Many SEO writers would try their best to see their headlines being clicked on. In fact, that’s one of the ways to generate traffic from the organic search results in SEO services. But, it doesn’t stop there. As SEO writers, you also would like your visitors to stay on our site and read your posts. Many SEO writers would do anything to achieve it, for instance by writing clickbait headlines. But, there are some things that any writers should put attention on before writing a clickbait headline, such as follows:
- Clickbait Headlines Result in Higher Bounce Rates
It goes without saying that your headline should fit your page or your post. Moreover, you need to watch carefully on your word choices. As using some kind of words, such as ‘simply unbelievable’, ‘the most amazing story ever’ or ‘you’ll be blown away’, should gratify the headline’s promise. But, usually these headlines won’t be able to meet the expectations of the readers. Due to this, many audiences will usually bounce back to Google causes the increment the bounce rate of that page.
- Clickbait Could Harm Your Rankings (in Facebook too)
High bounce rate is terribly important, as Google puts a high concern on it. Hence, Google interprets the first click as a mismatch between what they’re searching for and what they’re finding. Therefore, this will result in lower rankings, if people come back immediately to Google after clicking on a search result.
- Clickbait Headlines Can Diminish Trust
According to research of Matthew Hindman (2015), using too much clickbait path, with catchy headlines that misrepresent the article, can diminish the newspaper’s brand and squander reader’s trust. However, a large national newspaper found that headlines chosen for maximum clicks actually lowered total news traffic. Dramatic headlines do attract many audience attentions. However, it can quickly turn off those readers to visit the second or third article.
In fact, audiences have been smarter. They know which clickbait headlines that will not give them the best or most useful information. In the end, they will avoid clicking on links that are considered as not to be trustworthy.