cDo you know what it means to get more clicks on your headlines?

It means more traffic, more conversions, better SERP rankings and more credibility.

Writing an epic content isn’t enough because before reading your content, people are going to read your headlines. They’ll only read your content if they find your headline compelling, interesting and engaging.

In this post, you are going to learn about 3 powerful tweaks that’ll make your headlines get more clicks no matter if you are sharing them on social media, sending email campaigns or if they are on SERPs.

I’m showing you the simple and actionable ways to write compelling headlines

Why Writing A Compelling Headline Is Important?

When browsing SERPs, social media or email inbox, the first thing a user sees is a headline or a title and then a meta description. While both of them are equally important in attracting a visitor, a title is rather more significant.

You need to know that better click-through rates are only possible when you write attractive titles that are hard to resist.

But why should you care about click-through rates (CTR) anyway?

That’s because they affect your search engine rankings. Google now analyses factors like CTR and also utilizes intent based factors to rank your content.

If your headlines in SERPs are getting more clicks and your bounce rate is comparatively low than your competitors, you’ll have a good chance of outranking them.

Similarly, now you don’t have a user attention span of tens of minutes as well. To make sure the majority of the users who see your content’s title click on it, then do yourself a favour, write compelling, conversion-focused and powerful titles.

Let me share with you the 3 tips that’ll help you write high performing and catchy headlines for your content.

1. Use Numbers ( The Odd Ones )

Always remember to add a number into your headlines whenever possible.

Not only numbers are more visually appealing, but there are also proven and data-driven facts that headlines with numbers perform better than those which don’t have any numbers.

Here’s another optimization technique you can use, including an odd number in your headlines rather than even number.

Why?

Because headlines with odd numbers in them have seen 20% more click-through rate.

Try this:

If you are writing a post about the top 10 internet marketing eBooks to read, then write its headlines as:

Top 9 (+1) eBooks every internet marketer should read

You can even skip adding “(+1)” into your headline and add the tenth eBook as a bonus.

Remember to try this next time you write a list post’s headlines.

Let’s move on to our second tip.

2. Make Use Of Brackets and Add Power Words In them

This is one of my favourite tricks to increase CTR on my headlines.

Brackets are usually instant attention grabber.

Since very few of the content marketers use them, you have a great chance of getting ahead of then=m if you start using brackets in your headlines.

I recently used brackets in my own email campaigns headlines and here’s the result:

Both of my email autoresponders have an open rate of 28.8% and 28.1% respectively. (The industry average according to MailChimp is only 3.1%.)

What I do is that I try to add a bracket in 90% of my email headlines.

Every email I send has a number in its headline as well as it has a single power word in it.

A power word is a word that’s responsible to trigger a psychological or an emotional response. They are hard to resist and hence, it pushes a user to click or take any action that you have targeted.

That’s why you should always try to unpowered words in your headlines. However, it is not really necessary to add them to your headlines. Instead, you can also use them in your meta descriptions.

Add power words in your meta description is highly effective especially in PPC campaigns.

Here’s a list of power words for you to get started.

Let’s move to the third tip.

3. Use Emotions & Indicate Content Genre

Emotions are highly powerful when you add them strategically in your headlines.

They are a key to increase engagement with your content very effectively.

Why?

Because they instantly connect your reader to the message you want to convey in your headline. And that’s what you as a content marketer or a copywriter want. If a person feels they have a connection with your headline, they more likely to click on it too.

Some of the emotion-rich and catchy headlines are:

• How this poor marketer created own destiny to become rich
• 7 ways introvert people like you can shine in front of a crowd
• How to kill depression and blog like never before

and so on.

Also, note that I said to add content genre or the utility of your content in your headlines. American Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer is one of the best tools to check the emotional value of your headlines.

A content genre is the type or style of the content you have written. This includes different content types which are known as hacks, guides, tutorials, checklist and others.

That really helps in getting better CTR especially in organic search so make sure you use this technique in your next blog headline.

Bonus Tip

Test Different Headlines With Each Other (A/B Testing)

One tip, actually a secret tip I would like to give you:

Test multiple headlines with each other and let the data speak.

What I mean is, using some tools, you can write two or multiple headlines for a single post and judge which type of headline performed the best based on data that are generated by it.

I use thrive headline optimizer for doing this.

Thrive headline optimizer collects the data such as:

• Engagement percentage
• Click through rate
• A Clicks vs B Clicks when shown
• Scroll rate and percentage

And finally, it gives a lear calculated chance of winning and losing of headline A vs B.

The data never lies so based on reports that this tool generates, you can find out which type of headline performs best for your blog.

Conclusion

I hope this guide has helped you.

Just remember that writing good content is as important as good and compelling headlines.

Start implementing at least one tip from this guide and you’ll definitely see a huge improvement in clicks on your headlines.

If you found this post helpful, you would also like to read:

• Focus On Content Too Much? Here’s What To Do Else
• Show Different Titles to Search Engine and Real Users