Headline Writing: SEO vs Print for UK Journalists

Print headlines vs digital headlines: the key difference

Print headlines are written for people who are already holding the newspaper. They can be clever, punchy, or rely on wordplay because the reader is already there — the job is to entice them further into the story. Digital headlines must work for people who have never heard of your story and are scanning search results or social feeds. They need to be literal, descriptive, and contain the words a person would actually type into Google.

Keyword front-loading means placing the most important word or phrase at the start of the headline. Google gives slightly more weight to words that appear early in a title tag. More practically, in a list of search results or in a truncated social media post, the first word is the one most likely to be read — it needs to be your most important word.

The good news is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. The multiple-headline strategy allows you to write a shorter SEO title tag for search engines and social sharing, and a longer, more literary H1 for readers who land on the page. Many UK newsrooms now do this routinely in their CMS.

When headline strategy matters most

Red flags to watch for

• ⚠Misleading headlines: any headline that implies something the article does not support risks an IPSO Clause 1 complaint, regardless of whether it performs well in search.
• ⚠Keyword stuffing: repeating the search term multiple times in a headline reads awkwardly and may be treated as spam by Google.
• ⚠Question headlines that do not answer the question: “Could this politician be guilty?” — if your article does not answer the question, this breaches IPSO accuracy standards.
• ⚠Duplicate headlines across articles on the same topic — Google may conflate or de-rank pages with very similar title tags.
• ⚠Headlines over 60 characters that will be truncated in search results — the most important information must come first.
• ⚠Assuming the print headline and the digital title tag can be identical — they rarely should be.
• ⚠Relying on puns or wordplay that do not contain any search-relevant keyword.
• ⚠Never testing: publishing identical headline styles for years without checking click-through rate data in Google Search Console.

Headline writing checklist

• Primary keyword or subject name appears in the first three words of the headline.
• HTML title tag is 55–60 characters or fewer.
• Headline is accurate and not significantly misleading under IPSO Clause 1.
• A separate, longer H1 is written for the on-page heading if the CMS supports it.
• Headline does not rely on wordplay or puns that remove all search-relevant keywords.
• Print variant is written separately for print editions where applicable.
• Headline has been read aloud — if it sounds unnatural it probably contains keyword stuffing.
• Click-through rate for the headline URL is being tracked in Google Search Console.

Common mistakes

• ›Writing the headline last, after the article, without checking whether it accurately reflects the full content.
• ›Using the same headline in the CMS title field (which populates the title tag) and the H1 — losing the chance to optimise both separately.
• ›Optimising for clicks at the expense of accuracy — a misleading headline that generates traffic is still a potential IPSO complaint.
• ›Not tracking CTR data — without measurement you cannot know if your headline strategy is working.
• ›Assuming longer headlines perform better because they contain more information — truncation in search results means brevity usually wins.
• ›Writing headlines that assume the reader knows the background — a search user may have no prior knowledge of your coverage.
• ›Ignoring the meta description — the headline and description together determine whether someone clicks, not the headline alone.
• ›Never consulting A/B test results from Chartbeat or similar tools to inform future headline decisions.

Related guides

Primary sources

Frequently asked questions