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Let’s face it — clickbait works. Here’s how to use it to your advantage

Hook people with a creative title using the right words as "bait," and searchers will click your links, says contributor John Lincoln. Here are 9 examples of successful titles that encourage better click-through rates.

John Lincoln on May 2, 2018 at 12:10 pm

No two ways about it — clickbait works!

With the right page title, you can get people to click on your link in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That means you’ll get more clicks on call-to-action (CTA) elements on your website, which, in turn, should boost your bottom line.

If you’re interested in getting a better click-through rate (CTR) in the search results, then maybe it’s time to up your page title game. Fortunately, you can draw inspiration from others who’ve crafted titles that encourage clicks.

In this article, we’ll look at nine examples of outstanding page titles and go over what they have that makes them appealing and highly clickable.

1. The dynamic template

Travel website TripAdvisor uses a title that’s more of a template than an actual title. That’s because the marketing team applies the same title format to different regions.

For example, if you search for “best hotels in San Francisco,” you’ll see that TripAdvisor appears toward the top of the SERPs with this headline: “The 10 Best Hotels in San Francisco, CA for 2018 (from $76).”

That’s a great headline for a few different reasons.

First, it’s directly related to the query. So anyone who enters that search term in a search engine will be happy with that result.

Second, it uses the current year. That tells people the information on the page is up to date.

Putting the current year in the title is an old favorite trick of search engine optimization specialists (SEOs). If you want to increase your CTR, try adding the year to some of your titles. Even if you don’t make any other changes, you’ll likely see a bump in clicks.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

John Lincoln

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, a digital marketing teacher at the University of California San Diego and author of the book Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online. Throughout his career, Lincoln has worked with hundreds of websites, ranging from start-ups to household names, and has won awards in SEO, CRO, analytics and Social Media. In the media, Lincoln has been featured on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CIO magazine and more.