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Headline Tweaking for Better Click-Throughs

Can changing headlines post-publish impact readership of an article?

According to Visual Revenue, an analytic tool provider, during the 2012 Olympics, USA Today underwent a testing campaign of their headlines. As you can see from the results below, the newspaper was able to almost double click-throughs in some cases. Upworthy.com famously considers headline tweaking to be its secret sauce when creating viral content.

However, you don’t need to use a A/B testing company to get started in this area. Google Analytics content experiments can do a similar job and works particularly well on evergreen content, where you can tweak the text, wait for swings in your metrics and tweak again.

USA Title Testing

 

And one final reminder: nothing is more important for SEO than publishing content people want to read.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO For Editors

Charlie Rogers Charlie Rogers

Chief content officer, editor-in-chief, managing editor, launch manager, and product strategist on dozens of digital ventures, for companies including NBC, Conde Nast, Time Warner, Martha Stewart and Random House.
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