Clickbait the risks and rewards!

It’s the end. We are on the final leg of the 4-part clickbait series, but this is the most important one. Over the past three weeks I’ve said nothing but good things about clickbait however, there’s two sides to the coin and it’s important we acknowledge that fact. This series isn’t ‘clickbait is amazing’ and ‘if you’re not using clickbait you’re failing’, the key take away is don’t dismiss clickbait as a tactic, it works and it can work for you BUT beware the risks if you use it. Those risks are what today is about.

Tread Carefully

The trouble is clickbait can sometimes over-promise and under-deliver, so chances are most of your would-be customers try to avoid it whenever possible. After all, nobody likes to feel like they’ve been duped or had their time wasted — and so if you start publishing or promoting clickbait too often, your brand might become toxically synonymous with questionable information or wasted time.

More important still, you could be shooting yourself in the foot in terms of SEO.

In most forms of digital marketing, we’re told that our content has to serve a long-term goal. It’s either got to be engaging for the reader (to sell a product or keep people on your site for longer), to attract SEO traffic and rankings (where ‘mature’ content is often rewarded) or to convey complex information.

Clickbait articles don’t have any of these aims. You can see just by looking at them that SEO certainly isn’t a priority.

Nobody at Buzzfeed has sat in a meeting room pondering: “How can we get more traffic from people searching for stories about toddlers who can play the bongos?” No, the only aim of a clickbait article is to get you on to their site, at which point they need you to read as many other pieces as possible.

You can see further evidence for this when you read one of these articles. Often the largest part of the non-article space on the page is given up to “If you liked this, you might also like…” links – and judging by the time people are spending on these sites, it’s a tactic that works.

Here for a good time, not a long time

Search engines like Google factor a whole lot of criteria into their algorithms when producing results pages for users — and one of those factors is the quality of web content. Every couple of months, Google rolls out a number of updates designed to sift through clickbait, duplicate content and fake news, and subsequently punishes the pages and websites associated with that low-quality content by pushing them further down the results pages.

Another factor search engines look at when ranking different sites is a webpage’s bounce rates. If users click onto a page, identify the content as useless and immediately “bounce” away from the site without clicking to another page, Google generally classes that site as less valuable from a user standpoint. The more users bounce away from your pointless content, the more your website suffers.

Facebook has taken its own steps against clickbait, too. Last summer, the social media giant unveiled a new algorithm update that identifies clickbait being posted by companies, and subsequently prevents those posts from showing up in users’ News Feeds.

Bearing this in mind, it’s worth thinking twice before hosting clickbait on your company website or sharing it on social media. When used sparingly and creatively, it can generate positive traffic that could ultimately bolster your online presence. That increased profile comes hand-in-hand with a number of indirect benefits.

But relying too heavily on clickbait is also a sure-fire way to harm your SEO, lose social media followers and tarnish trust in your brand. So, you really should tread carefully. Sometimes it pays dividends to avoid hopping on the bandwagon — and unless you’re a confident marketer, that means you just might want to steer clear of click baiting.

Conclusion

Clickbait has a negative connotation associated with it.

Because we’re on high alert for the bad kind of clickbait: the empty hyperbole and salacious claims sold by swindlers and tricksters.

Those people give a bad name to clickbait. Because it’s not all bad.

If you believe in what you’re selling and that it can truly help people, it’s your obligation to do whatever it takes to get it in their hands.

In that vein, there’s nothing wrong with clickbait. There’s a reason it’s been in use, successfully, for decades (and almost centuries).

It’s because it works.

It uses well-worn, psychological patterns that people are already looking for. It gives them what they need, when they need it.

So what do you think? Do you think the risks are worth the rewards or is the payoff just not worth it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post and if you have read any of the previous let me know if you enjoyed the clickbait series.

P.S. Don’t worry there will definitely not be anymore clickbait in the future I promise 😉