes through will be disappointed and you won’t gain trust with your readers or authority in your niche. Instead, try making it interesting without all the hype and stick to the truth. A great way to do that is to think “what’s in it for my readers.”
Keep It Short but Engaging
Short titles tend to get more clicks on both social media and on blogs themselves. Keep it short but engaging. Try asking your readers a question or make a statement that makes them stop and think, or something that provokes an emotion. Put numbers in your titles to get them thinking about what’s in the content (such as… The 10 Best Ways to…..)
The rule of thumb is to try to keep it 8-10 words if you can. Although this isn’t a hard and fast rule, much more than this will cause people to loose interest. Keep in mind, most people on the internet are lazy readers, and tend to skim.
Use your keywords
Last but not least, don’t forget to work your keywords into the title. Try to write for your readers first and then work in what you need to do to make sure search engines understand what your article is about.
Ranking well for something your readers don’t want to read or don’t want to click on doesn’t do you much good. Focus on your audience and then optimize for search. This will help you most.
Keep in mind
Make sure to pay attention to what’s working for you, and what’s not. Study which posts get get clicks, and even try changing up your titles to see if you get more engagement.
If you are using Pinterest, this is a great way to see what titles grab attention and which don’t. Make several pins for the same article and change out the wording and titles to them. See which ones are getting your readers to click through. This is a great, and easy way to test what interests your readers most.
Example of the power of titles
I want to show you one way that I personally have seen success through changing a title. I wrote a postpartum healing post called “How to Heal Faster Postpartum.” I took a really long time to write the article, put a lot of research into, it’s a subject that I am passionate about and have experience in. But it wasn’t getting any attention on Pinterest. (My main source for driving traffic at this point.”
So I made a new pin, and titled it “9 things to help you heal faster postpartum, that you haven’t heard of.”
It works because it has a few key aspects.
- A number
- It helps my readers solve a problem
- It has unique information they haven’t read (a bit click-baity, but I feel there is a lot of unique info in there that many new mamas haven’t heard of, I’m comfortable saying I held up my promise.)
Within 3 days my traffic went from 2 per day to that post, to 10,000 a day. Of course, there were a lot of factors that went into this, but my title was super tempting to my readers. So I got a lot of clicks. My traffic, of course, died off from its viral spike, but it remains constant and usually brings in somewhere between 300-1000 views on an average day.
Time to Take Action
Action Tip 1#: Look for titles that catch your attention and keep a running list of your favorites. See how you can tweak them to fit your content. You can keep these in a word document, a google doc, or even print out a list of your absolute faves and tack them up on your wall for easy reference.
Action Tip 2#: Pick a certain amount of blog posts to overhaul. Maybe 5-10 at a time. Go through each one and see if you could make a better, attention-commanding title. This will help slowly boost your traffic. Keep a list on google docs of all your blog posts. Then create a column where you can keep track of the ones you have already overhauled. Then over the course of a few weeks, you can slowly update them.
Action Tip 3#: Create a few new pins for some of your posts. Start with ones you put a lot of effort and info into. Give them a complete overhaul and awesome, catchy titles. Then throw them on Pinterest and see if they start getting better traction.
Action Tip 4#: Use the tools below to help inspire your great blog titles! Remember to save your favorites in a running list for inspiration later!
- Hubspot’s Blog Traffic Generator
- Inbound Now’s Blog Title Idea Generator
- Co-Schedules Headline Analyzer
*Please note, that as fun and useful as these tools are, they are not human. So it’s important to experiment and find what works for you!
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