How to increase traffic 16,500%: clickbait vs. reality

 

by Ariella Brown

I just attended an event with the title " Information Gain Content: How to Increase Traffic 16,500% by Going Above & Beyond with Bernard Huang." Did the session live up to its clickbait title?

Not at all. 

This wasn't necessarily Bernard Huang's fault. The presentation was hosted by the Top of the Funnel group that favors these types of large numbers that sound just specific enough that people may believe they are real.

Earlier this month, it offered "Social Copywriting Secrets: Building an Audience of 114,985 with Eddie Shleyner" I attended that one, too, and there was nothing in it that justified that number as the guaranteed result of some tactic you could apply. Shleyner just emphasized sticking to good, authentic storytelling to keep your audience engaged.

There were no easy-to-apply tricks in this session. If anything, it was about the reason the old tricks no longer work.  Huang explained that Google is currently applying its stated standard of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) in the context of its AI overview.

My main takeaway from this session was not that it's easy to increase your traffic on Google but that it simply has switched one set of algorithmic rules for another, now including its own AI reads on content and that this is not necessarily a good thing.

What bad about this? 

The bottom line is that Google is relying very heavily on consensus as well as pre-established authority. That means that it is very easy for the sites that have already built up big audiences and strong rankings on Google to leverage that to put out proclamations that will be accepted as true, especially when they are -- inevitably -- echoed by the wannabee followers and all those who pretend to be thought leaders by parroting what influencers already say.


In other words, truly original thoughts by those who are not just reinforcing group think will likely be buried. I did raise this question and wasn't wholly reassured by the answer. It was that, yes, Google expects all points of consensus on a particular topic to be represented. If they are not present, your content will be an outcast. The only way you have a chance to be noted is if you play the contrarian game by refuting the consensus views point by point. Not giving it that nod is SEO suicide.

And so we the current state of search is one that aims to homogenize information according to preset parameters from those already granted expert status where those who are not in line with the consensus will be buried in the obscurity of high number page results. 

This is truly the opposite of a democratic platform in which understanding of history and current events is allowed to rise or fall based solely on its own merit rather than the pre-established narrative. George Patton would be appalled. He's the one who said: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

Google's algorithms are designed to reward those who follow in the paths preset by others rather than really thinking for themselves. 

P.S. For the story behind the illustration above, see my LinkedIn post. 

Related:

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What Edison can teach us about SEO

Put SEO in the picture

Follow Write Way Pro on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

You can also follow Ariella Brown.  

Aim higher than SEO for your marketing content

You know, Jane Austen could have opened "Pride and Prejudice" with the standard line, "Once upon a time there was a family with five girls and no sons to inherit the estate that they depended on for their support." She didn't.

https://www.zazzle.com/pride_and_prejudice_tote_bag-149363338488539996

Instead of sticking with the safe formulation, she crafted one of the most memorable openers for a novel that also gives the readers a taste of her wit and sense of irony. That opening line is Austen's brand in a nutshell.

This is what businesses should be striving for in their opening lines on their sites and their reports. Generative AI will not deliver that because it will work off pre-existing models. Simply tweaking that output will still not result in something truly fresh, though it may be just good enough to not incur the generative AI penalty Google has promised to deliver for those who aspire to achieve high SEO results.

Achieving SEO goals is not the same as making a memorable impression on your target audience when they click through to your site or blog.

What impresses Google is not necessarily going to move your target market to establish a relationship with your brand. The content that does can only be produced by a combination of analytics and human creativity.

You can't just be content with optimizing for search engines by following SEO guidelines when you need RO -- responsiveness optimization -- that requires blazing your own brand path.

That's what Write Way branding and marketing is all about. Learn more about my business offerings here.

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Follow Write Way Pro on LinkedIn and on Facebook.

You can also follow Ariella Brown.  

Put SEO in the picture

One aspect of putting SEO in the picture is thinking about the impact your pictures have on your site core vitals.

All content marketers know that it takes more than text to catch the eye. But those who are also aware of site loading issues realize that pictures can slow down a site.

Slow page loadings harm your core web vitals and your SEO.

So what should you do: give up the pictures or give up the better speed?

The answer is neither. You can have the best of both worlds -- attractively illustrated posts and good loading times when you optimize your pictures for web view.

In the past, I had to do this manually for each image, playing around a bit to find the size that would look good but does slow things down. I don't have to do that now.

I just discovered a great SaaS solution. Imagify optimizes your images for you in a snap. 

It enables you to fix all the ones you have on a page without having to upload them one by one. At the free level, you get up 200 images a month, though you have to be sure to download them within 24 hours.

I put it to the test with my site. As the screenshot here shows, it details how much memory space you can save for each compression.

For some of the pictures, the amount of memory gained was rather small, so I opted to skip those and only converted the ones for which the difference was more substantial. Imagify shows the amount of saved for all the compressed versions I selected in place of the original pictures.

While it's easy to use for any site, it's even easier if you use WordPress. You can use the Imagify plugin to automatically optimize the images and ensure that that they are not the cause of slow loading times on your site. Learn more about that by watching the video below.

