Why Headlines Are Critical When Creating Your Content Strategy [Infographic]

I joke around with our internal team that the actual paragraphs in our content do not matter. The scan-ability of the content is what is critical to the content being shared. Ultimately the success of your content marketing efforts will be measured by their traffic and conversion metrics. Most of this can be summed up by the number of links they generate, social shares, sign ups, and emails harvested from the content.
A good headline is key to success when it comes to achieving strong content sharing metrics. Therefore, the headlines and titles of your content should play a major influence in the type of content you write.
As you can see from the infographic below most people do not actually read your content. Therefore it is critical your content is easy to scan.

What makes easily scannable content?

• A good headline or title
• Bullet points for easy referencing
• Videos and images that can be absorbed quickly
• A list with headlines
• Short paragraphs
• Quotes and rich content snippets
• General bolded and headlined text for main points

 

 
Here is a link to the Quicksprout blog on headlines.

Conclusion:

Come up a list of headlines that are relevant to your industry and business before you start writing blogs. Massage them until you are confident that the list of headlines is substantial, maybe 40 to 50 so you have many to choose from.
From there I would stagger writing content that has a somewhat catchy or click bait like headline such as top 10 ways to improve SEO with in depth content such as a how to guide or a tutorial related to your industry. This will help keep your content varied but also increase the chances some of the posts generate more shares and back links.