emember back in the day when you walked by a newsstand and were stopped by a headline on the front page? More than likely, you bought the paper to read the article. Newspapers depended on the sensationalism of their headlines for sales.

That still holds true today on social media—it’s “breaking news!” I remember when that meant you were watching a TV show and the national or local news station was “breaking into” your regularly scheduled program. Unfortunately, too many people use that phrase as an attention grabber, which reduces its sensationalism.

How does this apply to your blog or social media? The problem you have as a small business is content overload. You’re not just competing with your industry competitors for the attention of a searcher or a social media user. You’re competing with the kids, grandkids, friends, family, other pages, people they’ve liked, politics, breaking news, ads, causes, etc.

When you write a blog post, you want your enticing heading to stand out on the search engine results page (SERP) and when you share it on social media. You want to get that click-through, which will lead to a conversion.

Here are the elements of good headlines/titles:

• They are written for the human reader with the search engine in mind. Its main purpose is to entice the person.
• They have the right number of words, not too long that it gets cut off in the SERP.
• They have the major keyword or phrase (AKA the topic of the article).

The following is a prompt to use to generate a headline. Start with a keyword phrase or two from your SEO Keyword Research. (If you haven’t done this, use the Google Keyword Tool to discover the most searched-for keywords or phrases for your facility and location.)

You are an SEO expert with a reputation for getting sites to the top of search engine rankings. Please create four blog article headlines for my {website} based on my {keywords} and {location}. The purpose of these articles is to boost my site’s search engine rankings and authority, attract potential customers, and have a high click-through rate on the search engine results page. Please cite the sources of content.
{website}:
{keywords}:
{location}:

Always check the data. Earlier this year, I asked Google’s Gemini for blog post ideas for a client and it gave me “Top 3 Video Editing Programs for 2023.” Yes, 2023!

Here are tips on how to optimize those meta tags and get those clicks.

THE KEY PHRASE
This is the main topic of your page or blog post. It should be one or two words. It needs to be both in the title and the slug, which is the URL or link, as well as the meta description. This is for SEO, and it also needs to make sense to the human.

META DESCRIPTION LENGTH
Ideally, it should be 160 characters. Anything longer than that will get cut off. The Yoast plugin for WordPress will let you know if it’s too long by the color line under it. Orange is too short, red is too long, and green is just right. Look at the preview, and be sure that you don’t see the ellipsis (…) at the end of the meta tag.

THE DESCRIPTION
Here’s where you need to put yourself in your target reader’s shoes. They are looking for an answer to their problem. You don’t want to give the whole answer here, but just enough so they can see that:

• It’s what they need or want,
• The website holds more valuable information, and
• It will behoove them to click on it. In other words, there is a benefit to them clicking on through to the website.

What if you don’t have a WordPress website? If you are on a platform other than WordPress, more than likely, there is a place for you to enter the meta description of a page or blog post. It’s usually under a section called “SEO.”

What if there is no meta tag? If there is no meta tag, the search engine will display the first paragraph. Obviously, that brings up this question: Is the first paragraph on your page or blog enticing enough to keep the reader reading?

In the March 2025 issue of Messenger, I wrote about the Google Analytics Search Console and what you can learn from its data. You’ll see how many times your website comes up for certain keywords and phrases and how many click-throughs it got. Obviously, if your site is brand new, you won’t have this. That’s why you need to have your Google Analytics set up before you start any marketing efforts.

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in digital marketing. It takes some time and effort to get everything set up and running smoothly. Nevertheless, with the right goal-setting and strategic and tactical planning, you should start seeing results in two to three months. Each business is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy.

The following are two more AI prompts to help you generate various marketing content.

OPTIMIZE SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES
(If you don’t have an about page on your website, enter the home page URL.)

You are an SEO expert with a thorough understanding of how to optimize social media profiles to improve search traffic. I want you to write social media profiles for {website about page}, including these {keywords} incorporated in a snappy description with relevant hashtags. I want profiles for:

• Facebook with a length of under 200 characters
• X (formerly Twitter) with a length of under 160 characters
• Instagram with a length of under 150 characters
• LinkedIn with a length of under 2,000 characters

{website about page}:
{keywords}:

CREATE A CONTENT PLAN
(The media mix could be your blog, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Instead of keywords, you can put your website. Just make sure what you enter into the brackets { } matches in both places.)

You are an SEO expert with a reputation for getting sites to the top of search engine rankings. I want you to create a one-month content plan for me based on my {keywords}. The purpose of the content plan is to boost my site’s search engine rankings and authority. Start at today’s day and give me a list of suggested content that accounts for my {regularity of posting} and {media mix}.
{keywords}:
{regularity of posting}:
{media mix}:

You get the idea.

Play with various requests. For instance, try entering your facilities’ location and amenities and ask it to suggest who may be interested in your services—AKA your target market(s). Then ask it what is the best way to reach each of those targets.

As I’m writing this, Elon Musk released Grok 3 (https://x.ai/). I haven’t tried it, but they say it’s the best yet. Remember that AI is a tool. It’s still a computer talking, and you want to talk to people. Don’t forget to add your human touch to whatever AI content you’re using.