A 3-Step Process For Turning A Basic, Forgettable Headline Into One That Gets Clicked

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🔥 “roast my headline”

A friend got in touch saying they needed help.

They run a blog in the baking and dessert niche.

Unfortunately, they’ve noticed a dip in traffic with the onslaught of recent Google algorithm updates.

To cut a long story short…

They want to improve their headlines to increase their click-through rate and compete with more authoritative sites.

So, they sent me the headline of an upcoming blog post and asked if I could “roast it” and then improve it.

The Headline They Sent: 

Initial Thoughts:

• It isn’t awful - it’s clear and to the point.

• But there’s no reason for it to stand out among other headlines. There’s no emotion or trust.

• It’s clearly targeting a keyword, so we’ll need to bear that in mind.

• There’s plenty of room for improvement, but we’ll need to be methodical to get the best result.

• I’m not a baker, so I’ll need more information to make the headline resonate with the target audience.

The 3-Step Fix:

1. Make It Quick, Easy, Or Actionable

It’s a “how-to” piece of content.

The blog post is helping a specific audience (bakers) achieve a specific result (bake brioche bread).

As much as we humans hate to admit it, here’s what people really want:

A digestible, actionable set of quick and easy instructions that will lead them to a desirable result (or away from an undesirable result).

Unfortunately, based on my research, baking brioche bread isn’t quick or easy.

It takes several hours.

Promising a quick and easy result would be dishonest.

But after reviewing the blog post, it’s clear that the content is digestible and actionable.

Highlighting that in the headline should make it more enticing to click on.

Here’s what we’d get:

“How To Bake Brioche Bread In 5 Simple Steps”

Better, but still a little bland.

2. Highlight Benefits And Pain Points

I asked the author for a brief list of benefits and pain points of baking brioche bread.

What makes great brioche bread great, and what are the common problems people encounter when baking it.

There were a bunch, but these two stuck out:

• What they want: Fluffy brioche bread.

• What they don’t want: Crumbly brioche bread.

These are great adjectives to include in the headline.

Here’s what we’d get:

“How To Bake Fluffy, No-Crumble Brioche Bread In 5 Simple Steps”

It tells the audience that if they click, they’ll get what they want and avoid what they don’t want.

We’ll need to keep an eye on the length here; Google cuts headlines short after approximately 60 characters.

But it’s shaping up nicely.

3. Add Some Trust

The more trustworthy you can make a headline, the more likely it is to be clicked.

Give the audience a reason to trust your piece of content over the others.

Here are some common ways of making a headline more trustworthy:

• Authority - Indicate that the author is an expert.

• Social Proof - Indicate that other people have already validated the quality of the content.

• Costly Signalling - Indicate that a lot of time or money has gone into creating the content.

The author is a professional baker, so highlighting her authority seems like the most obvious option here.

The New And Improved Headline:

Authoritative and actionable with the benefits clear to see.

It’s definitely more enticing to click on.

If You Find This Type Of Content Useful…

You should check out our course - Headline Magic (launching January 15th 2024).

You’ll learn a tonne of dead-simple techniques for writing headlines that get 3x more clicks (and views) than your competitors.

🐰 rabbit holes and resources

🍫 Today’s link candy for content creators:

• How to do content “right”, with Steph Smith [link]

• An 8-figure SEO master’s SEO predictions for 2024 [link]

• Seth Godin’s masterclass on how to get your ideas to spread [link]