How To Write A Great Headline To Drive More Online Traffic In Singapore

Research shows that eight people out of ten read your headline, but only two among those people tend to continue to study the rest of the material.

Amazing, right?

It is crucial to understand that before publishing your content. Even if you create innovative and unique content, a poor headline will reduce your chances of becoming successful.

Thankfully, information and analytics can assist you to craft excellent headlines that will capture the attention of your audience instantly. Here is your complete guide on how to write a great headline founded on research to drive more online traffic to your website.

Here are some simple ways to write a headline that will bring the best outcome:

1. Understand How to Write Exceptional Headlines

• Be topical and relevant: Even the best-written headlines are useless if the audience does not care. Create a headline that targets relevant fields and events happening in your niche.
• Understand your audience: Ensure that you know your real audience and understand their individual interests. You can accomplish that by conducting a little bit of analysis using Google Analytics.
• Speak the same way as your audience: Utilise the same language and words as your audience uses. That contains similar types of technical terms and jargon. You can learn these aspects about your audience by directly engaging in conversations with them on social media.
• Identify a problem and offer a solution: It can be difficult to state a problem and give an answer in a single headline. But when you do it well, the strategy can lead to a lasting relationship between you and your clients.
• Add A Stat: Individuals love seeing numbers in the headlines. This is even better when the numbers look hard to believe. If you have a potent stat in your material, put it in your headline.
• Offer an exciting hint: Omit just enough details to get the audience interested. For example, “This new web design has changed the game” may attract the audience to learn how the website functions.
• Use both closed- and open-ended questions: Open-ended questions are excellent when you need to start a discussion while closed-ended questions are good at inspiring curiosity. Test both to determine the one that works best for you.
• Include numbers when using list headlines: Writing a list? Include the number of items included in the list to give the audience a clear picture of what to expect.
• Ensure that the content aligns with the headline: Your headline should reflect the points in your content accurately.
• Avoid Clickbait: Clickbait supremacy era is over. If you have a headline that over-promises and delivers less, readers will get disappointed.
• Share your experiences: Something like, “What I learnt” is another excellent strategy for crafting headlines. You will gain trust from your readers by sharing your experience.
• Give evidence to back your claims: Content supported by evidence is very powerful since it is considered attractive, relevant, and accurate.
• Offer advise for advancement: Rather than persuading your audience to execute something, show them the reason why it is worth doing it. Motivating your readers and giving them reasons acts as a powerful message.
• Suggest the best means of accomplishing something: Excellent headlines connect with some common addresses and searches that your target audience looks for when seeking ways to solve their issues.
• Focus on helping rather than telling: Most searches on Google are mostly about offering solutions to problems in the most straightforward and quickest means.
• Use a headline analyser: Guessing what an excellent headline looks like is not enough. You require a headline analyser to sort your winning headlines from the losing ones backed by information. Use various headlines to determine the ones that work best.
• Target for headline analyser scores that are higher than 70: Anything less needs improving. Maintaining this standard ensures that you only create the most effective headlines.
• Write different headlines for each piece of content: A headline makes the initial impression about you to the readers. An excellent headline generates more clicks while a weak one reduces traffic. For that reason, it is crucial that you do it right. Try as many headlines as possible to see which ones are better than others, and use only the best.

2. Know the Impact of Emotions on Headlines

• Make the unbelievable realistic: If you have something strange, but true, in your content, utilise it to your benefit. If you have quality content, your headline sells the story without the need for cheap clickbait strategies.
• Induce urgency: Ensure that your content is time-sensitive by using words that stimulate urgency. For example, “Register for Our Workshop Before You Run Out of Time” inspires urgency to the audience.
• Utilise humour carefully: The same way you avoid ambiguity, avoid jokes or puns. Ensure that your headline can be understood outside its context.
• Go extreme: Studies show that using violent or aggressive words like fear and kill generates more social reactions. Just ensure that these words connect with your content to draw emotions from the readers.
• Front-load the structure of your headline: For example, “8 best ways to enhance your SEO” looks better than “8 ways of enhancing SEO that are best”.
• Use negative superlatives: Using words like stop, don’t, avoid, never, worst, etc. is an excellent idea. Studies show that negative superlatives are 30% better than positive superlatives in Singapore.
• Utilise positive superlatives: They are best when creating a headline that is powerfully emotional. Examples include top, biggest, strongest, largest, most, easiest, best, etc.
• Balance your words: Use a headline analyser to break down the type of words in your headline to ensure that they are balanced.

3. Understand the Perfect Headline Lengths

A study conducted in Singapore shows that users tend to remember only the last and first three words in a headline. Creating headlines that are not more than six words assists readers to process them efficiently and reduce the time required to understand its meaning. If you are not able to maintain your headline within six words, it is crucial that you remember that the words with the most significant impact are the first and the last three.

