In last week’s post on blog title generator tools, we talked about a list of tools you can use to generate titles for your blog posts. But as you probably know, it isn’t enough to just create a blog post title using one of the tried-and-true templates these tools use. People see hundreds of titles every day and click on just a few of them. So you can’t just create an okay blog post title or even a pretty good one. You need one that’s going to make your post seem too tempting to resist. How do you know how good your blog post titles are? Use one of these 3 free blog title analyzer tools:
Not getting enough visitors on your blog? Your blog post titles may be to blame. Download our free blog post title audit worksheet to assess the strength of your titles and learn how to improve them.
The Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer
This blog title analyzer created by the Advanced Marketing Institute has been popular among content writers for a while. If you’ve read So You Think You Can Write? by Julia McCoy, you’ve probably heard of it before. This tool focuses on analyzing the percentage of emotional marketing value (EMV) words (i.e., intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual words) in your blog post titles. It gives you an overall score and identifies the categories of EMV words that dominate your title.
How to Use It
To use it, just type in your title (which needs to be 20 words or less) and select the industry most relevant to the post from the dropdown menu. The tool says that it uses the industry selected to give you an average score for titles from that industry. But we’ve never seen this info show up on the results page.
The industry you choose won’t affect the way the tool scores your blog post title, so you can choose any industry on the list. Check out this screen shot for an example based on the fictitious blog post title “How to write epic headlines that will hook your audience right away”:
When you click on the “submit for analysis” button, you’ll see a results page that looks like this:
Overall Score
At the top of the page, you’ll see the overall EMV score for your blog post title. This tells you how many EMV words your blog post title contains out of the total number of words in the title. Our fictitious blog post title got an overall score of 25%. According to the notes below the total score, titles written by the average professional copywriter get average scores of 30–40% whereas gifted copywriters often produce headlines with scores in the 50–75% range.
Types of Words
Below the total score, you’ll see a table that identifies the types of EMV words (i.e., intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual) that are most prevalent in your blog post title. As you see on the results page, our fictitious title has an equal balance of words from all three categories:
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
Although the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool is an old favourite, there’s a newer tool on the scene that’s worth checking out. CoSchedule’s blog title analyzer tool is just as easy to use as the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool but more powerful. In addition to gauging the overall quality of your title, it looks at how well your title might boost SEO, social shares, and traffic.
How to Use It
To use this blog title analyzer, all you need to do is type your title into the box at the top:
When you click “analyze now,” you’ll get a results page with several different scores.
Overall Score
At the top of the results page, you’ll see the tool’s overall score for your headline:
As you see in the image, our fictitious blog post title got a score of 74, which is a pretty good score for this tool.
Word Balance
The next section displays a score based on the balance of four key types of words in your title: common, uncommon, emotion, and power:
Our fictitious blog post title got an A+ score because it contained a good balance of the four word types.
Word and Character Count
Below the word balance score, you’ll see a count of the number of words and characters in your blog post title. The blog title analyzer will also tell you how close these word and character counts are to what the tool considers ideal:
CoSchedule considers our character count to be somewhat high and our word count to be too high. Like the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool, CoSchedule’s blog title analyzer favours short titles.
Google and Email
Once you scroll past the character and word counts, you’ll see visuals on how your blog post title will look on a Google search results page and as the subject of an email in someone’s inbox. This lets you gauge how much of the title people will see in each environment. When your entire title is visible to people, it’s easier for them to recognize that your blog post is relevant to them:
CoSchedule shows us that our fictitious title is long enough to get cut off on a Google search engine results page. When you’re in this situation, you can either shorten your title or make sure that your keyword is close to the beginning of it (which is what we did).
Main Words and Sentiment
The last pieces of information you’ll get on the results page are a list of the main words in your title and the dominant sentiment of your title:
As you can see, CoSchedule has identified “epic headlines” “hook,” and “audience right” as the main words in our title. It also tells us that the title has a neutral sentiment overall. CoSchedule notes that negative titles pack a powerful punch. So if there’s a way to give your blog post title a negative tone, it could serve you well.
Extra Notes
CoSchedule is the most comprehensive free blog title analyzer tool we’ve come across. It even gives you tips on how to make your titles even better. You’ll notice, though, that it’s no walk in the park to score high with CoSchedule’s blog title analyzer tool. In fact, even blog posts with 500+ social shares on Facebook and Twitter get low scores when their titles are analyzed with CoSchedule. So although CoSchedule can be a great tool for helping you boost the impact of your blog post titles, you don’t want to live and die by it.
Sharethrough’s Headline Analyzer
This blog title analyzer by Sharethrough gives you more information than the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool but not as much as CoSchedule’s tool. It calculates a headline quality score using an algorithm that was built on the principles of behavior model theory and neuroscience and advertising research done by Sharethough. Sharethrough focuses on helping people generate great native ads, so in addition to giving you an overall quality score, this tool generates an engagement score and an impression score.
