Headline Analyzer - Score Length, Power Words and Sentiment
Analyze headlines for emotional impact and click potential.
About Headline Analysis
- Headlines are the first thing readers see - make them count
- Use emotional and power words to increase click-through rates
- Optimal length is 6-12 words or 50-70 characters
- Test different variations to find what works best
Table of Contents
Paste a headline and this tool breaks it down: word count, character count, which words register as emotional or as power words, the overall sentiment, and a combined score with a letter grade. It is a drafting aid for the stage where you have five candidate headlines and no way to choose between them.
What it is measuring
Power words are terms that carry weight on their own - proven, essential, complete. Emotional words carry feeling rather than force - surprising, painful, effortless. A headline made entirely of one type reads as either a press release or a tabloid; the useful range is a mix, anchored to a concrete subject. The tool reports which words it matched so you can judge the call yourself rather than chasing a number.
Worked example
Three versions of the same headline:
Severance Pay Calculation (3 words, no emotional or power words)
The Shocking Truth About Severance Pay (6 words, heavy emotional, no substance)
How Korean Severance Pay Is Actually Calculated (7 words, one power word, concrete)The first is accurate and forgettable. The second scores well on emotion and promises something the page cannot deliver. The third names the subject, the audience and the angle - and it is the one that survives contact with a reader who clicked expecting an answer.
Honest limits
This scores form, not truth. A headline can score highly and still misrepresent the page, and that mismatch costs more than a weak headline ever does: the visitor bounces, and repeated bounces are a worse outcome than a lower click-through rate. Use the score to compare drafts of a headline you already know is honest.
There is also no evidence that any headline score is a ranking signal. Word choice matters because people read it, not because a crawler weighs it.
Related tools
Once the headline is settled, fit it to the search result with the title tag optimizer, write the snippet with the meta description optimizer, preview both in the SERP simulator, and tag campaign links with the UTM builder. More in SEO tools.