How To Write A Killer Blog Title

Ever wondered if your blog title is as good as it could be? Daniel, our Search & Content Executive, shares some of the best practices he follows whilst putting together blog titles.

See below for a full video transcription.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi guys, my name’s Daniel. I’m the Search & Content Executive here at Flaunt Digital, and today I’m going to be talking about how to write a killer blog title. 

So when you’re putting together a blog title, the most important thing to consider is the user and the search engine. So these two things you need to be thinking about throughout the whole process of putting your blog together and the whole process of putting your blog title together. 

So what I mean by this is when putting together your blog title, you need to consider what users are actually going to be most receptive to and optimizing it for search engines as well.

Keyword Research

So one way that you can do this is by considering different keywords. So in terms of optimizing this for the user, it’s important to consider exactly how a user would search.

Search On Google

So one way to do this is actually by searching a few terms on Google.

So for example, maybe you’re writing a blog around e-commerce. What you can do is you can go on Google and type in e-commerce and maybe a few similar terms, for example, retail and online shopping and anything along the lines of that. And then when you actually begin typing that into the search engine, as with any search on Google a list of suggestions will pop up. So as well as that you can actually scroll through the search results, and maybe have a look at some of the page titles, the meta-descriptions or maybe even actually click through to some of the articles, read some of the content and again, just make notes of some of the keywords that may be related to your blog. 

Google Trends

And once you’ve done this, or if you already have a list of keywords that you’d like to be using, you can then actually go on Google Trends as well. So in brief, this gives you data on how popular each keyword is, how much it’s being searched for and just the general trend of that keyword. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page in Google Trends, you can also actually see similar keywords that people are using, along with a score next to it about how popular it is.

Ask An Expert

And then alternatively, if you already have expertise in this niche or you already know someone that’s an expert in this area, then you could just ask them for ideas, or obviously use your own expertise and put together some keyword ideas off the back of that. 

Optimise Your Title For Search Engines

So in terms of optimizing your title for search engines, it’s really important to put your most important keywords towards the front of the title. So taking it back to this e-commerce example, you could put together a title something along the lines of “E-commerce in 2018: Our top tips and recommendations”. But it’s always important to keep in mind that you are writing the title for the user, first and foremost, not the search engine. Whereas back in the day, you might have gotten away with cramming in five keywords into the title that doesn’t make as much sense as it really should, nowadays search engines are smart enough to actually interpret what you’re trying to get across, and as long as it’s prioritizing the user experience, whilst keeping in mind search engines, it should be alright. And you’ve also got to consider that technology’s getting a lot more advanced so things like voice search is becoming a lot more common. So for example, whereas 10 years ago someone might search for “television”, with the rise of voice search, people are probably going to search for something more along the lines of “show me results for this 45 inch Ultra HD Television from Panasonic”. And whilst the more generic terms might hold more search volume, typically these long tail, more conversational search terms are more intent driven and they usually convert better. 

Title Length

So the next point I want to raise is the optimal length for these titles. So when you’re putting together your title, it’s important not to make it too long. This is mainly because Google cuts off titles in its SERPs at 65 characters. So obviously if you’re putting together a title that’s 100 characters long, the user isn’t going to read almost half of that title.

But it’s also important not to under-optimize it as well. So if you’re putting together a title that’s say 30 characters or 25 characters even, that’s another 35 characters that you could’ve used up. So with this, you’re going to miss out on some of the keywords that you’ve just done research for, and this means that you’re going to rank for less relevant search terms and you’re also going to potentially lower your optimal click-through rate as well.

Use Tools

So one tool that I find really useful when putting together blog titles is a tool from CoSchedule, and it’s their Headline Analyzer. So basically how this works, you put your blog title into their analyzer tool; this will look at certain aspects of your title, for example, common words, powerful words and emotional words, that kind of thing. And it will then give your title a score out of 100 and, yeah, it’s not always 100% accurate but it just gives you some idea of how well optimized your title is. 

So yeah, hopefully, these tips should help when you’re putting together your next blog title. And once you’ve actually finished putting it together, it could also help to just search for it on Google. This way you can see how much content there already is out there with either the same title or on the same topic, and if there is loads of content out there already, maybe you could rethink the title slightly. But this could also suggest that it’s a popular topic to actually write a blog on, which is always a good thing. 

So yeah, that’s been how to write a killer blog title, I hope you found this useful. Please comment your thoughts below, any of the tips you have, let us know on Twitter and Instagram @flauntdigital everywhere. Yeah, thank you. Merry Christmas.