Does Your Headline Need Your Keyword?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

More and more, I’m seeing people online saying they don’t always include keywords in their headlines. The idea is that they would rather write an effective headline and get the conversion than to target the search engine and lose sales. Makes sense. But can you have both?

If you read the most important criteria for landing page conversion testing, the top one is usually the headline. That’s the part of the page that gets readers’ attention. If it’s written well, they’ll read. If not then you’ll be passed by like a lighthouse. Other parts of your landing page you want to make sure are conversion oriented include:

(Here is a great source for these points:)

• Call to Action
• Lead Paragraph
• Benefit Statements
• Images
• Look and Feel

Supposedly, these, along with your headline, are the six areas where conversions are either won or lost. I’m sure it’s true and if you look over that list you’ll see that each of those areas of your landing page contribute in some way to the execution of your sales pitch and affect whether or not you get the reader to respond positively to your message. The headline first.

If your reader doesn’t get past your headline, you’re screwed. No chance to get them to read your call to action, benefit statements, etc. They bail pretty quickly.

Still, don’t you want a headline that is optimized – along with the rest of your landing page – for a specific keyword? If you can, yes. But it’s not an either/or question. It’s a question of values. Do you value the conversion more or the optimization?

Look at this way. You buy a new car. The car gets 50 miles per gallon in gas mileage. Best on the road. But it only holds 1/10th of a gallon of gas. In other words, you’ll have to fill your tank every 5 miles. On the other hand, your cousin Bob bought a new car that only gets 25 miles per gallon, but he’s got a 10 gallon gas tank. He can only go half as far as you can go on each gallon of gas, but his tank is 10 times bigger. He can drive 250 miles before having to fill up his tank. Which car would you rather have?

In landing page terms, optimization is represented by the size of your gas tank. Conversion is represented by how far you can go on a gallon of gas. OK, so your conversion rate is smaller than the next guy’s. His is 5% and yours is 2%. Big deal. How much traffic do you get? 2% of 100,000 is 2,000. 5% of 10,000 is 500. The guy with the lower gas mileage makes more money.

Optimization is important. You don’t want to leave it out. The trick is to develop a headline that converts sales. If you can drive more traffic to your website using social media and other methods of marketing then the important thing is to get the traffic there. But my experience has been that if you optimize a website well and develop a well converting headline along with other elements of your landing page and you do that first then everything else you do to drive traffic is ice cream in a bowl. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Usually, you can have both.