What is clickbait & does it actually work?

Clickbait has become such a widely used word. It refers to internet content intended to entice readers to click on and follow a link to a website or article. Often, clickbait is a term used to describe misleading headlines. 

Moreover, Clickbait applies to any copy created to promote your content and drive quality traffic to your website.

Nowadays, most users are accustomed to seeing clickbait in every corner of the internet. Though clickbait has earned a bad reputation, when done correctly, the techniques can be an effective marketing tool that will increase your brand’s awareness and build relationships with your audience.

What is clickbait?

Clickbait is a sensationalized headline that encourages you to click a link to an article, image, or video. Instead of presenting objective facts, clickbait headlines often appeal to your emotions and curiosity. Once you click, the website hosting the link earns revenue from advertisers, but the actual content is usually of questionable quality and accuracy. Websites use clickbait to draw in as many clicks as possible, thus increasing their ad revenue.

While sensational headlines and content have been used since the 19th century, they’ve become widespread in the digital world. Although it’s based on an old idea, clickbait still serves the same purpose as its ancestor: to get your attention by whatever means necessary. Clickbait can appear in many formats, like blog posts, banner ads, and SERP ads.

Where do you find clickbait?

You can find it almost anywhere on the Internet, which makes it difficult to avoid. Clickbait headlines are common in places like social media and blogs, while many reputable sites like weather reports and news agencies offer ad space to clickbait content. This means you’ll have to remain careful before you click a link, even when you’re on a quality website.

Is clickbait bad?

We all want to develop content that draws readers to our website, and there are plenty of content marketing techniques that can help but all aren’t SEO-friendly. Google now knows more about your website’s content than ever, thanks to its various updates. If your webpage’s title, headings, and URL aren’t relevant to its content, Google might penalize you, which could severely impact your rankings. Clickbait can also affect your:

• Digital PR: If your website’s known for using outrageous claims and headlines to lure traffic, your brand reputation might suffer in the long run.
• Bounce Rate: When a user clicks through to your website and doesn’t find it useful or relevant, they’re more likely to “bounce” away from your site, raising its overall bounce rate.
• Backlinks: Earning links from less reputable sites can diminish your Page Authority scoring and your page’s rank.

Can I rank from titles and keywords alone?

The short answer is no. While some clickbait titles may drive a lot of traffic to your site, Google looks at more than just the number of visitors when considering page authority and page rank. You may get hundreds of people clicking through to your site daily, but if they click away because your content doesn’t match the title and URL you provided, it can affect your rankings.

Best practices to avoid clickbait

Pay attention to your page titles and heading structure. Google’s algorithms can understand the content written on your site and will check if it matches its headline and page title. Google’s most recent Page Title Update now enables the search engine to display a “replacement” title tag when your page’s title doesn’t accurately match its content. To avoid this, make sure your page title and headers accurately represent what your content’s about.

Why should you be careful using clickbait to promote your business?

The trouble is clickbait over-promises and under-delivers, 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.

Common characteristics of clickbait

Though there is such a thing as bad clickbait, reputable sources use many of the attributes of clickbait in order to make their online content more enticing. There are some common qualities found in all types of clickbait, such as:

• Content that inspires social sharing
• Headlines that strongly appeal to specific and strong emotions, like humor or outrage
• Distinct or funny images and videos
• Content that is easy to skim
• Headlines that grab your attention and leave you wanting more information
• Articles that are typically 300 words or less
• Unoriginal content that provides an embedded video that you could find on other platforms or a summarization of a longer article 

It’s important to note that clickbait doesn’t always possess every single one of these characteristics, but there are usually at least a few present.

Why do businesses use clickbait? 

Simply put, marketing agencies and business owners alike use clickbait because it’s a fairly easy way to increase web traffic and yield results. Commonly, these companies rely on listicles that focus on compiling industry-specific information for users, which results in saving the audience time and resources and an increase in traffic for the creator. This eventually improves the site’s presence on search engines, making it beneficial for all parties involved. 

Another option for increasing web traffic is content promotion. Using this technique,  relevant third-party websites publish your company’s content on their site, therefore increasing your company’s exposure. Though clickbait can improve a company’s visibility, it’s a little more difficult to determine whether this improvement in traffic directly results in an increase in sales and subsequent conversion rates.

How is clickbait used?

You can use clickbait techniques for a myriad of reasons, both good and evil. Many businesses use it for good as a way to market valuable content to a larger audience. Others may use it for more neutral reasons, like to promote average quality content in order to generate more revenue. Then there’s evil. There are those that use clickbait to promote scams, phishing sites, and links to malware (malicious software).

Much like advertisers, malicious individuals use these techniques to reach as many people as possible. These scammers and hackers hope that by getting unsuspecting users to click on a link they can then trick them into visiting a phishing site or convince them to download and install malware onto their computer.

The Benefits of Clickbait

Generally speaking, clickbait gains attention but lacks substance. However, it does offer some benefits, such as:

1. Increase in page views

Business owners create this type of content specifically to generate more page views, so it shouldn’t be surprising that that is its primary benefit. If you are primarily looking to drive more traffic to your site, clickbait can be an effective solution. Just make sure that you use some sort of analytics software so that you are able to track the sources of your online traffic. And remember that there are a ton of options for making shareable, interactive content that will entice users and enrich their experience with your company.

