With the number of professional writers on the web, particularly those involved in the field of SEO, site owners aren’t lacking on advice for optimisation and writing tips. What is often lacking, though, is the hard research needed to back up all the advice given.

Titles are so important to drawing your users in and attracting search engine attention that you’re not likely to leave them up to chance. Getting involved with a search engine optimisation expert can provide you with the experience and intuition needed to craft alluring titles. It can also help to do some research on your own. Handily, some of that research exists right here with us at SEO Consult.

First things first: tactics that work

Most successful bloggers swear up and down that the things most likely to get attention in titles are numbers. Whether they’re numbers to indicate a list, or statistics, or even prices, they’re the things that appear most often in blogging advice and in ‘popular articles’ pages on social book marking sites.

Another thing online writers swear by is the inclusion of a promise within the title. Internet users have a wealth of options on the net. The mistake many businesses make is in pursuing their own goals with their websites, and this loses them customers. Titles that include a promise of something of value, an offer, are more likely to attract attention.

Recommendations from writers are all very well, but very few back them up with hard statistics. A thinking site owner might be inclined to ask, do numbers and promises really work?

The studies

There have been studies to sort out the effect of prices, statistics, offers and numbers within titles. One study tested five headlines against each other, with a bland title used for control. The headlines were various combinations of approaches, but the three most successful were:

* offer and price, e.g. ‘Guaranteed service for $99′
* statistics and offer, e.g. ‘50,000 Londoners love our guaranteed service’
* offer alone, e.g. ‘We guarantee best prices for this service’

Out of the top three, the one that prompted the most conversions was the combination of an offer and a set price. The study found that internet users exposed to that title were over 70% more likely to pay for the service than when exposed to a bland title. Users who were exposed to the combination of the statistics and the offer were around 30% more likely to pay for the service. The offer by itself didn’t fare anywhere near as well.

The results of this study were, of course, specific to the type of industry the titles belonged to. If you’re not running a transactional site, providing costs in your titles won’t work. It’s interesting, though, that in a similar study based on a non-transactional site, the inclusion of a statistic and offer in the title increased conversions by around 40%.

Clearly, there are benefits to including numbers and promises in your titles. It’s important to note that including them every time may get wearing for your users, but occasional use might help your business.

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