If you’re like many content marketers, you may be missing out on a key part of a successful content strategy: excellent blog post titles. After agonizing over creating perfect, thorough, compelling content, it’s so easy to forget the title until the very last minute. We’ve all been there, and we should all be ashamed.
Sure, titles aren’t very long. Yet they are an extremely significant part of your content strategy because blog post titles — and all content titles — draw readers into your content.
If no one is reading your content, what’s the point of your wonderful call-to-action? Or your amazing compilation of 100 content marketing examples, or whatever type of content you’ve slaved over for hours? If you write a blog post and no one reads it, does it even exist?
In my last post, on creating a title report, I talked about a preliminary step to writing great titles — building a report to illuminate what the best blog post title types are for your specific audience. Yes, building a meaningful title report requires a lot of data, and a lot of time.
In this post, I’ll share some of the trends the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found in the title report we conducted, as well as some of the methods we use on a daily basis to ensure we’re writing the best blog titles possible.
Read on, and change the way you think about titles!
1. Focus on titles
I know. Duh. But think about it — how much time do you spend on your blog post titles, truly? For the Content Marketing Institute, we spend an average of 30 minutes per title in search of the absolute best wording. That adds up to a good chunk of time, but as I explained above, what’s the point of having an excellent blog post if its title won’t draw in traffic? Take the time to think twice about your blog titles or, if time is tight, bring in an outsider (like CMI did with me).
2. Never write misleading titles just to get people to click
No matter how sensational and marvelous your blog post titles are, if your content doesn’t live up to your title, say goodbye to returning visitors and conversions, and say hello to a high bounce rate and a bad reputation. For a hypothetical example, take a post titled “9 Steps to Social Media Monitoring Success,” that actually only describes nine features of the monitoring software company publishing the post. Title-content mismatches will only confuse — and alienate — readers.
3. Find the right keyword
If you have SEO targets for your web presence, make sure you are using your blog post titles to help you reach those targets. But even if you already have extensive SEO research at hand, you’ll likely find yourself wandering into new keyword territory at some point. In these moments, I rely on Google Adwords’ keyword tool to help me decide between keywords.
For example, I often use the word “headline” to talk about blog post titles in order to avoid confusion with SEO page titles. But a quick search on the Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool tells me that “blog post titles” gets 260 searches a month, while “blog post headlines” only gets 16. (That’s why the phrase “blog post titles” is in this post’s title!)
