We all know that headlines is a major player on your website. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make one headline that would work perfectly for SEO purposes, social media and your website’s actual visitors. These are all very different audiences and your goals for each audience group is different, which makes it more challenging. Obviously, your headlines is not just there to help you rank higher on Google’s search result list, it should also be engaging enough to work for your social media accounts and it should be friendly to your site visitors too.
Let’s try to focus on each type of audience more closely.
- Headlines for SEO purposes:When it comes to search engine optimization, you want your headlines to achieve many things. These goals include improving your website ranking and increasing your click-through rate. A good click-through rate means that when people search for certain keywords, they keep choosing your pages out of many websites that are on the search result list. You also want to keep your pogo-sticking rate at a minimum. In SEO, pogo-stick refers to when people ‘reject’ your content, go back to the search results, and find another website page because your content was not good enough. You want your headlines to be engaging. Through your headlines, you want to create and build more links if possible.
- Headlines for Social Media:Managing headlines for social media is a lot more challenging than it is for SEO in many ways. Your goal here is to create headlines that is interesting and contains basically most of the story, as much as possible. The main goal here is to generate more clicks, comments and interaction on your social media pages. You won’t have to worry about pogo-sticking here; it doesn’t matter even if they don’t read the whole article through – they just have to click, be engaged and interactive. For social media purposes, you’d also want your headlines to be amplified so that it can be easily shared to any social media platform.
- Headline Goals for Visitors of Your SiteIt is a fact that social media management and SEO are done to drive traffic into the website. However, you also have different headline goals for the site. You want visitors to feel comfortable, engaged, and you want them to trust your site enough to keep coming back. You want them to not just be visitors but buyers as well. You want to avoid situations wherein people refrain from clicking on your links and visiting your site because your headlines look like clickbait.
Conflicts Among the Three Channels
Unfortunately, these three audiences we are targeting do not always sit well with each other in terms of headlines. For one, when you think SEO-wise, you need keywords and these must be applied to your headlines too. However, when you try to incorporate a keyword-rich headline to social media, it would bore someone to death. So, while you succeed in the SEO aspect with flying colors, your social media aspect can be a complete failure.
Succeeding in the social media aspect means having a flair for mystery – basically using the headlines to tell the entire story without actually doing so. It’s almost impossible to target keywords with these.
Also, if you apply click-bait headlines that works well on your social media for your website, your website visitors aren’t going to like it. When your visitors aren’t happy, they aren’t coming back and that might affect your ranking.
Headline Solution
We definitely need to find a way to resolve these conflicts between the three in order to create the perfect headline. Here are some ways you can resolve these issues:
Step 1: Know your main audience.
Once you have determined that, you can focus on your main goals and you can prioritize the most important channel among the three. When you’re looking at a headline, you can determine if it is meant to drive traffic to your site, or if it is better for social media purposes. Some can also be good for SEO purposes. It’s all about determining which ones works for each channel and type of audience.
Step two: Focus on the most demanding channel
Keep in mind that for SEO purposes, the page title and the headline doesn’t really need to match perfectly. Of course, you could be in trouble if the two are completely different, but there are just small differences, it’s pretty much okay.
Step three: Be straightforward
As much as possible, go for the most straightforward version first, when it comes to headlines. Keep it informative and engaging but simple.
Step four: Write Freely
Once you’ve covered the straightforward ones, you can now freely write the headlines that are bound to be a hit for clicks on social media. You do not have to worry about the keywords yet and there shouldn’t be many things you have to consider at this point. The rest of the considerations will be done in the following step anyway.
Step five: Use steps 3 and 4 and add keywords
Now that you have the straightforward version and the click-bait version, it’s time to merge the two and add in the keywords. Compromises will have to be made in terms of audience, goals and keywords. However, once you’ve mixed these three elements together, you’d arrive at the headline that would work for all.
If you initially thought that writing the perfect headlines that could work for all three channels was impossible, think again. It’s totally possible with these five simple steps. This is the easiest way to create engaging and interesting headlines that would keep people clicking and visiting your website, all the while making it work SEO-wise too.
Your goals for each channel need not clash against each other. After all, they all lead to your main goal which is driving traffic and conversion. It’s definitely possible to manage the headline conflicts among social media, SEO and your website content channels. How soon are you willing to try it?