Another aspect of SEO in the picture

Another way in which to consider SEO in the picture is labeling your pictures in a way that makes Google identify it with your topic and keywords. In addition to the SEO benefit, you would be  achieving ADA compliance(see Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA) in rendering your  pictures accessible to those who have to have content read to them because they can't view it themselves. 

The SEO boost of the labeling can sometimes manifest itself in surprising ways. I notice dthis wehn taking a closer look at Google Search Console on my Edison blog to prepare What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO. Some of the search queries were bringing up the caption I had on the picture that illustrates the blog as some people make a point of including Wikipedia in their query. 

So here's the general rule for thinking about SEO for pictures: you want to minimize the file size but maximize your label.

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Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible
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Ryan George shows best and worst marketing practices

 If you If you are not familiar with Ryan George, then check out his YouTube Channels. Screen Rants, which offers commentary on films in the guise of pitch meetings in which spoilers abound, has nearly 8.5 million subscribers (and millions of views on his take on Spider-Man: No Way Home in which he reveals, among other things, how long it takes to watch five movies to get all the connections in this one).

The  Ryan George channel has 1.38 million subscribers. One of the recent videos on that channel contains fundamental points about the customer's experience. In What Shoppiong on Amazon Feels Like, he nails both best practices and worst practices for effective marketing. 

Best practice: conveying the sponsor message 

The brand paying George for the video is mentioned at the beginning but only very briefly. That means that even if you don't want to sit through an  extended description of the features and benefits SayMine.com boasts of, you will at least have heard of it. 

That's a win-win solution. By placing the more extended description at the end, he's removing the irritation people have from being forced to watch an ad before they get what they want, something that is not likely to make people develop more positive feelings for the brand. 

I touch on the downside of withholding content from your audience in Make your content as accessible as possible.

The brand still gets its spotlight with a brief mention in the beginning and in Ryan George's description of the video. Plus when he delivers the spiel about it, he does so in a kind of tongue-in-cheek manner consistent with the Ryan George brand. He delivers it in the guise of the "adstronaut."

Worst practices: irrelevance, keyword-stuffing descriptions, and information overload

Within the video, the role of Amazon shows an obliviousness to what the shopper wants and needs that highlight the worst practices of pushing products and services on the shopper that are irrelevant to his current needs. He's shopping for a chair and is not interested in video recommendations.

When he finally does get to see chairs, all of them are identical despite showing different brand names with variations on descriptions. Those of us who have shopped on Amazon know this is accurate but just to prove it, I'll put a screenshot from Amazon below:

Compare that with one of the ones in the video:

Content writers, take note! These product descriptions exemplify an SEO strategy that forgets about how the text sounds to  the human reader .

While all that may not overwhelm the shopper, attempting to make sense of the thousands of reviews may do so. That is also not an exaggeration. One of the chairs I checked on the site had over 23.5K ratings. 

Talk about information overload! A few hundred would be more credible and manageable than the huge number of reviews that certain products show on eCommerce sites.

Audiences loved this video because they could so relate as customers. Marketers and online sellers should pay attention because the humor here works because it is true. Turning off shoppers and losing potential customers due to bad practices is no laughing matter. 

Related:

Amazon uses snail mail for direct mail and Seeing stars

Make your content as accessible as possible

 

The certificates above show that I have just completed the HubSpot Academy courses on content marketing and SEO. I did pick up a few tips, but the best part of it was the feeling of gratification that my understanding of best practices from years of experience was spot on. Unfortunately, the businesses I sometimes worked for often deviated from such best practices.

Unlock those gates!

For example, I'm generally not in favor of gating good content. You want it to be read, so why create barriers to getting it read? I fully understand that you want to force people to give you their contact information to follow up with potential leads. However, as the course points out, you can encourage some kind of opt-in even without blocking the content.

Semrush, the online visibility platform, agrees that introducing a layer of friction -- even if it is as simple as entering an email address -- will turn away readers. That is not something you want to do in the awareness stage when you wish to attract as many eyeballs as possible.

"You usually wouldn’t start a relationship with gated content. You have to woo your readers first, showing that your content is worth their time and — later on — their personal information." - Semrush

HubSpot's course suggestion was to have the content accessible with an option for the reader to download it as a PDF. People will voluntarily download content they like to have available to read at leisure, particularly longer form content. My guess is that seeing things first the first time on a smartphone likely contributes to that practice even more.

Keep it simple!

I also felt particularly gratified about another explicit guideline it gives that I've clashed with some clients over in the past. That is to use clear, direct language rather than jargon or what you believe is a very impressive vocabulary filled with the types of words students used to memorize for the SATs. It's a mistake to believe that you sound smarter by using big words, as the really confident person will explain even more complex topics as clearly as possible (think "explain it to me like I'm five").

I still remember what my composition instructor said about Winston Churchill, who was a highly capable speaker and writer. As the British Prime Minister during WWII, he didn't say, "The received communication from France is extremely unfavorable." Instead, he said, "The news from Paris is very bad."

