Today in Digital Marketing - Write Better Headlines and Rank Higher in Google

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

Tod speaks with LaRissa Hendricks from CoSchedule about their Headline Analyzer tool. You can learn more at https://coschedule.com/today (this episode is a paid partnership)✅ Follow Tod on Social Media    (LinkedIn, Mastodon, TikTok, etc.)✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨   ✓ Ad-free episodes  ✓ Story links in show notes  ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions  ✓ Better audio quality  ✓ Live event replays  ✓ Audio chapters  ✓ Earlier release time  ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts  ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed 🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack📰 Get the Newsletter: Click Here (daily or weekly)✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/GroupOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What may be the single most important part of your next blog post or company news release? The headline. It sells what you're writing, convinces people they need to read on. Get the headline wrong, and you may as well not even been bothered to write the rest of it. Headlines are an important part of search engine. They're a big ranking factor and can determine whether you're on the coveted front page of search results or end up at the bottom of the pile with thousands of others.

Some brands spend big bucks to hire expensive copywriters to craft a title, but some smart marketers are using a tool from CoSchedule called Headline Analyzer. And as part of this paid partnership, I'm joined by Larissa Hendricks, a product marketing strategist at CoSchedule. Larissa, welcome. Thank you. What makes a good headline? So that's what our team set out to answer back when they first developed Headline Analyzer. It's really what makes a headline stand out above any other headline that exists on the internet? What makes it clickable? What makes it engaging? What makes people want to read it? So it's the very human psychological side of things. What power and emotional words might be appealing to people? In addition to the machine side of things. So what makes a headline rank higher in search engine rankings? And what

really appeals to a machine? You know, does it include those keywords that perform well? So it's both, I guess, human and machine. Yeah. And what's interesting, I think, is that, you know, the human side, the emotional, psychological side doesn't really doesn't really change. I mean, even back to like David Ogilvie's days in the prehistoric era of advertising that that sort of, you know, appeal to people's emotional centers never changes. Whereas the technical side, the SEO, that's changing like like every hour, it seems sometimes. So walk us through Headline Analyzer. What is it? Is it an app? Is it a website? Yeah, so it's an app. It's a content optimizing tool. And it

analyzes your headlines for all of your content and gives you a headline score and an SEO score. It started just as an app. And now it exists also as a browser extension and a WordPress plugin. So we really wanted to make it accessible for every type of headline writer out there. I think it's so important to have that integration too, especially in a CMS like WordPress, to have it where it's just kind of built in. And in fact, it kind of ends up being, feeling like it's part of WordPress all along.

I had it installed for a while and then I took it off briefly and I kept clicking. I'm like, where's my headline fixer? Because it did not like my headlines, let me tell you, it did not at all. But the browser extension as well. So that's like if you don't use WordPress, you can still use it, I guess, anywhere on the web then, eh? Literally anywhere. Yep. So the benefit of that is that you can literally just click on the little Headline Studio or Headline Analyzer. We technically call it Headline Analyzer Studio logo. And then it'll just pop up the tool next to wherever you're writing headlines, whether it's a YouTube video,

a case study, social media. Yeah. And it's just right there next to your content. One of the things I really like about it is you can see your competitors headlines and you see it in a format that looks like a Google search results page. So you can see how your headlines stack up against theirs. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, so search competition is, it's a really popular feature of our SEO report. So you can literally see a preview of what your headline is going to look like in those search results. And you get a really good glimpse into other similar headlines that maybe include the same keywords

or about the same topic. So you can see where your headline ranks compared to where those other headlines are currently ranking. So you have an idea of what that's going to be like when your content gets published and you can improve your headline score to try to get your headline to rank higher. Where does this data come from? What powers your algorithm?

A lot of things. A lot of things do. So I actually just talked to our director of engineering and CTO for some insider info because I've been at CoSchedule for three years now, I think. But Headline Analyzer has existed as a tool for something like eight years. So they built this way before I started working here. And it is so interesting to me. I learned things that I honestly did not know before. So they told me that we use three different natural language processing engines to process literally every headline to understand the

structure and the sentiment and the meaning of the headline. So without that, we would basically just be guessing how readable a headline is. And that's really what sets Headline Analyzer apart from other content optimizing tools is its ability to actually interpret your headlines. So it doesn't just look for like a handful of words like other content optimizing tools do. It can interpret the headline that you're writing. Yeah, most of them are really quite dumb. They just do like a word count or they just say, just put the words how to in front of it. Yes, yes, this does so much more than that. So they use that. And in addition to that, they have collected data from big providers worldwide that just offer up third party information on language. So they combine those things, along with some research on vocabulary

itself to find out why certain words are more engaging than others. So they looked at university studies of what actually happens in the human brain when we read certain words, which is the really interesting part to me. I'm very interested in human psychology, and that's really where that psychological aspect comes in. And that's where in Headline Analyzer, there are word banks, power word banks, emotional word banks, common and uncommon word banks. And they're just literally treasure troves of words that appeal to human beings based on that data. So if you include if you sprinkle in those headlines and or your those words into your headlines, you're going to likely get more clicks,

