The Shocking Truth Behind Why Clickbait Actually Works

Clickbaiting in SEO
(Last Updated On: November 12, 2018)

What is Clickbait?

As its name suggests, clickbait is a type of content that is written particularly to attract as many clicks as possible. Any sort of content can be viewed as clickbait content. News stories, videos, blog posts, interviews, infographics – bundled in a certain way, you can make any web content clickbait. However, clickbait ordinarily has a few of the accompanying attributes:

  • An eye-catchy and convincing featured headline
  • Effortlessly skimmable
  • Amusing or memorable images/video
  • Humorous tone, or appeals strongly to a specific emotion/feeling (more on this instantly)
  • Intended to encourage social sharing for instant viral marketing

The truth behind clickbait will shock you

Not all clickbait content has all of these signs, but most of it tends to have all or somewhere around a few attributes.

Over time, content advertisers in virtually all industries have intended to try and design their very own viral successes by imitating the style and format of web content specially designed for clickbaiting by sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, the two biggest and best clickbait producers on the web.

Click Baiting and SEO

In an ideal world, click baiting can tackle with each and every issue that an SEO specialist can face. Click-baiting can boost rankings and it can earn you more views per visitor. In all actuality, click baiting can actually do more damage than good for your SEO.

While click baiting can get you some more couple of clicks and a few visits from time to time, the worst part about click baiting is that you surrender the chance to include your keyword in your title in return for a couple of words that can provoke individuals’ interest and as a general rule, that can really backfire on you.

Does this mean that click baits are bad for SEO? Yes or no.

We can really learn a few lessons from click baiting and we can utilize those lessons to enhance our SEO and of course, the content that we churn for our websites – which over the long run, is the better thing to do.

The Benefits of Clickbait

So, thinking about creating some click bait content for your website or blog but not much sure about how you could benefit out of it?

Let’s take a look at some of the pros of clickbait.

1. More Pageviews

The main idea behind creating clickbait, it should come as no surprise that more pageviews is the first pros of this type of content. If your only goal is the more page views, then clickbait is an excellent way to get them.

Clickbait can generate more pageviews each day whether you use it on your own blog or elsewhere, such as guest columns for other publications or social media posts. Obviously, to gauge the effectiveness of clickbait posted to your own website, you’ll need to pay close attention to the sources of your traffic using an analytics platform such as Google Analytics.

2. Greater Potential for Social Shares

Good (or effective) clickbait is almost as irresistible to share on social networks as it is to click instantly in the first place. However, people won’t share just anything, as thoughts of their personality are often closely related to the type of content they share among their social networks.

To encourage tagging & social sharing of clickbait, it pays to appeal to people’s emotions. The stronger the emotional rejoinder, the more likely they are to share the content. Although holding down precisely which emotional triggers to target is difficult, many social media experts agree that primarily there are six emotions associated with the social-friendly content. They are:

  • Fear
  • Anger
  • Joy
  • Sadness
  • Disgust
  • Surprise

Combine a strong claim to one of these emotions with an enticing title and well-structured content, and you could have the next viral hit in your hands.

3. Expanded Brand Awareness

Another benefit of clickbait is brand awareness. If clickbait results in more social shares and page views, it defines that more people out there will be exposed to your brand as your offered content spreads across the web like a forest fire.

Increasing brand awareness in terms of viral marketing is vital to content marketing, and creating compelling clickbait is a great way to do it. If we think of content marketing as a recurring cycle, brand awareness plays a crucial role in helping site visitors remember your content (and thus, your brand) and establishing trust.

What We Can Learn From Click Baits

We’ve built up that big-name website are beginning to phase out click baits so how can we gain from that is by adapting their good points while abstaining from copying the bad ones. Here are some examples:

“You will have a hard time believing… ” – Many misleading content connections begin with this notorious articulation. It’s a powerful methods for catching individuals’ interest and yet it is a twofold edged sword since it raises their desires. What we can gain from this is individuals are normally inquisitive so it is smarter to put in a title that is useful and in the meantime, interesting. Good Example: How we Analyzed and Improved our Term Frequency – Inverse Frequency in 10 Minutes. This is powerful on the grounds that it catches the pith of something that is inconceivable at first look yet can really be accomplished subsequent to perusing 10 minutes worth of substance that is both important and educational.

To Click, Or Not to Click?

Rowan Atkinson clickbait news

Let be honest – clickbait can be a considerable measure of good times for content marketers. Coming up with witty, sensationalist headlines is a skill that can be profitable to content makers, and it’s constantly pleasant to see those spikes in site visits and social shares when click bait content performs well. Be that as it may, as we’ve seen, there are advantages and disadvantages to utilizing click bait content in your content marketing strategy – and no one but you can decide whether the potential gains are worth the risks.

Please follow and like us:
About Sunny Kumar 42 Articles
Sunny is passionate about Digital Marketing and building Brand Awareness. He is an experimental blogger. He holds a Google Certification in Google Analytics & Digital Marketing having a wide range of industry experience to his credit.

1 Comment

Comments are closed.