A title and meta description (a brief description of the page) is what SEO specialists look at first when auditing a website. There are various rules for writing headlines for ecommerce websites.
Below, we will review how craft attractive headlines for ecommerce websites asking yourself 10 easy questions.
The examples overviewed below are mainly related to books. The names of the authors of most of them have already become brands, and the books remain bestsellers thanks to successful titles. However, these examples apply to any type of content – and for ecommerce websites as well.
10 Questions To Ask When Writing Headlines
1. Does your headline promise a benefit to the audience?
Choose a title that clearly communicates to customers the benefits they will receive from your product or service. The best headline solves a problem or helps the audience achieve a desired goal.
Compare the following titles:
- “Graphic design tools and techniques”.
- “Master Your Design: A Guide to Using Basic Tools and Techniques”.
The first heading tells the reader about the content of a book. The second title describes the benefits that the reader will receive after reading this book.
2. Does your headline contain specific details that emphasize its relevance and value?
Specific details in the title, such as exact numbers, draw extra attention to your content. Numbers structure information, as can be seen in the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. Imagine the title of this book without the numbers: The Habits of Highly Effective People. Doesn’t sound very convincing, does it?
What’s more, numbers can make your content more relevant by offering a customer a specific timeline or timeline to achieve a goal. For example, the headline “Lose 21 pounds in 21 days: Martha Vineyard’s detox diet” sounds awesome. The title of this book tells the readers exactly how many pounds of excess weight they will lose and over what period. Buyers of books about diet and other methods of weight management probably want to know the exact results of the application of the described methods.
3. Does your headline take into account the target audience?
Identify your target consumers. This makes your content personalized. You can identify the target audience by directly naming them or by specifying their key characteristics. The more obvious you make it, the better.
CJ Hayden’s book, “Attract Customers: A 28-Day Marketing Course for Professionals, Coaches, and Consultants”, defines an audience by occupation.
Some authors manage to define the target audience by telling who the readers are not. For example, Robin Williams created “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”.
4. Does your headline help position your products?
The “…for dummies” book series is one of the best examples of content positioning with a headline. For example, the book “Red Wine for Dummies” is unlikely to interest experts and subtle connoisseurs of this drink. However, if you want to get a basic knowledge of red wine, the above title will grab your attention quickly.
The title can position your content by directly indicating the method used to solve the problem. “Natural Cancer Prevention” is an example of this approach.
5. Are you trying to arouse curiosity among potential customers with your headline?
As we are told by various books on literature analysis and the nature of literary creativity, interest in a text (it is clear that the word “interest” here is very conditional – it is a complex of feelings that a text evokes in the reader) appears when the text exceeds our inner expectation from it. And this happens thanks to certain techniques that “break” the general paradigm of the text, the usual picture of the world.
There are three such approaches:
- Metaphors. They make the names more understandable and memorable. They create images that remain in the reader’s memory. Metaphor is the transfer of meaning, the use of a word in a figurative sense. For example, “I burn Paris” by Bruno Yasensky (he actually did not burn the city). Coming up with a metaphorical title is very easy. It is important not only to invent it but to beat it in the text. The headline is the bait, the hook. If you deceive the reader’s expectations by not “playing” the title in the text, you will lose confidence in your next titles.
- Alliteration is another way to make a title memorable. It involves the repetition of homogeneous or identical consonants in the words of the title. Alliteration is a technique that is more characteristic of poetic speech. But the composition of headings is closer to versification than it might seem at first glance.
- Contradictions or unexpected expressions also arouse customers’ curiosity. They remain winning against the backdrop of trivial headlines. The title of Tim Ferris’s book “The 4-Hour Workweek” is an example of the use of an unexpected phrase. Many buyers do not believe that it is possible to work only four hours a week, so they are interested in the book. Another example is “The Goal: A Continuous Improvement Process” (the goal is not a finish point, but a process stretched out over time) by Elijah Goldratt and Jeff Cox.
6. Does your headline enter into a dialogue with the audience?
Pack in the title of your book or article a promise made in simple and clear words. The best headlines retain the almost naive obviousness that characterizes the everyday conversations of ordinary people.
Choose the correct verbs when creating titles. Also, use verbal nouns. They form the reader’s attitude towards the product that you need.
Incentive verbs are one of the most successful forms for the title. They direct customers to a specific action. “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill is one example of the use of incentive verbs in the title.
7. How short is your headline?
Let’s face it: concise headlines attract more audience attention. Remember, the fewer words you use in the title, the more a potential customer will remember.
Writer Malcolm Gladwell is considered a recognized master of short headlines. Pay attention, for example, to the title of his book “Geniuses and outsiders“ – clear and brief.
8. Do you use subheadings?
A subtitle is an amplification of your title. Combine short headings with longer subheadings that reveal some details. Larry Fine makes good use of the title and subtitle. His work is called “The Piano Book: Buying and Owning A Used Or New Piano”.
Garr Reynolds uses a multi-word title to draw attention to his book. And the subtitle gives readers additional information. Reynolds’ piece is titled “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design And Delivery”.
9. SEO: Does your headline include popular search requests?
Naturally, we could not ignore this issue. Web content should drive traffic. The most basic traffic generators are search engines. However, it is necessary to find a well-balanced solution and not use bare keywords.
The main thing is the relevance to the content, and then the “fit” for search engines. Let’s illustrate with an example of this article. We wrote the article itself, having the headline in mind – simple and capacious. The only thing we did was check which request is more frequent – “How to craft headlines” or “How to create headlines”. And although the verb “create” seems to be a better option in this context (it is closer to the nature of the act of coming up with headlines than the verb “craft”), nevertheless, the final version of the heading was coordinated.
In general, all of us, working with content and hand in hand with specialists in optimizing and promoting websites on the Internet, should keep in mind the frequency and competition for those queries that somehow coincide with our headlines. It is clear that not every request can be “pulled” to the top of the issue only thanks to the content. But if the page does not have textual relevance to the intended request, then it will never become the top request at all.
Related: The Future of eCommerce: Marketing Trends Every Business Should Know In 2022
10. Do you use more than one of the above techniques when creating headlines?
The content creators use two or more of the techniques described above to come up with striking and popular headlines. For example, alliteration and metaphors can be successfully combined with subheadings that detail information.
Conclusion
The nature of a good copy—and the headline as part of it—is highly controversial. You can create a great headline that completely rejects all of our recommendations above. Some talented writers can do that. And even talented ecommerce website managers with good expertise.
High-quality texts are the sum of technologies that the author uses, learning from personal and others’ mistakes. And in this article, we specifically touched upon the technologies, trying to analyze successful, in our opinion, headlines and generalizing their properties, leading these generalizations to some conclusions.
