Headline Analyzer for Landing Pages

What makes a landing page headline work

David Ogilvy wrote that five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. On a landing page a visitor reads your H1 and decides in a few seconds whether the page is for them. The headline has one job. It has to tell a stranger what you sell and why they should care, fast enough that they keep reading. The six checks above test that job, and each one comes from a rule we wrote up with its sources.

It passes the five-second test

Show the hero for five seconds, hide it, and ask what the product does and who it’s for. If the visitor can’t answer from memory, the headline failed. Category words do most of the work here: “helpdesk”, “project management”, “email marketing”. A clever line with no category noun leaves the visitor guessing. Our five-second test write-up covers the patterns that pass and the three that fail.

It leads with what the buyer gets

“AI-powered survey platform with 50+ integrations” describes the product. “Get answers from real buyers in 24 hours” describes the buyer’s week after they sign up. Visitors care about the second one. To find your outcome, ask “so what?” about your feature until the answer is something your buyer would say out loud. The benefit-led headlines guide has the formula and three before-and-after rewrites.

It makes a claim you could check

“Faster”, “smarter” and “powerful” give the reader nothing to hold on to. A number, a timeframe or a named result does. You don’t need a statistic in every H1, but if your subheadline carries no specific claim either, the hero relies on adjectives alone. The specific claims article lists where to find real numbers if you think you have none.

It says one thing, in the buyer’s words

A headline that stacks three promises makes the visitor choose which one applies to them. Pick the one your best customers mention first. Then read it as an outsider: any term you’d have to explain on a sales call (“agentic”, “orchestration”, “single pane of glass”) belongs lower on the page with a plain gloss. Ogilvy called the headline your eighty cents out of the dollar, and the single dominant H1 article explains why you shouldn’t split it.

Real SaaS headlines and their Clarity scores

We ran these homepages through the full PageLint engine for the teardown gallery. The H1s are copied as they appeared on the page, and the Clarity score is the lens score from each published audit. The middle column shows how each one did on the five-second test.

The two ends of the table show the pattern. Mailchimp and Trello name the category or the daily task in plain words and score 86. Vercel’s “Agentic Infrastructure” and Webflow’s “Make your website a growth engine” never say what you’d buy, and both fail the five-second test. The 24 SaaS value propositions ranked by clarity go through every one of them.

When to start with the problem

Benefit headlines assume the visitor already wants the outcome. If your buyers don’t yet know they have the problem, lead with the problem in their words and bring the outcome in the subheadline. None of the 24 gallery homepages open with a problem, so a problem-first H1 also stands out in a crowded category. The PAS copywriting formula gives a fill-in template for a SaaS hero, and shows where agitation turns into manipulation.

Headline analyzer questions, answered.

Your headline is one of 55 checks.

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