3 Reasons Why Writers Should Ditch Headline Checkers

Let’s use our brains.

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

Are headline checkers helping your writing, or just making it sound more like everyone else’s?

As someone who has tried these checkers a number of times, they don’t work. If anything my views decreased after using them.

I promise to explain 3 reasons why that might be.

1. Inaccuracy

You spend 12 minutes working on your headline.

You put it into the checker and it gives you a bright green light. “Very strong,” it says. Yay, this must be fantastic.

You write the article and when it’s finally published, it gets 5 views.

These ‘headline checkers’ are inaccurate, likely because they’re AI and don’t read like a human. Someone might love your title; the robot might detest it. Perhaps, because it doesn’t have enough words (more on this later) or has too many letters or seems all too specific.

Never listen to AI. If you want to know how strong your title is, ask yourself, or someone you know. If other people love it, it’s reliable to assume your readers do too.

Action: Ignore AI tools like this.

There are two other big issues with these.

2. A Rant On ‘Power’ Words

Remember how I mentioned the score based on how many words you use?

This metric shouldn’t even be measured. These softwares are obsessed with ‘power’ or ‘emotion’ words so the purpose of a headline turns into, How many power words can I fill this with? I myself started becoming desperate to think of new ones.

The AI counts how many you have and if it’s 0, red flag; if it’s 3, green flag. It doesn’t matter how awful they sound or how strange and irrelevant they are. If you include them, your headline is apparently perfect.

You want to know the best metric? The best score to which you should base your writing on? Impact.

This is also known as, Does it actually sound powerful? Again, this is the measurement of a human brain, not AI.

Power words are irrelevant. If you want to include them because they sound strong, by all means do so; don’t use them because a machine says they’re strong.

Just to illustrate this, I tested my first viral headline from Medium on AISEO. “The 10 Platforms I Currently Use As A Writer,” received a score of 53/100. It “needs improvement.”

I scored a whopping 0% on Power words, Emotional words AND Uncommon words. But guess what? I attracted 132 views in the space of a couple days – the first time I had done so.

These tools are useless.

Action: Assess your headline based on impact, not the number of certain words you have.

3.

If SEO was so magical and life-changing we’d all be going viral.

We’d all be sitting with 10,000 paid readers on a Substack email list and attracting 800 views every article we write.

The reality is far from that. By now I’m sure you’ve guessed I’m not the greatest fan of SEO.

I don’t detest it. Perhaps all the writers who rave about it are onto something I don’t know, considering I don’t – honestly – have many readers. But many who use SEO are in the exact same boat.

I think virality comes down to something else, but let’s stay with SEO for this one.

SEO isn’t useful because algorithms change all the time. Readers’ interests change. SEO can only be useful if you 1) get on a trend early, and 2) that trend lasts a long while.

If you rely on some words more than others, you actually rely on the algorithm. The algorithm is not reliable. One minute you go viral; the next you have only a handful of views.

SEO words don’t have a permanent shelf-life. But impactful words do. If you connect your words in the right order with the right tone, you have a strong impact.

Keep writing, keep achieving.

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