Your headline is the first-and possibly the only-chance you have to attract attention to the content you've written. That's the writing on the wall. And it turns out that some kinds of headlines attract attention better. How should you write your headlines?
"Your title will directly impact your click-through rate," writes Jonathan Long for SEJ. "A horrible blog title will pull a low CTR, while a compelling title will pull a higher CTR. Makes sense, right?"
Hubspot, Market Domination Media and Outbrain collaborated on this infographic that used a sample of 3.3 million headlines to explore what kinds of words were most effective in headlines.
What drives people to click on headlines? Including a bracketed clarification like [Infographic] will increase your click through rate by 38%. Including the word "photo" will increase your CTR by 37%. The word "who" in a headline will increase CTR by 22%.
What words should you avoid? "Tip" is bad. So is "magic," "credit," and "simple." I would assume this is because these words have been used too much in sales pitches, so people, who don't want to read sales pitches, use these words as shorthand to avoid sales-y content.