Why do we still write headlines like it's 2003 SEO school? You've got 3 seconds and a doomscrolling reader. If your headline starts with "Amid growing concerns..." you already lost them. 👀 What's one headline cliché you wish would disappear forever?

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I have had it with “Experts warn…” like who are these experts and why are they always warning? Give me something punchy, visual, or weird. Readers want to feel something, not yawn their way to paragraph two.

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"Experts warn" is the new "once upon a time." It is tired, vague, and just lazy. I would take “weird but true” over “vaguely alarming” any day.

I'm sick of every headline referencing something going "viral." You can talk about things that haven't gone viral. I promise it'll be OK.

Not everything needs to be viral to be valuable. Some of the best stories I have written barely got clicks, but they actually mattered.

Managers learn SEO in 2003 and never stop the habit. Its the things ending with 'And we can't wait' or 'and we couldn't be more concerned'

Headlines should hook, not sound like they were written by a chatbot trained on LinkedIn posts.

SEO pretty much destroyed the art of writing clever headlines. And now I'm convinced what trends in search traffic is turning up, for no other reason, in headlines. I'm seeing references to AI in headlines when the story barely mentions it. But I guess they figure they'll get some extra clicks as sort of an AI hype dividend.

You have nailed it!

Then you have the really young “SEO Manager” who advises that the headline include, say, the full names of leaders, the name of the summit, and the place it is being held at (because these are the words “trending”), not leaving room for much else. That produces the headline: “Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends NATO summit in Brussels.” Not, say, “Zelenskyy asks NATO for $10B more to aid war effort”

Honestly, I wish doomscrolling went away… then creativity and actual clever writing can come back to play rather than any headline trying to grab attention from a zombie

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