Headlines. Argh. Even perfectly competent copywriters—oops, content creators—can feel a bit anxious when confronted with the imperative to write a snappy header.
Recently, Tamsin Henderson, a UK-based PR and copywriting professional, offered up food for thought. In her article “How to tweak your headlines for success,” she talked about struggling to create a headline for a press release about the world’s fanciest piano. Her first effort—“Bespoke Piano Company Unveils World’s Most Luxurious Piano”—didn’t get a single bite when posted in her online newsroom. Her second—“Dubai Sheikh Buys £420,000 British Piano Studded With Half A Million Swarovski Crystals”—garnered attention and interest from journalists who hadn’t responded earlier.
What happened? She says, “Because I turned a lofty concept (world’s most luxurious piano) into something tangible, interest grew.” She recommends that you be specific, to avoid creating “vague, watery headlines.” (Don’t you love that image?) And she further advises asking yourself if your headline is social media-friendly.
Hmm. I get what she’s trying to do. Yet I wonder if SEO makes it actually more difficult to create great headlines, geared as they are toward search engines. A writer acquaintance thinks that SEO has flipped the order we all learned as fledgling writers. That is, instead of writing an “interesting” headline followed by a “basic” subhead, we now must write a bare-bones headline and inject the interest into a subhead. And that the end result is not so interesting.
What do you think?
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