more engagement on your headlines. Yeah, when I first sort of looked at it, I punched in the very first one, I punched in the headline from our newsletter, which was meta's new terms and conditions. And you know, what I was expecting was it to say, well, it needs more characters and like that. But yeah, it was it was a whole different level of recommendations. It was like, increase the use of power words increases the use of emotional words. And then there was like you say, a word bank. I could just click on it and it would give me these words that I could fairly easily integrate in to kind of just lift that headline up a little bit. It was, I was impressed how fast it was. Yes. Yeah. And that's something that we've worked on over the

years. When we took the initial tool, Headline Analyzer, we revamped it into Headline Studio in 2020. And that's where we added in a bunch of SEO data. And we also made it so much faster. It just instantly analyzes your headline. And so it's really quick to use. We also took a ton of open data points about content marketing engagement in general. So that's something that helped build the tool, the initial tool like eight years ago. But over the past nine years, that co-schedule has existed. We've continued to use that data and put it into the tool.

And that's what helps us really figure out what headlines work for all different types of content for marketers. You mentioned the SEO score. I want to talk about that in a moment, because in addition to just kind of the headline score itself, a separate section talks just about SEO. It recommended that I use keywords with, and it shocked me that it was even considering this, was saying that I should use keywords with more average monthly searches. And then it gave me those searches.

It showed me what those were. And it also told me, you know, I'm going to say this. This is a little insulting, but whatever. It also told me that my whole topic that I was writing about had actually fallen out of popularity from an SEO point of view. So, like, I mean, this tool can also be used to decide what to write about in the first place. Yes, absolutely. And that's actually something that we've used it for on our own marketing team. We use this tool internally because it's so helpful. So you can literally, if you don't know what you want to write about,

but you have one keyword where you're like, I think I want to include this, just use that in your initial headline that you analyze. And you will find keyword variations on that one keyword and related questions that your audience is searching for. And both of those things can help you understand what content is really going to land with your audience and give you ideas of other angles to use as well. So something we do with that is literally create topic clusters or groups of related content around those keywords. So it really helps you brainstorm not just the headline for your content, but just content ideas in general, and even just larger form content ideas like topic clusters. You know, one of the things that I really liked about it was you give it a headline draft,

and then you can either dive deep into the recommendations, which cover things we haven't even talked about, like clarity and sentiment. Or if you're short on time, then Headline Analyzer gives out a score like we see on a lot of SEO tools. How is that score calculated? Yeah, so the scores are actually calculated from all of that data that I previously mentioned. So it's literally the data on marketing trends and that open content marketing data from literally tens of millions of blog posts, just so many blog posts.

And we take that along with the processing from the natural language processing engines. And then we have the vocabulary data and data from third parties on language. It's literally all of that combines to provide users with a headline score and an SEO score. And that SEO score as well, that data is taken from third party providers that monitor SERP data. So we partner with them to get that data to flow into the application. And we use that data to understand how a specific headline might rank in search. That actually makes a lot of sense because, you know, as I said, you know, Google changes so often. They do updates into the search algorithm on average two to three times

a day. I mean, we only hear about the core, the so-called core updates, but I mean, they're always updating it. So, you know, having, I think having an API partner like that for you is great. It also means that people who use your tool don't have to negotiate with those third-party tools on their own to get access to that data. It all kind of flows in, which leads me to wonder, how much does this cost? Honestly, nothing when you get started. So it is a free tool and it will always be free. Headline Analyzer started as a free tool and you can still access Headline Analyzer,

use it totally for free. When you do sign up, you will have access to all of the features. You can test out that SEO report and all of those features. You can reanalyze your headline up to 25 times. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, you'll just have full access to everything. After you first sign up and you try it with your first headline, then there will be some features that are locked because they're premium. Those are our SEO features. Those are our entire headline history where you can see a history of literally every single one of your past headlines that you've written. Power and emotional word banks.

Some of those things will be locked. Those are our premium features. So you can upgrade to Headline Studio Pro. And plans actually are pretty reasonable. They start at around $99 when we run specials on them. Per year? Per month? Per year. For our least expensive plan when we're runnings on them. Per year, per month? Per year for our least expensive plan when we're running it on sale runs at $99 a year and you get monthly amounts of headlines.

So that would be usually 10 headlines a month for $99 a year. You can go anywhere. Our plans, our regular price plans go anywhere from five headlines a month to 60 headlines a month. So depending on the volume of headlines you're writing, um, if you only write a handful, maybe you write just like a blog post, an article and a press release every month, then

you might just need a low headline plan. Or maybe you work with a team. And those will get you access to the pro side, which has sort of more of the detailed things. But there's still a ton within the entirely free forever side. Yes, a ton. So it's our entire original tool, Headline Analyzer. All of that stuff is free. It's basically just the add-ons from Headline Studio when we created that in 2020. Those are more of the premium features that we offer. But yeah, there's so many features that you can use for free. And it's the whole psychological side of things, what is going to appeal most to people and make them click on the headlines that

you write. Where can people try it out? They can try it out at co schedule.com slash today, which is specifically for this podcast. Larissa Hendricks is a product marketing strategist at CoSchedule. Larissa, thank you so much for this. Thank you so much. This has been a Paid Partnership special edition. You can try out their tool, Headline Analyzer,

at coschedule.com slash today.