How to write the perfect headline, backed by science and snake oil.
- Julie R. Neidlinger
- Mar 31
- 5 min read
“Headlines are all the rage in the online content marketing world now, and I’m not talking about President Truman pulling one over on Dewey and the Chicago Tribune,” I wrote in a blog post on January 12, 2015.
That’s a terrible hook.
I’ve always known I wasn’t the greatest headline writer, either. How do you write the perfect headline? I don't know.
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Sometimes, I like the pun better than I like the long-tail search-engine-optimized (SEO) headline that my website platform constantly nags about. “Get your search term into at least one H1 and H2 for maximum results!”
Is anyone else tired of maximizing results everywhere in life? I am.
How awkward and whore-ish a properly online-optimized headline reads.
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As a kid (which I’m generously now using to cover ages 7 to about three years after college), I used to love pretending I ran my own newspaper.
Long-time blog readers might remember that back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I created a few issues of the glorious publication The Occasional Falsitator, which often featured Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and President Clinton’s antics. Other print publications, such as the Lone Prairie Magazine, were a little more serious.
I created fake newspaper inserts for the history book when my hometown celebrated its Centennial, incorporating old articles my parents had found while researching the town.
I can confidently say that the headlines I cobbled together were either weak, weird, or too abstract to function in today’s world.
When I was a newspaper reporter, I won an award from the North Dakota Newspaper Association for one of the headlines I created. While reporting on a family that had triplets, I wrote one for my record books:
Faith, Hope, And Charity Arrive In Time For Christmas
Faith, Hope, and Charity were the names of the babies. I never hit that pinnacle again. I struggled to find headline poetry in my many newspaper stories on canola, liquor licenses, a teacher’s early retirement, and the new plumber that had set up shop in town.
The online techniques that are recommended now just wouldn’t fly in local paper and print, though, to be fair, something like "Liquor Licenses Unveiled: The Shocking Truth That Could Dry Up Your Favorite Bar!" might have worked, despite being completely deceptive about the actual article. I assure you, the only thing dry was the actual article.
"This Teacher Quit Early—and What She Did Next Will Leave You Speechless!" is far too catchy in this day and age of teachers doing wildly inappropriate and wrong things with their students.
I guess if an overtalking long-tail search culture clicks on salacious content, that’s what we’d get. Frankly, if you want great headline advice, there’s the film adaptation of The Shipping News, though the younger folks will have to get past Kevin “Problematic” Spacey.
Billy: It’s finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that’s what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, what do you see?[Points at dark clouds at the horizon] Billy: Tell me the headline. Quoyle: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds? Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village. Quoyle: But what if no storm comes? Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.
At the end of The Shipping News, when the house that has been the story’s focal point is destroyed in a storm, Quoyle, the protagonist, realizes he can see this destruction in two distinct ways. Ever the newsman, he concocts the perfect headline:
Quoyle: There’s still so many things I don’t know. If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind, and if a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal. Headline – Deadly Storm Takes House, Leaves Excellent View.
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Alas, online content isn’t there to tickle the wit but to bring a search engine to you and get you to click. Such punchy headlines are generally not the tendency now.
Lying ones are, though.
My old Falsitator publication would not be occasional anymore. We can scroll entire hours away, reading just headlines, not the story. Why bother burying the lede when your readers only take in the headline? You don’t need a lede at all!
It’s too bad, really.
Headlines are the magic that tells the reader how to feel about a story before they even get started. They are the rudder of the ship. The same story reads differently, depending on the headline.
Thank You For Clicking Through. This Article Is All Lorem Ipsum.
While working at a content marketing startup, I spent a shocking amount of time trying to craft the perfect headline for SEO. In frustration one afternoon, I used the automated headline tool we were using—which graded you based on word and character count, emotional words, reading grade level (keep it low), clarity, immobility, and SEO score, among other things—for evil.
“I’m not making the internet a better place!” I messaged in HipChat to a co-worker.
In frustration, I decided to create a series of headlines that had nothing to do with work, headlines that ticked all the right boxes for assertiveness, FOMO, fear, and gossip—the tools of online headline trade.
“What do you think of these headlines?” I asked my co-workers.
14 Reasons You Should Have Cake For Breakfast
158 Reasons You Should Own A Fuzzy Cat
The Teddy Bear Had Rabies. Had We Known, We’d Have Chosen Differently
And There Stood The Tallest Chicken Ever
The Next Big Thing: Training Pets To Drive Trucks
“I would click on those,” my co-worker admitted.
No joke, I was curious about the tall chicken as well.
That led to 20 minutes of riffing on headlines, scouring the internet, and filtering through customer gripes for hilarious potential headlines. Of course, I had to run Dan Ariely’s name, with cats, through the headline tool just to find out.
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This was the formula. This is the formula. Twist the story, start in the middle of the opening line, hint, fudge, hook. Content irrelevant beyond key words. Win for everyone but national IQ levels.
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