Getting your content on page 1 is a huge step in getting it seen. An engaging title is another way to improve your content’s clickthrough rate. But unless you’re running focus groups, it’s hard to have data ahead of time that shows which title is the most engaging. Well, now there’s a way to do just that.
A recent article on Search Engine Land clued me into TitleTester— a quicky and easy way to test variations of an article or page title. The idea is simple: you draft a few variations of a title, and set them up in a poll. TitleTester distributes them to your list of respondents (colleagues, coworkers, or TitleTester’s own people), with a simple question: which one do you like best? People click their answer, and you get data on which one of your titles worked best among your polled population.
You can use your own email lists for responses, but after all, you can do this with a simple email poll. TitleTester’s real value comes with its paid service. TitleTester has their own population of respondents you can poll, which you can narrow down by age and gender, so you can get feedback customized to your target audience. Depending on how much your target audience and your email contacts diverge, TitleTester’s populations can be a huge boost toward getting eyes on your content.