Every day, valuable articles go to waste because they’re introduced by lazy titles.
There are over 500 million blogs worldwide, and they publish over 200 million articles a day. With competition at its all-time high, gaining and maintaining readership can feel hopeless.
This is why writing a catchy title is crucial. Catchy not as in “clickbait” but as in one that piques curiosity and encourages someone to click based on genuine interest.
Just as a well-written article is wasted when paired with a boring title, a brilliant title is useless unless its content is useful.
Readers may click on it, but they’ll leave immediately. This increases your bounce rate, which is a significant factor in Google’s rankings.
It may sound like overkill, but coming up with blog title ideas for your article should take almost as long as writing the article itself. Your blog title accounts for as much as 50 percent of your blog post’s success. That’s why it’s so important.
How to Come Up With a Catchy Blog Title
Showcase the Value
People don’t click on headlines unless they offer a clear benefit. Your article might be an illuminating masterpiece. Unfortunately, no one will ever know about it if you don’t clearly describe its value with an intriguing headline.
Don’t be afraid of having “spoilers” in your title. Your audience needs to know exactly what’s in store for them. The title should make a promise to your readers that you go on to concisely answer with quality content.
To do this, you need to understand your readers, the problems they face, and the solutions you can provide for them. Once you know you have a valuable solution, thinking of a blog title idea that’s catchy is simple. It comes down to describing it with adjectives that...
Evoke an Emotional Response
People are emotional beings. No matter how much we like to believe we think rationally, we often don’t. People can be urged to act instinctively. If you know the right “catchy” words to use in your headlines, you can use this to your advantage.
This practice may sound questionable or even immoral to you, but it’s not about misleading your readers. Using powerful words that tap into your readers’ emotions helps them decide which content is most important for them. It’s what they want.
Plus, if your content doesn’t grab the attention of your readers, someone else’s will. The best emotions to tap into are the strongest ones, especially fear, anger, and surprise. You can also make your content seem urgent, preventing readers from ignoring it until later.
Here’s a list of catchy words for eliciting an emotional response:
Make it Distinct
An easy way to ensure your title is unique and specific is to include numbers in it. For example, “4 Steps for Writing Titles” is more specific than “How to Write Titles”. This helps ensure your readers know what to expect when they click on your blog headline.
Another reason to make your title distinct is to differentiate it from the rest of the articles competing for the same keywords. Think about it from a reader’s perspective. If a search engine results page has ten articles with virtually identical titles, they’re probably going to click on the top result.
You can beat out results initially ranked above yours by making your blog title unique. This can mean unusual phrases, puns, and anything creative you can think of to make your title one-of-a-kind.
Include SEO Keywords
Lastly, no blog title is complete without optimizing it for SEO. Your title is the single most important part of an article for SEO. It should include your focus keyword(s) as early in it as possible.
When choosing your focus keywords, consider important factors like search volume and keyword difficulty. You’ll want to choose a keyword that has enough monthly searches to make it worth targeting (say, 1,000) but that isn’t too difficult to rank for.
It’s okay to include more than one focus keyword, but remember that the priority is to engage potential readers. Trying to include too many keywords in your blog title can make it tedious to read.
Did You Know?
SEO Title Tags vs. Article Titles (Headlines)
Did you know that your articles have two types of headlines? For example, the headline at the top of this page reads “4 Steps for Writing Irresistible Titles That Captivate Your Readers”. This is not the title that appears on search engine results pages.
Look at the tab at the top of your browser and you’ll see the title “How to Write Catchy Blog Titles in 4 Simple Steps”. This is what appears on search engine results pages and is known as an “SEO title tag”. Note that the two can be different. Use this to your advantage to include variations of your focus keywords in your titles.
Why You Shouldn’t Use a Blog Title Generator
There are thousands of blog title generators and clickbait title generators out there, but leading blog authors don’t use any of them. Artificial Intelligence isn’t advanced enough for that yet. Computers don’t understand how our brains work, and there’s no blog title generator algorithm complicated enough to produce compelling titles.
Besides, you should take pride in writing the headline for your articles just as you take pride in writing the articles themselves. Writing is meant to be a fulfilling process that takes work. It shouldn’t ever come down to ones and zeros.
The Bottom Line on Picking a Blog Title
Writing a blog title can be an arduous process, and it should be. It’s critical to the success of any blog post. Your blog title needs to clearly tell your audience what benefits they will gain from reading it. It must include emotionally powerful words that seize their attention.
You also have to include priority keywords you want to rank for, that way search engines recognize your article’s relevance for those words and phrases.
With so much competition, following these rules isn’t enough to ensure your articles will rank, but it will give them a fighting chance. When you back your engaging titles with solid prose, you’re doing a better job than 95 percent of the competition. To do a better job than 99 percent, contact us today.
