How to Improve Blog Post Headlines to Get More Clicks

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Video Transcription:

Hey guys Justin Bryant here from selfmadesuccess.com and in this video I'm going to show you how to make the best headlines for your blog post.

Okay, so I'm going to show you a few ways you can do this.Obviously you need keywords.

You need words that will make people want to click your headlines, search results and you want to rank while also attracting people to see your headlines and click on them.

So, they need to really stand out while having those keywords in them so one thing I want to show you is Yahoo.

So,Yahoo has tons of news and things like that and news really creates lots of great headline ideas.

Okay, they really know how to make people click on their stuff, so if you pay attention to news sites, you will really get some great ideas on how to make a good headline and Yahoo News has one of the best places to start. 

So, if you look here you see, you know, you see things about sports, you see things about television, you see entertainment, all kinds of stuff, but you can see what makes you want to click. 

You know what really attracts you, what stands out to you, what makes you really notice a headline. 

You can go through Yahoo News and really figure that out for yourself, but that's one way to get some ideas of just breaking down a headline and seeing oh what, what really makes me want to click because see they're not really worried too much about keywords on Yahoo News, they're worried about getting you to click.

They're worried about just trying to get you on their site no matter what they need to say in the headline. So, you'll get some great ideas from Yahoo News.

Okay, second, obviously when you need to find keywords, you should be using the Google Keyword Planner tool, which if you don't already know, you go to Google AdWords, create an account, go to tools and then go to Keyword Planner and you can type in different words and it'll show you the competition, will tell you the monthly searches, suggested bid, things like that.

So, use these to find low competition keywords. I recommend your keyword phrase be at least three words, so you might look at different phrases that fit in those different things.

So,you know business is very vague. It won't get you a lot of customers because it's so broad. You need to get something specific with low competition and is at least three words long.

Your main keyword phrase for your headline and then, so we have an idea of how to structure a headline from looking at news sites, things like that.

When you have your keyword phrase ready from looking at the keyword planner from Google, go to coschedule.com/headline-analyzer. Okay and it's just coschedule.com/headline-analyzer.

They have a great headline tool that I recently discovered and I just want to really share with you guys because I think it does a great job of telling you what to work on, what your overall score is based on some good things to test your headline on and good aspects to really use towards your overall score.

And the headline analyzer is free and it's easy to use. So once you have a headline here what your headline is and I actually tested a few that I use here.

Let's say ways to be more productive just as an example okay it will analyze it for you give, you an overall score tell you what to work on.

So it's a high score that's actually pretty good but it gives you a c-minus down here because your headline is missing important words that will be necessary for readability and sharing.

So it tells you right there you need to have a headline that's easily, that's easy for people to read, it flows well it needs certain amounts of words in there that can kind of create a balance to really pop.

So to really make your headlines pop like these news sites on Yahoo, you want to have power and emotional words. And it gives you the actual description of what words look like for these.

And you can even go to their articles with tips and examples of words. But in this you can go for power so I don't have enough power words in this headline.

So power words or phrases indicate intense trigger words that frequently command attention and action. You'll notice news uses these a lot. They usually have at least one power word or phrase. 

Okay, so I don’t have any power words in this headline and I have some emotional words like“to be”. Maybe I could do better with them. It says they frequently stir an emotional response in the reader.

They have been proven to drive clicks and shares. Great ones are usually made up of ten to fifteen percent of these words. You have thirty three percent uncommon words, (more, ways) just words that don't usually end up in the sentence. 

Normal headline and then common words(to, be) you know just average words that usually just make it flow. But we need to improve this score and get to about an a-plus. 

So we need to do that while keeping our and our headline score in green which is about 70 and above. 

You need to include words from all of these categories and on top of that it gives you a headline type, which is a list or how to or things like that.

There's a lot of different ones you can check out headline types here. And they also have a character count, word count. They teach you to keep your word count under about nine or ten words.

And your headline is a bit short because it needs to be you know closer to about 35 characters or so as opposed to 29 or less. So that tells you okay this is what it's going to look like in Google results.

So you don't want to be too long to where it doesn't show the entire headline and the results. 

And it also gives you sentiment or keywords as well. So did I had a hard time detecting the keywords which is really like productivity, things like that.

Sentiment also shows a neutral settlement if it's strongly positive or strong negative it tends to perform that it creates an emotional response. The whole point of getting clicks is to create an emotional response with the reader.

People make emotional decisions. That's what you want them to do. Okay it gets them hyped up, they have to click, they have to see what's on that page. So few things we might could do.

Okay so “ways to be more productive”… We have a decent headline score but we're trying to get more balanced, we're trying to improve a few things. So how would you do this?

You know I'm just trying to do an example but ten ways to be more productive and happy. Let’s see what that says. Analyze now. 79 headline score, a-plus, nice work.

Your headline contains a good balance of word types, so now I have common words uncommon words, emotional words and power words. Okay that word count is good. 

Your headline is the right length and it's going to look good in the search results, plus it creates a positive sentiment. So all that is good. Of course it didn't really… okay let's try something else.

How about “how to increase your productivity and dominate…Increase your productivity. Well, let's just see what that says… 71. So it went down a little bit. I took away the emotional words of “happy” and “to be”.

B-plus is pretty solid, but word count, character counts are good. They look good in search results. All sentiments are neutral again. The keywords are better now.

“Increase productivity” is a better keyword, but it kind of sacrifices some other things. So“how to increase productivity”… What other words do we need? We need some uncommon, maybe some emotional words.

“How to increase your productivity and, say, “dramatically”. Okay, so dramatically didn't show up. Now it might not have… It might not be a perfect tool, but it really does help you with certain things, so if you want to increase your productivity to…

Let's see… we can do, maybe, I don't know… Words like “happy”, emotional words, you know they do really well, you need to have some of that in there. So emotional words like “productivity to be happy”… Whatever…

You know you can play around more and make it flow better, but now you have a 79, A-plus. It’s a list type, good characters, word count is good, it's a positive sentiment and has good keywords.

Okay, so it's not a perfect headline, obviously, but it helps you show, okay, what kind of headline is it, what words should you be included in this, what kind of emotional impact are you going to have on visitors when they see this headline.

So you need to figure out things like these and then have power words like “increase, happy”, things like that, and really kind of capture their attention.

And obviously it flows well when you have more common and uncommon words to go with them. 

So, you know you want to get a good headline score. You want to have a balance of all these words. It really comes down to your emotional and power words when it comes to getting clicks.

It comes to your keyword phrase that's three or more words when it comes to getting your rankings. 

Okay, so if you combine all those things, use the headline analyzer to test results, use Yahoo to get ideas of how to make things really stick out, be creative and use the keyword planner to find your keyword phrases, you'll really be able to create some great headlines and get more clicks, get better rankings for your blog.

And you can even use this for other things like YouTube videos and things like that. So if you got something from this video please like and subscribe so I can make more great videos for you like this.

If you want to add something that really helps people create good headlines or that works for you, let us know in the comments or just let us know what you thought about the video.

And if you want to contact me directly or get more in-depth information on how to create better headlines and better blog posts you can go to selfmadesuccess.com.

Other than that, I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope to see you in the next one.

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