The real cost of ignoring headline writing
The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Nobody bills you for neglecting headline writing. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- The headline decides whether the rest is read
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Specific beats clever. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
What to do next
Say what the reader gets. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The short version
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about headline writing before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Say what the reader gets — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.