Here is what you need to remember when creating your headline:

• Determine the most excellent length for your language: For English, it should be between 60-100 characters. Each language has its own rules and only running tests can reveal what works best.
• Avoid ambiguity: Write headlines that are keyword and information-rich and that match the expectations of the audience. That means keeping them as brief as possible.
• Understand the type of media where the headline will be used: What you require your headline for determines its length – different media like search engines, social media, and email have different headline length requirements.

4. What Is the Appearance of Your Headlines?

• Align the headlines: Left-aligned headlines are the most formal and conservative while centre-aligned headlines are the strongest regarding visibility. Try using both of them to determine the one that works best.
• Colour your headlines: Colouring the headlines grabs the attention of the readers since it adds some visual interest and contrast.
• Size the headlines: Making your headline visibly more prominent than the rest of the content makes it eye-catching.
• Select a robust typeface: Use a font that offers a strong personality and visual impact – and it should fit the body text.

5. Refine the Headlines Using Google

You need to ensure that the search engines find your headlines. Here is how Google can assist you to refine your headlines to ensure they are optimised for SEO.

• Shrink your search results: You can use Google Advanced Search to narrow down your results to a given time frame, language, and region.
• Search for related search terms: The list appears at the bottom of your SERPs and contains the words that are closely related to what you typed. The terms will assist you to create more relevant headlines.
• Try utilising suggested search terms in your headline: Type the first words in your headline to observe if the automated suggestions look similar to it.
• Use Google Keyword Planner: The keyword planner will assist you to determine the search terms that your target audience looks for.
• Include relevant keywords: Keywords will help search engines find your content. So, ensure that you include your target keyword in your headline as well.

6. Keep the Headlines Clear and Brief

Readers like precise headlines that clearly state what is included in the content. Here is how to create a headline that is clear and short:

• Add words that refer to extra material: If your blog contains downloadable content or a guide, indicate it in the headline. It will attract readers to click and get more details on what your content includes. For example, you can write something like “How to Build a WordPress Website (Free Template)”.
• Use active voice: Active voice is easy to understand when examining headlines.
• Be Specific: Focus on the specific topic that your content discusses. Consider that central point and craft a headline that tells readers the exact thing contained in your content.
• Avoid generic headlines: You can use a headline analyser to determine when you create a generic headline. Generic headlines get forgotten very quickly.
• Keep your headlines simple: most individuals skim on the internet. So, create clear headlines with a simple language to catch their attention quickly.
• Assist readers to see the benefits of reading your content: Take this headline for example: “How to Write A Great Headline to Drive More Online Traffic in Singapore”. It clearly shows the role of the content and increases its accuracy in combatting one specific problem or action.
• Give a solution to an issue: Use words like to, will, and that in the headlines to make them appear promising to the audience.
• Address your audience: Address the readers as “you” to grab their attention quickly and help them relate your headline to their individual experiences.

7. Understand Your Competition and Outdo Them

Your content competes against lots of other material. Understanding your competition will assist you to work smarter when crafting your headlines and make them noticeable to the audience. Here is how you can make your headlines stand out than those of your competitors:

• Oppose common knowledge: Do you have a customarily accepted “wisdom” that you would like to challenge? Create a headline that opposes it. Write something like: “Why … Doesn’t Help”. Such headlines attract a lot of attention. However, ensure that you have supporting information to back your claims.
• Run simple A/B tests using social media: Social media networks like Twitter make A/B testing very simple. You only need to write two headlines and run tests to determine the one that works best.
• Try experimenting with new headline ideas: Get creative! Try new headline strategies – you may find fresh ideas on what might work.
• Use headlines that identify your brand: Think of headlines that will make your audience able to differentiate your content from that of others. You can do this by researching on the phrases and keywords used in the content of your competition and determining how you can make your headlines stand out than theirs.

8. Repurpose Your Headlines

Excellent headlines are worth getting read. These tips will assist you to understand how to repurpose your captions for maximum reach:

• Condense email headline: the most sensational email headlines usually range around 50 characters in length and start with the most significant words. A headline analyser can assist you to determine whether your email headline is exceptional or not.
• Try using alternative headlines on social media: What performs well for blog posts may not perform well on social media. Consider using alternative headlines to boost your blog posts on various social networks.
• Consider various platforms where the headline might appear: Your content is likely to get shared through social media. It is expected to be in your promotional emails too. Consider writing headlines that are simple to adjust for multiple formats like email subject lines and social media posts.
• Replace your existing ideas with fresh headlines: Recycle your content by using different headlines to increase the gap between you and your competitors.

Conclusion

We see now that headlines are vital for boosting your social shares, getting the content read, and marketing your brand. Headlines are the initial thing that readers will come across, and it is your role to persuade them to click and examine your content. Even if you use a single strategy among the ones outlined in this post, you will add a sense of uniqueness to each of your pieces of content.