How to Craft Captivating Ecommerce Headlines and Boost Your SEO
An awesome headline is the best and cheapest way to quickly grab your audience’s attention. With all those websites and online stores competing on the market nowadays, it’s not so much a problem with getting users to visit your store, but make them want to stay there. You do this by offering a valuable experience — both in terms of design, interface, offer and copywriting. In this article, we will focus primarily on the topic of eCommerce copywriting; specifically, crafting headlines that will attract customers.
When we talk about headlines in the eCommerce space, we’re talking about all those little snippets of text that denote an important part of your site. We usually associate the term ‘headline’ with news and magazines – and this is exactly the function they should have on your site as well. In other words, they should inspire feelings of exclusivity, urgency and importance.
Why should you have headlines on your online store in the first place?
Use Emotional Buzzwords
Present Your Best Offers and Discounts
Align with your Brand Style
Work with Professional Writers
Research the Competition
Be Descriptive and Original
Find the Perfect Length
Write 100% Unique Headlines
Ask Questions
Test Different Headlines
Conclusion
Sounds good? Let’s dive in!
During the design and web development phase, many online store owners wonder what they have to gain from headlines. Usually, the majority decides to incorporate several main headlines that carry most of the website’s weight. However, it’s advised that you use as many headlines as possible in your eCommerce copy, and here’s why:
In today’s times, Internet users are accustomed to having important parts of texts emphasized for them. In other words, you want to present to them what’s most important about a product, collection, category, etc. and not expect them to do that work themselves.
This is one of the most valuable effects of headlines in eCommerce online stores. Every time you attract a user to your website, you should use every available resource to turn them into a customer. Images and videos play a huge role in this, but the headline can also be attention-grabbing.
If you’re looking to attract impulse buyers, you need to create a sense that what you are offering is time-limited and available for just a little while. Otherwise, they will just roam away from your store and think they will “get to it later”. In a huge majority of cases, that will never happen. That’s why you should go after your visitors while they are still browsing through your site.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the features that make a good headline for eCommerce sites. Use the following tips to create the best headline for your brand.
Selling products or services is surprisingly more about selling the story than the product itself. Any marketing professional will tell you that. To utilize this insight to the maximum, you need to wrap up your products in powerful and emotional buzzwords.
Depending on your product, you can choose the most appropriate buzzwords that will urge your users to make a purchase. Here are some of the feelings and emotions you can go after, coupled with buzzwords you can use to get there:
Take a look at this comprehensive list of ecommerce emotional buzzwords that will help you sell more products and grab your audience’s attention.
If you compare some of the biggest eCommerce sites, you will see that they save the headline area for their best and biggest offers. For example, they present generous and attractive promo codes as part of their header promo banner. You have probably seen this a lot of times.
If you have an ongoing promotion, it’s a good idea to accentuate that in your headlines. You can also use pop-up windows with an attention-grabbing headline that will help your customers find the offer right away. You will also get an influx of users who are searching for special offers and discounts using search queries on Google and other search engines (e.g. “blue summer dress on sale”).
Every designer or marketer will tell you that your branding needs to stay consistent all the time. This means coordinating everything from your brand colors and logo to typography, positioning, copywriting, and so on.
Let’s talk about brand colors and headlines, for example. Of course, you are aware that your brand colors say a lot about your brand’s voice and style. Every color sparks a special reaction in the human brain. Depending on the culture, every color has a significant effect on our psyche, whether we are directly aware of it or not. Here are just some examples:
Now, let’s say that yellow and orange are your brand colors. As an online store owner, you have most likely chosen these colors to attract a younger audience with bubbly, cheerful products, or services. In this case, you wouldn’t combine these colors with a headline that’s overly professional or serious.
Ecommerce is a budding industry and it has been steadily growing for the last couple of years. When we say industry, we don’t only imply the core business of selling products or services online. The growth of this industry actually implies that a lot of the services supporting online commerce have grown, as well.
Writing is a good example. Whereas writers were always involved with the marketing process, it was usually done on a grand scale: writing for multinational corporations in mega marketing campaigns. Now, writers work for small and medium eCommerce brands, for everything from headlines and product descriptions to social media ads.
We recommend using some of these writing services for your eCommerce headlines: EssaySupply (professional paper writers know how to provide a clean, direct text with a compelling effect), Fiverr (find independent writers who specialize in eCommerce writing), Toptal (hire the 1% of the best talent online), BestWritingAdvisor (cooperate with some of the best online store writers in the industry).
