The squint test
Blur your page until the text is barely legible. What still stands out? On a page that works, the answer is the headline and the button. If your logo, navigation or a stock photo dominates instead, the page is spending its visual budget on things that never convinced anybody.
Say the specific thing
The strongest headlines name a concrete outcome or a concrete audience, ideally both. Compare "Better project management" with "Keep every client project on one timeline your team actually updates." The second is longer and far better, because it is specific enough to be either true or false — which makes it worth reading. Clever is optional. Clear is not.
Use their words, not your internal ones
Teams accumulate internal vocabulary — the product names, the category words, the phrase everyone in the company uses. Visitors have none of that. The words that convert are the ones customers use when they describe the problem to a colleague. You can find them in support tickets, sales call notes and reviews, and they are almost always plainer than what ends up on the page.
Lead with the problem when the product is unfamiliar
If you are in a category people already know, lead with your differentiator. If you are in a new or fuzzy category, lead with the problem, because a visitor cannot want a solution to a problem they have not recognised yet. Getting this backwards is why some technically excellent products read as noise.
The subhead does the second job
A headline that tries to carry the outcome, the audience, the mechanism and the differentiator becomes a paragraph. Let the headline land one idea and let the subhead add the qualifier — who it is for, or how it works in a handful of words. Two lines that each do one job beat one line doing four badly.
Write ten, keep one
First headlines are almost always the most generic ones, because the obvious phrasing arrives first. Write ten variants quickly without judging them, then pick the one a stranger would understand fastest. The exercise costs twenty minutes and routinely produces something materially better than the first attempt.
Then check it in the wild
Read your headline immediately after reading the ad or search snippet that brings people to the page. If the two feel like they belong to different products, the headline is not the problem in isolation — the pairing is. Fix the pairing, not just the page.