Catchy headlines with strong SEO
One of the most ubiquitous ways for editors and writers to use ChatGPT is to create ideas for catchy headlines that also have strong SEO value. For years editors who favor clever puns and attention grabbing headlines have adjusts to the voracious, yet dulled down, needs of search engjne algorthms. AI offers a chance to do both.
Rob Tornoe’s great tech column in Editor and publisher advises this prompt:
“You are an editor at the [name of publication], a newspaper that covers [topic of coverage and geographic area].
“You’re going to suggest SEO headlines for the following article. The goal is for the article to show up in search results when people interested in the topic search the web. You want the headlines to be user-friendly, but they must be shorter than 65 characters, and the first three words count the most toward search engine optimization. Use sentence case for the titles.
Come up with 10 options for the following article, and please estimate which would return the most SEO results.”
We tried it on an article about hiring milennials. Our original, clever headline read “This is Lauren. You hired her. Now what?”
The headline performed well in the newsletter, but after the initial posting, could we create a headline that had some SEO value to generate ongoing search traffic? Of ten options generated GPT helpfully said headlines 1, 2 and 3 had the highest search value because they “target high-volume, widely searched terms like “millennials vs boomers,” “why millennials quit,” and “millennial career path.”
GPT also returned that first three words are strong search triggers. Good to know. Here are the three suggstions:
- Millennials vs. Boomers: How Work Culture Has Changed
- Why millennials quit jobs and what employers can do
- The millennial career path: What boomers get wrong
We decided to combine 1 & 2: Millennials vs. Boomers: Keep your next key employee from quitting.
Then we asked GPT to return headlines that were specific to the publishing industry and tweaked a new version:
Millennials vs. Boomers in Publishing: How to keep the next generation from quitting
It’s quick fix, and probably would probably work equally well for the newsletter, too.