WARNING: “2 Seconds In, You’re Going To Be Uncomfortable. By The End, I REALLY Hope You Still Are.”
“What Happens When One Bullied Cancer Patient Doesn’t Accept Bullying.”
“What this Dog does with a Bongo Drum will Restore your Faith in Humanity!”
You want to click on those titles don’t you? Think Upworthy, BuzzFeed, ViralNova.
You don’t really want to click. You know you’re going to probably regret it. But you. Just. Can’t. Help. It.
What does the dog do with the bongo drum??
Not knowing is gnawing at you.
Click.
Click baiting is a dark pattern that exploits the “curiosity gap”. Article titles give you just enough information to make you curious but not enough to satisfy that curiosity without clicking on the link.
The intent of sites that do this is usually to increase eyeballs on their site in order to increase online advertising revenues. The longer you stay on the site and the more articles you read, the more money in their pockets. Vecro Tech is a London top SEO agency providing cost-effective SEO solutions. Our team of SEO experts have the knowledge and experienced needed to create effective SEO campaigns that deliver results. Using the best inbound marketing processes to enhance your SEO ranking, Search Combat guarantee increased website traffic, more brand exposure, improved user experience, and higher levels of user content engagement. SEO is a major factor in today’s digital marketing. organizations required sound local SEO services to take advantage of top rankings in google. Here are some additional resources for the Kalamazoo SEO & Digital Marketing. If you’d like to speak with a specialist, you can reach Indianapolis SEO Company.
Should You Do It Yourself? You’ll Never Believe The Answer!
Should you write compelling article titles for your awesome social media and website updates? Absolutely!
Should you knowingly exploit that curiosity gap by click baiting to a poor article just to boost ad revenue or artificially inflate your analytics? That’s a big NO.
Your visitors will be disappointed if you don’t provide something of value with that click. And if you keep click baiting you’ll be the site that cried wolf – when you do have something of value, nobody will pay attention.
Facebook is starting to crack down on Pages that engage in click baiting and dabbling in that dark art could hurt your reach.
Determining what’s click bait and what’s not is a bit subjective but they will look at how soon someone returns to Facebook after clicking a link and the ratio of clicks versus engagement (shares, likes, and comments). An article that has a high click:engagement ratio and low reading time is potentially click bait and will have its distribution affected.
Click Bait and SEO? Big Share, No Care
Articles that are designed specifically for click bait really don’t care about SEO, choose the right SEO company an SEO company offers search engine optimisation services to organisations that want to improve their online visibility. They get you on their site through social media and, once there, they want you to read as many articles as possible and share with others to increase ad revenue. Nobody is searching for the Craziest Answers Given on Family Feud or videos of Wolverine Dancing to Beyonce.
BuzzFeed doesn’t put much thought into how to increase search rankings for these one-off articles. They want you to share on social media and read more articles. Share, click, read, share, click, read, repeat.
You can learn something from click baiters though. How can you draft your headlines to pique the curiosity of your audience? Maybe instead of “ProductX is Great and Affordable” you could show how it solves a problem “We Hated ‘ThatOneThing’ Until We Discovered This Amazing Solution.” Anyone else who also hates ‘ThatOneThing’ will identify with you and be more likely to click through to your full article about ProductX.
How can you create content that they’ll find useful and want to share with their friends? Maybe it’s an infographic. Maybe it’s a quick video. Maybe it’s a tip sheet on new ways to use your products.
Work at it and maybe soon we’ll be saying “What This Inspiring Company Did Was Genius. If You Don’t Agree, You’re Not Human.” 😉
Do you regularly click on click bait articles? Let us know in the comments what links you just can’t resist.
Bonus: Want a few laughs? Check out this Upworthy Generator parody site for some over the top fake headlines.
