Project Bloodhound: How to write headlines for your real estate weblog posts that deliver the goods — and deliver Google results

A headline on a weblog post is a differentiator — this entry is different from all the others — but that’s not a very useful lens for understanding headlines. A serial number — A37592x — is a differentiator, too.

A headline can serve the same purpose as a headline in the newspaper, as a brief summary of the succeeding content — “Man kills wife, kids, self.”

That’s a useful function, but it’s not really doing the job we want a headline on a blog post to do.

Here’s a better way of understanding the communicative purpose of a weblog entry’s headline:

A headline is a testament from the writer to the reader than the content described in the headline is accurately reflected by that headline and that reading that content will repay the effort it entails.

But that’s still not enough. A headline on a weblog post, and on any persuasive copy, has to ensnare and entice the reader. The headline has to promise a substantive benefit that the reader will realize by pursuing the copy. Writing an effective headline is very much a Direct Marketing problem.

And we’re not done even yet. In addition to all the jobs it must undertake in the reader’s behalf, a well-written weblog headline should also engage horizontal search engines in meaningful ways.

So a properly-crafted weblog headline will:

• Summarize the content in an interesting way
• Promise the reader a practical benefit for reading that content
• Search well on the most-significant keywords in that content

That’s a big load to carry, but a good headline can make a post, where a bad one can break it.

I don’t want to represent myself as a good example, because I will frequently opt for clever rather than good, but the headline of this post is a nice example of a good headline: It tells you what I’m going to talk about, it tells you how you will gain by reading this post, and it is strong on keywords that are likely to be searched by people who may have an interest in BloodhoundBlog’s ongoing content.

The latter point is important. It’s easy to score well on long-tail search terms, but if they don’t bring you the people you want to recruit as readers and convert as clients, you’re spinning your wheels.

Relevance, to Google, is the title tag plus the headline plus the body copy. If your title tag reflects you headline (about which more soon), and if your body copy corresponds to your headline, then Google will regard your page as being highly relevant. If it happens to be highly relevant to your mission in real estate, then you’ve done the job right.

Let’s pick on some Bloodhounds to illustrate what we’re talking about.

Yesterday Doug Quance gave us:

Elections Really DO Have Consequences

What might work better? How about:

Recent Supreme Court decisions demonstrate the importance of picking the right President: Elections really do have consequences

A better summary, an implied promise of benefit and better search terms. The search keywords are off-topic for real estate, but we have a wider latitude than a purely-commercial real estate weblog. Nothing human is alien to BloodhoundBlog.

Teri Lussier graced us with:

Project Bloodhound: And they called it puppy love

I like it better this way:

They call it puppy love: Six frisky young pups join the dog-pound for Project Bloodhound — a chance for all of us to learn and grow

Summary? Yes. Promise? Yes. Searchable? Kinda-sorta. Let’s try it again.

They call it puppy love: Six frisky young pups join BloodhoundBlog for Project Bloodhound — a colloquium on Social Media Marketing for hounds of all pedigrees

That will search on Social Media Marketing, one of our choice keywords.

Sean posted an entry called:

Custom Signs and Brake Lights

This is really opaque, but perhaps it’s so opaque that people had to click through to find out what it was about.

Here’s another approach to the same post:

Do you want to see cars slow down when they catch sight of your real estate listings? Nothing stops traffic like a custom yard sign

Summary, benefit and search keywords, all in one headline.

Eric Blackwell wrote a gracious and beautiful post about Charles Richey’s illness, but I want to put Eric in the hospital for this headline:

As a personal favor…

No summary, no benefit, no search. What would work better?

How about this?

When you needed his help, Charles Richey was always there for you. Now he needs you to be there for him. Join me in helping Charles and his family as he recovers from a devastating illness.

The summary is there. The benefit is group cohesion. And this headline will search strong on Charles Richey.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m also writing for length. One line of a headline on BloodhoundBlog is about 68 characters, so I’m trying to fill out the lines as I write.

You will note that I am not taking any special pains to be brief. If I can say what I want to say in one line, I will, but I don’t hesitate to take three lines if that’s what’s needed. There is no benefit to anyone in doing less than the whole job.

And here’s another conundrum: Which comes first, the headline or the body text? I will often write the headline first, so I have a clear idea on the promise I plan to deliver on. But it can happen that I will end up writing something different than I had planned — in which case I simply rewrite the headline.

Everything is hard when it’s unfamiliar, and it might seem especially cruel of me to ask you to spend even more time on your headlines when you’re already obsessing over your text. But a few moments of extra time thinking about how to write an accurate, engaging and searchable headline will pay huge dividends in readership, comments and — it is to be hoped — commerce.

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