Signs it is time to revisit headline writing

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few signals that headline writing is due some attention.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• The headline decides whether the rest is read
• Specific beats clever

How to approach it

Say what the reader gets. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Specific beats clever — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.