The contrast to Churchill's direct and honest approach appears in Emperor Hiroshito's observation after the devastation of two atomic bombs, "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."

Consider which statement you would consider more trustworthy as a source, and remember that when crafting your own content.

screenshot from https://app.hubspot.com/academy/21390613/tracks/15/377/2059

I took the liberty of grabbing a screenshot from the HubSpot video as proof of what I tried very tactfully to convey to a few of my recent clients. Unfortunately, they refused to get the point. In one case, they insisted they have to avoid using "layman" terms. In the other, they insisted that really smart people speak that way.

P.S. Semrush also corroborated that point in a tweet that went up just today. Here's the final step in its short thread on how to format your content for search engines & target featured snippets:

✍️ Finally, tighten up your page’s copy. Try to use short, direct sentences with language that isn’t too complicated. Good luck 👋

— Semrush (@semrush) February 9, 2022

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Where HubSpot Messed Up

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

Churchill's Guide to Writing

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines 

CRO is Like Basketball 

Most Memorable Brand Slogans 

What Edison can teach us about SEO

en.wikipedia.org

 

No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what worked. You have to do the same to optimize your SEO.

Are we really going to talk about Edison? Yes. The first lesson of SEO is that the title

must match the content because it is the promise you make that the content has to deliver. 

You want to build an audience by giving them content that they find so good, they share it.
Clickbait always disappoints and so would only be shared by those who don’t really read

the content. 

Why SEO is important

People put a lot of trust in what comes up as a result in organic search precisely because it
comes across as information they seek rather than ads people paid to have shown to them.
While it’s easier to get fast results when you pay for ads, a solid content strategy that

incorporates SEO will offer a greater ROI over time.

What people get wrong about SEO

The biggest mistake people make when deciding to implement SEO is thinking of it as a

formula that can easily be applied to any site to boost rankings instantly. SEO doesn’t

work like that.

You don’t just read up on some SEO tips, apply them, and expect surges of traffic overnight.
As is always the case of seeing results from content marketing, you  have to allow six months to see measurable results from working through necessary tweaks

to titles, keywords, tags, etc. 

Improving it involves understanding what brings people to your content, what they’re

looking for, and how they’re phrasing their searches. That can inform your strategy

for creating content that is is is both relevant to your brand and to your audience’s

concerns, so the context within your work is important. 

Understanding SEO in context of your content

As someone who has blogged for fun since 2005, I’ve written about a variety of topics that

interest me without any though of popularity or monetization. Google Search Console

reports give me valuable insights into SEO by showing me not just which posts gets clicks

but which queries bring them to people's attention.

My post on Edison is far and above the most popular post on that blog, as you can

see from the top five shown below. The other four have something in common with

the Edison blog; they reference famous people. Those names are key component

of some of the queries that bring people to my blog. That was one insight derived

from studying Search Console.

Lightbulb* interest persists

Google doesn’t just provide me with the statistics here; it shows me what brings people to a post with emails that offer updates on performance, as well as the queries people type in that drives them to my site.

The latest one offered this insight:

How do people find you?

Top growing queries

Compared to previous month

how many times did edison fail before inventing the lightbulb

+18 clicks (web)

how many tries did it take to invent the lightbulb

+9 clicks (web)

how many tries to invent the lightbulb

+9 clicks (web)

Top performing queries

Query

Clicks (web)

how many times did edison fail before inventing the lightbulb

35

how many times did it take to invent the lightbulb

13

how many tries to invent the lightbulb

11

I wrote the blog on Edison back in 2015 when my curiosity was piqued about the myth of a thousand attempts to get it right after visiting his lab and home in New Jersey. Clearly many
others share that curiosity, and it is their query that drives traffic to the blog, delivering SEO
results that far exceed what I could get on social media.

Keep your content updated

Another thing to remember is this: the lightbulb’s development certainly didn’t
end when Edison filed for a patent on the bamboo filament version. It continued
to evolve over time, and your content has to as well, to stay relevant and rank well.

Accordingly, in 2020 I added several updates to the blog. They ranged from warnings about the Edison sites having closed to visitors and offering only virtual tours to more details about the evolution of the lightbulb until Edison’s patent, including the work of Lewis Howard Latimer, who was obliquely referenced by Joe Biden in the summer.

In 2022, I added a reference to the HBO series, The Gilded Age because the seventh episode
makes a point of bringing up Latimer in connection with Edison. The problem with that is
that show is set in 1882 when Latimer was still working for Edison's competitor. Though
he did come to work for Edison, that was in 1884. He also was working in the New York
office, primarily on patent issues -- not in the Menlo Park lab where the tinkering took
place.

Google is constantly adjusting its algorithms, so you have to constantly adjust your own
content to keep it optimized. SEO is not an ultimate destination but constantly evolving
journey of discovery.


*Note on "lightbulb" as one word. I opted for that here because it is AP style; however, writing it as two words is also correct.

Related:

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible
7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines
CRO is Like Basketball
Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing
Most Memorable Brand Slogans

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