By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

Writing a headline can be harder than writing a 1,500-word article. But that’s no excuse for writing bad ones, especially when help is so easy to come by.

Like email subject line testers, headline analyzers can help you get more clicks by using algorithms to assess factors like SEO, word count, and sentiment (is it positive, negative, or neutral?).

There are a lot of headline analyzers out there, and as someone familiar with the overwhelm of too many options, I knew I needed to narrow down the field.

After polling co-workers, combing subreddits, and running some quick tests, I landed on eight analyzers that merited in-depth testing.

Table of Contents

• How I Tested
• The Top 5 Headline Analyzers
• How to Pick the Best Headline Analyzer for You

If you want some perspective on the thorough, thoughtful logic behind my thorough, thoughtful rating criteria, keep reading — but if you want to get right to the good stuff, I won’t take it personally.

Jump straight to my top five headline analyzers or to the final rankings.

How I Tested

To make this a fair fight, I tested the same three headlines in each tool.

I used two winning headlines from an annual contest sponsored by ACES: The Society for Editing, one in the PR and marketing category and one from the national media organization category.

The third headline is for the article you’re reading right now.

• Are You Pumping Up Or Pooping Out? The Perils of Exercising Too Much
• Welcome to the office, Gen Z. You’re the only one here.
• I Tried Out the 8 Best Free Headline Analyzers — Here Are My Results

My Expectations of Free Headline Analyzers

• It should provide specific areas for improvement.
• Suggestions should hold up to common sense.
• Any numbers, measurements, or graphs should be sufficiently explained.
• It should be easy to use and interact with.

Rating Scale

Although most tools provide one or more scores, like an “overall headline score” or an “SEO score,” I haven’t included them here. Without knowing exactly how those scores are calculated, they have limited usefulness in side-by-side comparisons.

That said, none of my five favorites had scores that strayed too far from one another. All the tools gave middling scores to the two award-winning headlines and a much higher score to this piece’s headline.

In other words: All of these headline analyzers will be most useful if search engine optimization (SEO) is your top priority.

But there’s still a few tools on this list with features that can help just about any headline writer.

To find the best of these free headline analyzers, I used a scale of 🤖 (1 robot) to 🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖 (5 robots), with one being the worst and five being the best, for each of the following criteria:

Interface: Was it intuitive and easy to understand? Were …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron