Tablet search engine system screen
By Marcus Roth, Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content.
Like it or not, the titles of your content are not meant for you, they’re meant for your audience and search engines. It’s a different story if you’re writing a novel or another piece of fiction because the title serves to convey theme or a key takeaway in the piece.
The Titling Misconception
When it comes to your articles, it’s common to see many nonfiction pieces titled as if they were novellas. Logically, this trend makes sense given that in school we spend a large amount of time in English class where we analyze works of great fiction. Thus, our minds inherently think anything we write deserves the title of a fiction piece. In fact, this way of thinking is so deeply ingrained into most of us that even I initially titled this article something intriguing, but contained no real information for a reader like you: “Your Titles Aren’t for You”.
My instinct proves this point. If someone were to read the title above, they would have no idea what the piece is really about; they would not understand if it was fiction or nonfiction, nor would they glean the genre of the article or be certain that their questions would be answered.
Title Clarity is Key
The internet is a very busy place, and every piece of content is competing for eyeballs, likes, and shares. An environment of infinite timelines and constant scrolling, your title needs to encapsulate the topic of your conversation with clarity to cut through the noise. You should attempt to make your title make its intended audience say, “oh, this is for me.” That should be enough to get them to stop scrolling and read your article.
SEO Makes the Difference in Your Titles
The other reason to practice this titling convention is from a search engine optimization perspective. Google uses advanced technology to scan the content you put on the web and attempts to categorize that content in ways that best unify with keywords that would be typed into Google that represent an answer the questions that are being searched. Google identifies keywords within a text and attempts to gather what the content is, then tries to understand the article through keywords. Focusing an article on keywords and playing to how Google’s algorithm works is called keyword matching. It is most important to do keyword matching in the title and headlines of your content because Google knows that that’s what people read first before they decide if they want to stop and read the piece or keep looking for something that will satisfy their true question.
How to Write Your Titles
My biggest recommendation for creating titles in your articles and webpages is to first identify key search terms you would like your content to address, then title your piece with those search terms directly in mind before writing your content. It’s common that a lot of authors will write their content or shoot their video and then think of a title after, but doing so puts the cart before the horse in our modern search engine optimized world. This is quite literally the optimization part of search engine optimization. Anyone can write a blog and post it on their WordPress, but if you’re looking to optimize success, you’ll want to be titling your content appropriately.
I’ll leave you with an example of some titles to illustrate the concept.
Good Title:
The top five shops to visit in Hampton Beach in 2023
Less Good Title:
A Local’s Guide To Hampton Beach
A Bad Title:
We Love Hampton Beach And You Should Too
About the Author: Marcus Roth is Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content. Marcus has a unique experience in B2B and B2C start-up companies ranging from enterprise-level market research of Artificial Intelligence to self-defense eCommerce products. His experience in AI market research brought him, and his research, to INTERPOL, The United Nations and Harvard University.
