NEED TO WIN MORE ONLINE TRAFFIC? 11 ½ BEST FREE HEADLINE ANALYZERS!

Look at any glossy magazine and the first thing that pops out is the title – 10 best ways to… or 6 signs that… These headlines are designed to intrigue us, tease us, entice us – often hitting a hidden nerve, a subconscious desire to be liked, desired, understood. These headlines do not appear out of thin air though, and are deeply rooted in human psychology. To learn more, I recommend this book: Alchemy: the Surprising Power of Ideas that don’t make sense, by Rory Sutherland. But, what if you do not have the time to read this book yet you still want to get the same results on autopilot, with a lot less effort? Can you actually achieve web or YouTube traffic with a headline analyser?

Headline analyzers are advanced algorithms that compare your blog or YouTube title to a set of criteria that are known to be successful in generating clicks. These tools rely on AI to determine whether a particular title is catchy enough to trigger a click from a viewer. And that is all that a headline needs to do. Your “sales” copy, the blog or the video then needs to deliver on that headline.

Look at your local supermarket – glossy magazines line the check-out shelves – this is prime real estate, similar to the 1st page on a Google or Bing Search. The closer you are to the top of the page, the more likely someone is to click on your link. But, only 8 out of 10 people will actually read these headlines. The last 20% are distracted. Now, how many people actually reach out, grab the magazine and open it? Chances are that only 2 out of every 10 people will do so. That is a 20% click through rate on a heavily optimized headline, often developed by experts with University degrees behind them. Is it any wonder then that 80% of a marketing budget tends to go to the headline?

“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

– David OgilvyOpens in a new tab.

The formula can be complex, but there are easy tools to simplify the process and best of all? 80% of the benefits are free!

What should a headline analyser do for you?

A headline analysis tool really has 1 job to perform – to evaluate how likely the title of your blog or video is to generate interest in a user and entice them enough to actually click on the link, sending traffic your way! There are two basic approaches:

  1. Take the keywords and generate potential headlines. This is more generic and provides a target list of potential blog titles.
  2. Take the headline you generated and evaluate it based on specific parameters such as:
    1. Title length – Use too many words and you lose the reader. Most people skim through a results page to see which sites might hold their answer – too long and the information is missed.
    2. Character count / pixel length – Google only shows so many characters in its results page. If your title is longer, then it is truncated, potentially changing the whole meaning of the title.
    3. Skimmability – most people just skim through the titles, recalling the first 3 and last 3 words at most. If you can put your topic and keywords in these areas, you make a greater impact. As an added bonus, try to make those words form a semi-coherent sentence!
    4. Word balance – The title should be:
      1. Simple to read – using mainly common words.
      2. Memorably – use an unusual word or person/brand name to make the title stick out.
      3. Emotional – people may forget the words, but they recall the emotions. Evoke curiosity, passion, anger or amusement and folks are much more likely to click.
      4. Powerful – Power words can trigger an action – “Rise Up!” is more likely to be recalled than “Consider the condition”.
    5. Positivity – We like to be happy and to have pleasant outcomes. Fear is a motivator, but when it comes to triggering free-will, positivity has a longer lasting effect.
    6. Type – some headlines are clearly clickbait and will be avoided. Others may promise a specific type of information – pricing, information, guidelines. Using the right type for the search intent is more likely to result in a “click”.