How to Use It
Sharethrough’s blog title analyzer tool is just as easy to use as CoSchedule’s tool. All you need to do is type your title into the box and click “analyze.” You’ll notice that the word and character count for your title show up right away:
Overall Score
As you scroll down, you’ll see the overall headline quality score and a list of strengths and suggestions:
Sharethrough’s blog title analyzer tool gave our fictitious title a score of 71, which it describes as “above average.” It also identifies three strengths of the title: limited use of positive sentiment, strong human connection, and limited use of passive language.
Engagement and Impression
Below the headline quality score, you’ll see an engagement score and an impression score:
Our title received average scores in both domains – 66 for engagement and 58 for impression.
Extra notes
If you scroll back up to the list of suggestions, you’ll see that making the title longer is one of the ideas listed. Unlike the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool and CoSchedule’s tool, Sharethrough’s blog title analyzer tool favours longer titles. If you haven’t noticed it yet, the three tools don’t always agree on what defines a good title.
Do Blog Title Analyzer Scores Predict Engagement?
It’s great to know that your blog post title scored well with one of these blog title analyzer tools. But how much weight should you put on this score? Do blog post titles with higher scores really perform better than titles with low ones?
To answer this question, we searched for 10 articles on BuzzSumo using the keyword phrase “start a blog.” We then looked to see if there was a relationship between the blog post title scores generated by each of the three blog title analyzer tools and the total number of shares for the posts according to BuzzSumo.
We found that CoSchedule scores were positively related to total shares (r = .41). This means that posts with higher CoSchedule scores generally got more social shares. In comparison, Sharethrough scores were only weakly positively related to total shares (r = .09). This means that posts with higher Sharethrough scores often got more social shares but sometimes got fewer shares than posts with lower scores. And what about the Advanced Marketing Institute scores? They were negatively related to social shares (r = -.17). This means that posts with higher Advanced Marketing Institute scores got somewhat fewer social shares than posts with lower scores.
This analysis was based on a small number of posts, which varied widely in total social shares and Advanced Marketing Institute scores but not as much in CoSchedule and Sharethrough scores. So it’s possible that we would have gotten different results if we had looked at a larger number of posts with more variation in scores. But based on the posts we looked at, CoSchedule may be the tool you want to use if your goal is to maximize social shares.
Use Your Judgment When Using These Blog Title Analyzer Tools
One of the most important things to do when using a blog headline analyzer is to use your judgment. Blog title analyzer tools can point you in the right direction for crafting a solid blog post title. But you don’t want to base every decision you make about your titles on them. Here are a couple of reasons why:
They Can’t Always Catch Grammar Errors
We put the three blog title analyzer tools to the test to see how good they are at catching titles with grammar errors. How did we do it? We took our fictitious blog post title and rearranged the order of the words in it to make it grammatically incorrect. This gave us a blog post title with the same words as the original but lots of grammar errors:
Original: “How to write epic headlines that will hook your audience right away”
Rearranged: “How to headlines write that hook will your audience right away epic”
Here are the overall scores each blog title analyzer tool gave to the original blog post title and the rearranged version:
Advanced Marketing Institute
- Original: 25
- Rearranged: 25
CoSchedule
- Original: 74
- Rearranged: 69
Sharethrough
- Original: 71
- Rearranged: 71
As you can see, both the Advanced Marketing Institute’s tool and Sharethrough’s tool gave the same score to the original and rearranged sentences. CoSchedule’s blog title analyzer tool was the only one that downgraded the grammatically incorrect version. But notice that even this penalty was tiny. A score of 69 is only a 5-point drop from 74 and still a pretty high score.
So what’s the moral of the story here? Grammatically incorrect titles can get high scores with these blog title analyzer tools. Why? Because these tools are sensitive to the words in your blog post title but not the order they appear in. That’s why you shouldn’t skimp on proofreading your blog post title just because it got a high score.
They Can’t Catch Repulsive or Offensive Headlines
Another thing to keep in mind is that getting a high score with one of these blog title analyzer tools doesn’t guarantee that your audience will respond to your post positively. To see how these blog title analyzer tools respond to repulsive or offensive headlines, we tested how they scored this headline:
“How to make delicious meals from puppies” (We know — it’s awful).
Let’s see how the 3 blog title analyzer tools did:
The Advanced Marketing Institute’s blog title analyzer tool gave this blog post title a score of 42.86%. That’s higher than the range of average scores for headlines written by professional copywriters:
CoSchedule’s blog title analyzer tool gave the title a score of 75%, which is pretty high. According to CoSchedule, this is a good title:
Sharethrough’s blog title analyzer tool gave the title a score of 64%. It was the only tool to give the title a mediocre rating:
Of course, these blog title analyzer tools assess how much people will be drawn to a blog post title and click on it. And just because a blog post title is repulsive or offensive doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to click on it. In fact, shocking titles may be particularly likely to generate clicks. This may be why the Advanced Marketing Institute and CoSchedule gave this title a high score. The title may generate lots of clicks, although not for the right reason.
Summary
It isn’t always easy to tell how people will respond to the title of your next blog post. But instead of being completely in the dark about it, take your blog post title for a test drive. Use one of these 3 free blog title analyzer tools to help you turn your mediocre blog post titles into epic ones.
Not getting enough visitors on your blog? Your blog post titles may be to blame. Download our free blog post title audit worksheet to assess the strength of your titles and learn how to improve them.