2. Higher likelihood for shares

Individuals expertly craft the headlines used in clickbait to pique people’s attention and encourage users to share the content on their own social media platforms. But you’ll have to be careful because people are cautious about what they share since it usually reflects on their own personality and character. Clickbait increases the chances of being shared by creating a strong emotional response in the reader. Many believe that there are six emotions that you can target to manipulate an audience into social sharing:

• Shock
• Joy
• Disgust
• Sadness
• Anger
• Fear

4. Improved brand awareness

Obviously, more page views and shares will inevitably result in an increased awareness of your brand. Clickbait can be an extremely effective tool for making your brand recognizable by people, which is an important aspect of content marketing. Content creation and brand awareness go hand-in-hand because when a reader remembers your content, they will eventually begin to trust you and establish a relationship with your brand, which often results in them one day converting into a customer. 

Though creating viral content is perhaps the most effective way to increase brand awareness, content that encourages shares on social media and visits to your page will improve your brand’s visibility just as effectively.

The disadvantages of clickbait

As with most content marketing techniques, clickbait can be a valuable tool but comes with its fair share of challenges, such as:

1. People have become desensitized

When clickbait was first developed, it was extremely effective due to its novelty. However, its popularity has grown exponentially over the years which has created an audience that is less easy to impress with this type of content. Phrases commonly used in headlines, such as “with this one strange trick” or “their reaction is priceless” have created an over-saturated market with highly cynical audiences. As more and more companies resort to clickbait strategies, it has created a whole lot of noise and very little interest.

2. Misrepresentation damages a brand’s image

If you purposely mislead your audience by offering a clickbait headline that fails to deliver, your brand image will quickly disintegrate. Not only will your audience become annoyed, but they will also likely lose trust in your brand. Though your deception may attract page views, the reader will probably leave the page quickly once they realize that it has deceived them and will begin to view your brand negatively. Ultimately, you may encourage more views, but the potential damage to your brand is probably not worth it.

3. Page views are relatively unimportant

While quite a few content marketers are beginning to hone their clickbait abilities, more and more experts are beginning to come to the realization that page views have become increasingly unimportant. These industry professionals are finding that they should place more focus on the reader’s attention and engagement when measuring the success of content. 

A popular metric for this called “total time reading” estimates the amount of time that the average person spends with each piece of content. Using this information, companies can figure out which of their posts readers found the most engaging. Aside from using a metric that measures the total attention given to each piece, experts are also beginning to examine the total attention dedicated to a website. This allows companies to examine what aspects of their site are gaining the most interest.

4. Search engines could punish your website

In an effort to discourage fake news, duplicate content, and clickbait, search engines like Google continuously develop algorithms that establish strict criteria for the results shown to users, such as a content’s overall quality. When a search engine suspects websites and pages of having content that is low quality, the search engine pushes their ranking down on the results pages.

In addition to content quality, search engines also analyze the bounce rate associated with a web page or site. In other words, if a high volume of users has gone to a webpage, realized the content was pointless and then immediately “bounced” away from the site instead of redirecting to another page, search engines usually classify this content as invaluable to users. 

Aside from search engines, social media platforms have also taken measures to decrease the prevalence of clickbait on their sites. Facebook, for example, released an update to their algorithm that is able to identify when a company posts clickbait on the site and then keeps those posts from being featured on people’s news feeds.

Ineffective clickbait titles

There are likely more examples of bad clickbait titles than there are good. Here are some examples of headlines that will probably make you laugh more than they’ll make you click:

• “Once You See This You’ll Never Look at Dogs the Same”
• “After She Called the Cops, You’ll Never Believe What She Did Next”
• “You’ll Freak Once You See What This Fast Food Chain Did”
• “She Finally Admitted This Shocking Secret That Tore Her Family Apart”
• “The Ugly Truth That This Grocery Chain Doesn’t Want You to Know”

Effective clickbait titles

When you decide to adopt clickbait techniques for your marketing strategy, it’s important that you choose headlines that intrigue and then pair it with content that delivers. Here are some examples of effective clickbait titles:

• “12 Things Every Parent Should Remember”
• “The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategies”
• “10 Jobs That Will Enrich Your Life”
• “The 5 Documentaries You Have to Watch Before You Die”
• “30 Must-Have Products That Will Improve Your Productivity”

Conclusion

Clickbait is a type of marketing technique used to drive views and clicks with considerable setbacks to your SEO strategy. But avoid clickbait by ensuring your page title, headlines, and URL match your content and your user’s search intent. 

Whether you are considering adopting clickbait techniques to improve your search engine results or to increase your page views, you’ll be faced with a fair share of advantages and disadvantages. 

It’s extremely important that you take the time to research how to effectively employ this marketing tool before adopting it and remember to always prioritize the relationship with your audience by placing your focus on offering them valuable, quality content that establishes trust.