When Writing a Blog Post, is it Better to Write a Title that Asks a Question?

Your website is up and running and it’s time to come up with blog post titles. But you’re wondering whether you should frame your blog post title in the form of a question. Let’s find out what is best for SEO.

Transcript:

Lavanya, you had a question as well. And I specifically asked you to ask the question.

When you are ready to set up your blog post title, should you use the title “5 reasons you should do something,” or should you make it a statement or a question? Which one was the best way to do it?

I think that’s a super question for when you’re thinking about blog posts because depending on your primary marketing channel will give you a different answer. So if you’re primarily writing articles for social media, you really need a catchy, cute, engaging, and clickbait title. So that’s where the things like “five things you should do to blah blah blah” are good titles because they’re clickbaity. But it’s not as good of an SEO title because when people go to search engines, they ask a question like “How do I do X?” or “Why should I do Y?”

And so, if you title the same article, how can you do this? Then that’s a better search engine blog post than a social media blog post. So since we’re primarily focusing on SEO, I tend to write my blog posts to be questions of the blog post that answers this. Ends up being really good for people being able to find the article in search. But then, when you share it on social the title isn’t as great as it could be because it’s not click-worthy. It’s not tantalizing. It’s just like, okay? And so, if you don’t have that question, you might not click on it and Facebook. So if you phrase it as “five things you must do well,” holy crap! I better do those that get the click on Facebook.

When I work with new writers, I always coach them with this because a lot of them are used to running for social media. They’ll come up with a cute, catchy creative title, but it doesn’t describe what the question this time article answers, which is the way you would bother to read it in for search. So that’s how I would distinguish which of those two is better based on the marketing channel you’re using. That’s what we want.