The headline does most of the work
Visitors read your headline before they read anything else — and many read nothing else at all. It carries more weight than any other six words on the page, so spend the time accordingly.
On most pages, the headline is the only thing read in full. Everything beneath it is skimmed, scrolled past, or never reached. So it's strange how often the headline is the line written last, fastest, and with the least thought.
Get it right and the payoff is real: headline optimisation alone has driven conversion lifts of 27% to 104%. Few changes that small move the number that much.
Clarity beats cleverness
The instinct is to be clever — a pun, a mood, a vibe. The problem is that clever asks the reader to do work, and a reader deciding in two seconds won't. A headline's first job is to make someone feel they're in the right place and understand what they'll get.
If they have to think about what it means, you've already lost the ones who didn't.
"Quiet luxury, fifteen minutes from the old town" tells a traveller more than "Where moments become memories" ever will. One is a place. The other is a greeting card. The specific, concrete line almost always outperforms the poetic one.
Write ten, ship one
Because the headline carries so much, it deserves disproportionate effort. Write ten versions. Read them cold the next morning. The first one you wrote is rarely the one that survives — it's usually the most generic, because it's the one your brain reached for by default.
Everything else on the page supports the headline. Get those few words right and the rest has a job to do. Get them wrong and it doesn't matter how good the work beneath them is — most people will never see it.