Are you having trouble getting traffic to your website? Without traffic, all your efforts spent researching and writing a great blog post can go to waste. 

You come up with a terrific article after spending so much time in research and writing a single piece. It will be heart-breaking if it’s not getting enough traffic since you put so much effort into it.

Generating compelling headlines is an easy method to get more traffic and visitors to your website. Writing eye-catching headlines for your website copy, articles, and blogs is an art. You must accomplish it precisely to get more visitors and increase your revenue.

In this article, we'll share 8 tips on how to write great headlines that can attract visitors, drive more clicks, and help generate more revenue.

Take inspiration from Google SERPs

When writing a piece of content, do some keyword research to have an idea of what web visitors type into Google to find information. After you've done thorough research on the keyword(s) you want to target, look at the search engine results page (SERP) to find out which articles you're up against. 

To get ranked on Google’s first page and be a real competitor, you’ll require a comprehensive understanding of the content type that already exists. 

Analyzing Google SERPs will help you identify the type of headlines that are working. You can take inspiration from that and create similar types of headlines, instead of reinventing the wheel. 

Highlight benefits

Before selecting whether or not to click on an article, readers ask themselves what they are going to get out of it. Writing a promising headline that highlights benefits makes it clear to your readers that there is something in your piece of writing that is beneficial for them. 

The value a reader can expect from clicking through and reading your headline should be indicated in the headline. Top content accomplishes one or more of the following goals:

  • Entertain
  • Engage
  • Empower
  • Enrich
  • Educate
  • Inform
  • Inspire
  • Provide an answer to a question

When a reader chooses to read your post and devote their time and attention to it, they've already created expectations based on the benefit your title promised. Make it clear how your reader will benefit — which can help increase clicks — but don't make any unrealistic promises.

Use numbers

Using numbers and data in your headlines can also help significantly. Numbers catch our attention and cause us to halt in a sea of text. The effective method to get more visitors to read your content is to incorporate numbers and data into your headline. 

We recall numbers because they aid in the organization of information in our brain. According to a study by Conductor, headlines with numbers are more likely to generate social shares and attention. The results of the study showed that headlines with numbers lead the preference chart at 36%. 

It means that adding numbers in your headlines can help you outperform your competitors who don’t.

Be careful with superlatives

A superlative is a strong adjective that can have a big impact on how people react to your headlines. Superlatives like biggest, greatest, and best have a lot of impact on headlines. However, negative superlatives (such as least) can also be very effective. 

Positive superlatives performed 29 percent worse than negative superlatives in the study, whereas negative superlatives performed 30 percent better. 

For example, here are some common superlatives for “people” for instance:

  • The most successful people
  • The happiest people
  • The most fascinating people

Use power words to make an emotional bond

Words have a direct impact on our physical and emotional well-being. Emotional headlines constantly outshine neutral headlines every time. Elicit emotions in your readers by implementing power words in your headlines to make an emotional connection. The most effective emotive headlines aim for:

  • Happiness
  • Love
  • Fear
  • Anger
  • Disgust
  • Affirmation
  • Hope

You can use these power words whenever you need to make your text more engaging and captivating. Keep in mind, however, that emotional headlines should be used with discretion. You don't want to slip into the clickbait trap of failing to deliver on your promises to your readers. 

Include keywords, brand names, and experts’ names, whenever possible

Using names of popular brands and famous industry experts’ headlines is a proven strategy. If any expert or professional has contributed to your content, it’s a good idea to mention that in the title of the content. A simple technique like this can help increase your credibility and views. 

Ideally, the name of the expert or brand should be easily recognizable in your industry or niche. This is a prerequisite for this strategy to work. The names you choose to display in your headlines should also be relevant to the target audience for your brand.

Use software and tools to refine headlines

There are many online tools and software available that can help you refine your headlines and can prove to be the difference between a good and a fantastic headline. 

Use these free tools for brainstorming and analysis, not as a substitute for a headline written by a human. Some free tools available online to improve headlines are:

Test and monitor

“Headline testing” is the process of creating many headline options for an article which may then be tested on a variety of audience groups to see which one performs best. Set up and conduct A/B tests to improve a blog’s headline for statistics like total clicks, user engagement, social media shares, and other relevant metrics. The poor-performing headlines can then be excluded.

Test out a headline to see if you would click it. For this exercise to be valid, it’s important to take on the role of your readers and examine whether your title might pique their interest. Based on the results you get, you can identify the headlines and the type of headlines that resonate the most with your audience. This information can not only be used for a specific post but the lessons you learn from these tests can be implemented across the board: social media posts, future content, email subject lines, etc.

It’s important to note that A/B testing headlines should be a continuous process. The split tests can be conducted before or after publishing the post. It is a continuous process to optimize your content (headlines, in this case) and improve performance over time.

Conclusion

These headline writing tips may help you get more traffic and clicks. On average, 6 out of 10 individuals simply look at the headlines before sharing them on social sites. Only 49% claimed to have read the entire article. 

That is the importance of headline and why it plays a critical role in the success or failure of website content. 

The tips mentioned in this article should help refine your headlines, make them more captivating and engaging, and drive more traffic, clicks, and revenue.