“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
David Ogilvy
Writing headlines is hard. Striking the perfect balance between engaging, skimmable, social media friendly, and informative is tough. Get it right, though, and you will be rewarded with a noticeable increase in readers of your content.
HeadlineEngine provides a set of metrics to help you craft the perfect headline. It’s no silver bullet, nor is it a rule to follow, but as an editor it should help you get it right more of the time.
It analyses your headline as you type it and provides a score, based on the readability (how complex it is), length (how long it is), and powerwords (whether it contains emotional words).
FEATURES
READABILITY
We use the Flesch Kincaid formula to calculate readability. A good range of not too complex or too simple would be between 45 and 90. This is configurable in the system.
READING GRADE
We use the Flesch Kincaid formula to calculate reading grade. This is configurable in the system.
WORD COUNT
Our analysis of best-performing headlines shows that the ideal limit for a news article is around 12 to 14 words. This is configurable in the system.
LENGTH
You should aim for a letter count in the low-80s, which is about 12 words. We recommend between 40 and 90 characters. This is configurable in the system.
POWERWORDS
Powerwords are emotional words. You can set your own, or use the words from RankMath.