Are Your Blog Headlines Doing Their Job?

Marketing

When you’ve worked hard to set up your dealership blog -- or paid good money to have someone set it up for you -- itcan be frustrating when you think that nobody’s reading.

Even though it’s a relatively new technology, automotive marketing shares the same traits with all other forms of copywriting. You have to give people a good reason to read what you’re writing. The best way to get people to read is to give them a great headline.

Headlines are important for two reasons. You wan t to entice real people to read your posts, but you also want your posts to show up well in search engines so that they can find you in the first place. Here’s what you need to know about headlining for your automotive blog marketing campaign.

Search engines require relevance.

Search engines like Google display entries in their results in order of relevance to the original search term. When someone types in a specific make and model of vehicle, the search engine provides the best matches for their search terms, and the words in your headline some of the most important ones they analyze.

Make sure you’re incorporating what people might be searching for. Think about what information your blog post is providing, and title your articles using words that people would type if they were looking for that information. If they’re looking for ‘used car deals in Denver’, don’t title your post with ‘New Pricing’ because that won’t tell the search engines what they need to know.

Human beings require human interest.

Knowing that search engines rank certain pages well because they contain highly relevant keywords, many first time webmasters try to stuff those words in their headlines just to get high placement. What gets forgotten is that high placement does not guarantee a click. If your title is boring people won’t click on it no matter how high on the page you are.

The way to capture reader attention is to highlight what they will benefit from reading the article. Be as interesting as you can without being boring. To use the previous example, ‘used car deals in Denver’ might get you high search engine placement but it’s not particularly enticing to real people. ‘Used Car Deals in Denver: Best prices in the state’ or ‘How to Find Used Car Deals in Denver’ show readers what they’ll get out of reading your article. Telling them how they’ll be helped almost guarantees a click.