These bits of advice can help a lot, but there is no proven recipe to get a headline right. If you’re struggling with your headlines even after you applied some of the tips above, you might want to take a look at what your competition is doing. You should choose online stores that are closely related to your niche.
Also, you should focus on eCommerce stores that are bigger and more profitable than yours — perhaps there is a simple formula in their copywriting contributing to their success that you can simply observe by taking a look at their online store.
On competitor stores, you can find good ideas for content. You should never copy what they are doing, but there is no shame in finding inspiration from different sources.
This may seem like a trite piece of advice, but it’s actually something a lot of marketers forget about. The key to being original in this context is to use all those winning formulas that simply work with customers, but not over-do it and find your own voice in those writing patterns.
For example, the word ‘sale’ or ‘free shipping’ simply work — there is no need to change them to achieve originality or uniqueness. However, that doesn’t mean that your headlines and product descriptions should be a mosaic of those sales-y phrases, clichés and jargon.
Next, it’s important to make your headline colorful. This doesn’t really mean using color on your headlines and product titles (although you can do that, too!), but using descriptive language to make your headline pop. You can do that by using interesting adjectives or phrases. This is a bit different than the first point we have talked about (emotion-triggering words). In this case, you want to evoke a visual and imaginary response in your reader, not an emotion.
This is especially useful in product headlines or in headlines that describe collections that are based on a visual theme.
For SEO purposes, it’s important that your product descriptions and headlines are of ideal length. However, this is easier said than done, since search engine algorithms change very rapidly and it can be quite hard to keep up.
For example, if you have written headlines and product titles based on the formula that they should be between 6-10 words long, and the preference than changes to 4-6, you will have a lot of work on your hands.
In eCommerce headlines, it is challenging to find wording that will be short enough to please readers and retain their attention, all the while incorporating enough keywords to attract search engine traffic.
Another aspect that is incredibly important for SEO is uniqueness. Original, non-plagiarized content is always emphasized as a must-do for SEO success, but this is even more apparent in headlines. Headlines are much more important for your search engine ranking than a random phrase in a 500-word product description. In other words, if you have a headline that is not unique, you will gain some serious negative SEO points.
At the same time, it is quite challenging to achieve full uniqueness in the eCommerce realm. Let’s say you want to create a headline for your new dress collection. You create a new slider on your homepage and write a headline “Check out our new dresses!” The problem with this headline is that it has been used thousands of times. Customers or users will not mind, but search engines will.
That’s why it is advisable to include some interesting and out-of-the-box phrases that will really make your headlines unique to search engines and interesting to readers.
Modern customers are more active than ever. When browsing online stores, they do not want to feel like passive consumers. They want to have the feeling that they are active decision-makers who make informed, educated purchasing decisions. You can leverage this and achieve this effect by asking questions in your headlines.
This will not result in a direct answer (even though it could), but it is a great psychological trick that will help your customers feel more involved in the shopping process. Here are some examples you can use:
Use questions that are direct, thought-provoking and interesting, but that can fit in casually and organically in your online store.
The secret to long-term, deliberate business success in the eCommerce world is using real data for insight. When we talk about headlines, it means comparing your own headline versions and seeing which one performs better. There are many different tools that you can use to do this. If you are not well-versed in these, you can simply switch up certain headlines on your website and observe how the traffic, engagement and sales change.
Writing the perfect headline is much more complex than what it looks like. Even though it’s just a few words or phrases, you will have to put in much thought to it. The reason they are so important is that they are among the first points of contact between your customers and your product. That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to get it right.
It’s also a good idea to have several options handy and test them side-by-side to see which one performs better. You can do A/B or multivariate tests using ads on social media or Google Optimize. It’s always better to back up your expectations and predictions with real results.
Finally, if you are not sure how to do this type of writing, you shouldn’t refrain from outsourcing this work, at least in the beginning. If you want, you can hire writers for the first couple of gigs and then continue with the work on your own, once you see how professionals do it. The great thing about this approach is that you will be able to get expert insight into your particular industry and niche but continue carrying out the work by yourself.
Melanie Sovann is a writer, editor and content writing expert at EssaySupply. She is interested in the fields of business, marketing and entrepreneurship. Lately, she has been learning more about dropshipping.
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