When headline writing is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Headline writing is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is worth it

The headline decides whether the rest is read. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How to decide

Say what the reader gets. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. 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.