Top 11 Headline Analyser tools

  1. Sharethrough Headline AnalyserOpens in a new tab.. This is a great tool with an extremely easy to understand layout – best of all, it provides a score for both the engagement and the impression value, which helps to optimize for either interaction or trust and which are often mutually exclusive.
    1. The tool keeps track of your prior efforts, allowing you to recall the best combinations of words and to learn how the word choice affects the scores.
    2. The tool also gives you a quick breakdown of what works in your title and suggestions on how to improve the strength of the headline, with relevant websites to highlight the point.
    3. Oddly enough, much longer headlines scored considerably better here than all other tools.
  1. Blog About by ImpactOpens in a new tab.. This tool is very different to all the others, apart for the AMI – EMV tool. Unlike the other headline analyzers in the list, this tool does not actually evaluate your headline and provides you with a score. Instead, it suggests title structures for your content. Just keep pressing “Enter” and you get more tips. This would be an ideal starting point for the titles before jumping to the scoring tools and optimizing each letter.
    1. The tool tries to match your keyword to potential user intents, essentially providing preset winning formulas that should perform exceptionally well.
    2. Using the same keywords will generate quite a few blog titles, which are surprisingly different to each other, allowing for a dry topic to be explored in a variety of ways.
    3. Headlines tend to be very unique and if you can think of a good angle, the topics will definitely be quirky and fun, making your blog memorable.
  1. Portents Content Idea GeneratorOpens in a new tab.. This is the 2nd non-conformist tool. Just like Blog about Impact, this tool gives you potentially eye catching titles to start with, though they do seem much more “clickbait-like”. The first response involved Spock! Definitely THE right tool for a quirky headline approach!
    1. Dozens of headlines generated at once.
    2. Each result comes with a description why it should be successful.
    3. No need to think of the entire headline, just the keywords.
    4. The various headlines can easily be converted into a series of mini-blogs.
  1. CoSchedule Headline StudioOpens in a new tab.. This tool is possibly the most comprehensive, breaking down your headline into no less than 9 separate categories with easy to understand visuals, allowing you to quickly assess where you might improve your score. The tool has a Chrome Extension, which allows you to easily figure out why the title of any page works.
    1. Similar to OptinMonster, the platform does spread the score across 9 different categories, making it easier to see where to improve the score.
    2. There is an extremely convenient set of color coded icons on the left that allows you to jump to the right section. Simply select the red ones and improve your score!
    3. As a negative, they hook you in with 3 premium searches, which are easy to waste and then put you on a much more limited plan.
  1. Headline Analyser by CoScheduleOpens in a new tab.. No, this is not Deja-vu or a mistake. I had to check 3 times though, just to make sure! Coschedule offer 2 headline analyzer tools and this is the 2nd too. Oddly enough, the tool does return much lower numbers for the same headline, so it appears to be a genuine alternative tool! The targets for various categories, such as word count (9 here, 12 in the Headline Studio) accounts for the discrepancy.
    1. Very useful guide as to why each parameter used is important.
    2. Flags “weasel” words that cost real estate but do not yield results.
    3. Delivers a proper report on the various metrics.
  1. Advanced Marketing Institute – Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer – This is one of the most unique marketing tools out there. Consumers first buy with their hearts and then come up with reasons for the purchase. AMI’s tool is designed to hit straight at the heart, proving metrics to determine the emotional appeal of the headline and the likelihood that someone will click.
    1. Measures the emotional marketing value of the headline. This is important to breakthrough the reader’s apathy and information overload.
    2. Provides hints as to the most likely emotional direction. This is crucial. If you want to grow your audience, perhaps indignation or anger will do. How about a dose of curiosity? But, very few people buy when angry and most may try to return the item once they come to their senses. This tool allows you to match user intent with the user’s mood.
  1. SEOPressor Blog Title Generator. This is yet another idea generating tool, which is great, though it was last updated in 2018. It did provide some excellent and extremely easy to implement recommendations. My mind sparked as soon as I saw the first 5 titles. Almost made me want to restart this entire post…
    1. Generates multiple headlines for your keywords.
    2. Allows you to add a category to your blogpost, thus giving you the opportunity to match the headline with user intent very easily.
    3. Great tool to use if working on multiple platforms. For example, LinkedIn may do better with a Brand or Product headline. YouTube should go well with an educational blog.
  1. IsItWP Headline AnalyserOpens in a new tab. – this is a great tool for refining your title until it is perfect. The tool will provide a score across several categories, along with recommendations on how to improve the headline. Implement the suggestions and feed the result back into the tool…
    1. Uses several categories to evaluate the headline.
    2. Provides easy to implement recommendations to improve the headline.
  1. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator – amazing tool to generate a multitude of headlines in a very catchy away. The headlines are fun and often provide a surprising angle for the same old information! This allows you to relook at your data with fresh eyes.
    1. This is a great tool to develop several titles in one shot, essential for doing A/B testing or simply to fill out a monthly marketing calendar.
    2. Hubspot also offers the potential to fill out the entire year’s calendar by signing up to their newsletter.
  1. Headline Analyzer by Capitalize My TitleOpens in a new tab.. This tool differentiates itself from the others by using a specific SEO score. The other scores are readability and sentiment. The SEO game is all about getting the search engine to rank your blog highest, and therefore getting a good SEO score could help. A few simple tweaks to my title made the score much better – 73, with SEO skyrocketing to 59, but on top of that the other segments went up too! Oddly enough, their own headline scored poorly using their tool!
    1. The tool will check for filler words which do not add value to your headline.
    2. Has SEO suggestions to improve the Search Engine side of things on top of the human side.
  1. OptinMonsterOpens in a new tab.
    1. Optinmonster uses no less than 8 metrics to determine your score, along with a very handy color guide that provides easy visual feedback on areas that need improvements.
    2. OptinMonster highlights the words that your audience are most likely to read before making a decision where to click. This is brilliant as it automatically gives you an idea of what is in the user’s mind.
    3. OptinMonster also provides a guide as to what kind of post your viewer will expect to see – in this case a list. Successful headlines make a promise – successful content fulfill that promise. This makes it easier to match search intent.

Honorable Mention:

This is not technically a Headline Analyser tool, but no SEO suite would not be complete without a hotlink to this particular site:

  1. Answer the Public. This is more of a keyword generation tool, using the basic sentence structures such as “why”, “what” and “how”. From there, it scours the internet to see how the keywords can be expanded into longer tail keywords – very useful to rank for more than one keyword.
    1. With the right starting point you get hundreds of ideas.
    2. You know that these are popular searches… and the more “spokes” to the wagon-wheel, the greater the breadth of the topic, thus the greater the chance of getting way more traffic through additional long tail keywords.
    3. The data is broken up into categories, making it easier to decipher the user intent for a specific headline.

How to decide which headline analyzer is the best?

I have tried using all of these tools and to be honest, the results do vary tremendously. Where one headline scored 85% in Headline Studio, it dropped to a measly 69% in CoSchedule headline analyzer – but does it matter? These analysers have been created using AI and feedback loops, which means that while they are very good algorithms, they may exhibit a bias based on the initial data sample. Study your niche and grab some headlines from the top 5 sites and feed them through the various platforms. One of them will consistently give you better results and that is the right tool for you.