If you love to write, but writing effective headlines seems to evade you, you’re certainly not alone. Like every group project in college ever, it’s hard getting headlines for SEO, social media, and website visitors to work together all at once.
Luckily for us, the SEO wizard himself, Rand Fishkin, has served up a highly-digestible tutorial on how to create a headline that cater to multiple audiences and goals.
It starts with first understanding what each headline needs to accomplish. Naturally, keywords for SEO can be really boring on social media sites and perform poorly. But clickbait-style headlines popular on social media run the brand reputation of your website. Just to name a couple conflicts…
To help you through these issues, Rand’s made a step-by-step list of an effective headline writing process. Here’s just a snippet:
- Step 1: Determine who your primary audience is, your primary goals, and some prioritization of those channels.
- Step 2: For non-conflict elements, optimize for the most demanding channel.
- Step 3: Author the straightforward headline first.
- Step 4: Now write the social-friendly/click-likely version without other considerations.
- Step 5: Merge 3 & 4, and add in critical keywords.
Dive in for way more detail and an example that’ll make you realize, whoa…they can all work together.
