There’s a heck of a lot of information out there about how important it is to have a good headline for blog posts. Many people will make their decision to read or not, based purely on the headline. So, headlines count. A lot.
While there is a ton of practical advice about making your headlines stand out, there is also an online tool that goes one step further: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer actually takes your headline and tells you what’s wrong with it, in a fairly scientific way. To test this tool, I tested several versions of the headline for this post. Here’s my testing history, with each version’s associated score:
The tool breaks down the words in your headline into several types, and, if a category is missing, mentions that so you can up your score:
And, of course, you get a comprehensive, easy-to-understand score. It took me several revisions to get a headline that scored an “A+”:
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- The analysis also provides a word and a character count. and will make minor recommendations to make those counts better. A tip sheet is also linked for further information.
- It also provides a Google search preview, as well as an evaluation of the sentiment of the headline. Headlines with positive sentiments tend to do better.
- Overall, a fairly thorough analysis for an automated tool. Lots of information and links to even more, to help you to craft effective headlines.
- The only thing I don’t like (and this is not really about the tool), is that I wonder if this is just another step towards creating yet more headlines that qualify as “clickbait.” What did you think of the headline of this post? Too clickbait-ish, or fine as-is?
