Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World – Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about writing titles and headlines, both for SEO and in this new click-bait, Facebook social world. This is kind of a challenge, because I think many folks are seeing and observing that a lot of the ranking signals that can help a page perform well are often preceded or well correlated with social activity, which would kind of bias us towards saying, “Hey, how can I do these click-baity, link-baity sorts of social viral pieces,” versus we’re also a challenge with, “Gosh, those things aren’t as traditionally well performing in search results from a perhaps click-through rate and certainly from a search conversion perspective. So how do we balance out these two and make them work together for us based on our marketing goals?” So I want to try and help with that.

Let’s look at a search query for Viking battles, in Google. These are the top two results. One is from Wikipedia. It’s a category page — Battles Involving the Vikings. That’s pretty darn straightforward. But then our second result — actually this might be a third result, I think there’s a indented second Wikipedia result — is the seven most bad ass last stands in the history of battles. It turns out that there happen to be a number of Viking related battles in there, and you can see that in the meta description that Google pulls. This one’s from Crack.com.

These are pretty representative of the two different kinds of results or of content pieces that I’m talking about. One is very, very viral, very social focused, clearly designed to sort of do well in the Facebook world. One is much more classic search focused, clearly designed to help answer the user query — here’s a list of Viking battles and their prominence and importance in history, and structure, and all those kinds of things.

Okay. Here’s another query — Viking jewelry. Going to stick with my Viking theme, because why not? We can see a website from Viking jewelry. This one’s on JellDragon.com. It’s an eCommerce site. They’re selling sterling silver and bronze Viking jewelry. They’ve actually done very classic SEO focus. Not only do they have Viking jewelry mentioned twice, in the second instance of Viking jewelry, I think they’ve intentionally — I hope it was intentionally — misspelled the word “jewelry” to hopefully catch misspellings. That’s some old-school SEO. I would actually not recommend this for any purpose.

But I thought it was interesting to highlight versus in this search result it takes until page three until I could really find a viral, social, targeted, more link-baity, click-baity type of article, this one from io9 — 1,000 Year-old Viking Jewelry Found On Danish Farm. You know what the interesting part is? In this case, both of these are on powerful domains. They both have quite a few links to them from many external sources. They’re pretty well SEO’d pages.

In this case, the first two pages of results are all kind of small jewelry website stores and a few results from like Etsy and Amazon, more powerful authoritative domains. But it really takes a long time before you get these, what I’d consider, very powerful, very strong attempts at ranking for Viking jewelry from more of your click-bait, social, headline, viral sites. io9 certainly, I would kind of expect them to perform higher, except that this doesn’t serve the searcher intent.

I think Google knows that when people look for Viking jewelry, they’re not looking for the history of Viking jewelry or where recent archeological finds of Viking jewelry happened. They’re looking specifically for eCommerce sites. They’re trying to transact and buy, or at least view and see what Viking jewelry looks like. So they’re looking for photo heavy, visual heavy, potentially places where they might buy stuff. Maybe it’s some people looking for artifacts as well, to view the images of those, but less of the click-bait focus kind of stuff.

This one I think it’s very likely that this does indeed perform well for this search query, and lots of people do click on that as a positive result for what they’re looking for from Viking battles, because they’d like to see, “Okay, what were the coolest, most amazing Viking battles that happened in history?”

You can kind of see what’s happened here with two things. One is with Hummingbird and Google’s focus on topic modeling, and the other with searcher intent and how Google has gotten so incredibly good at pattern matching to serve user intent. This is really important from an SEO perspective to understand as well, and I like how these two examples highlight it. One is saying, “Hey, just because you have the most links, the strongest domain, the best keyword targeting, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll rank if you’re not serving searcher intent.”

Now, when we think about doing this for ourselves, that click-bait versus searched optimized experience for our content, what is it about? It’s really about choosing. It’s about choosing searcher intent, our website and marketing goals, or click-bait types of goals. I’ve visualized the intersection here with a Venn diagram. So these in pink here, the click-bait pieces that are going to resonate in social media — Facebook, Twitter, etc. Blue is the intent of searchers, and purple is your marketing goals, what you want to achieve when visitors get to your site, the reason you’re trying to attract this traffic in the first place.

This intersection, as you will notice, is super, uber tiny. It is miniscule. It is molecule sized, and it’s a very, very hard intersection to hit. In fact, for the vast majority of content pieces, I’m going to say that it’s going to be close to, not always, but close to impossible to get that perfect mix of click-bait, intent of searchers, and your marketing goals. The times when it works best is really when you’re trying to educate your audience or provide them with informational value, and that’s also something that’s going to resonate in the social web and something searchers are going to be looking for. It works pretty well in B2B types of things, particularly in spaces where there’s lots of influencers and amplifiers who also care about educating their followers. It doesn’t work so well when you’re trying to target Viking battles or Viking jewelry. What can I say, the historians of the Viking world simply aren’t that huge on Twitter yet. I hope they will be one day.

This is kind of the process that I would use to think about the structure of these and how to choose between them. First off, I think you need to ask, “Should I create a single piece of content to target all of these, or should I instead be thinking about individual pieces that hit one or two at a time?”

So it could be the case that maybe you’ve got an intersection of intent for searchers and your marketing goals. This happens quite a bit, and oftentimes for these folks, for the Jell Dragon Viking Jewelry, the intent of searchers and what they’re trying to accomplish on their site, perfectly in harmony, but definitely not with click-bait pieces that are going to resonate on the web. More challenging for io9 with this kind of a thing, because searchers just aren’t looking for that around Viking jewelry. They might instead be thinking about, “Hey, we’re trying to target the specific news item. We want anyone who looks for Viking jewelry in Danish farm, or Viking jewelry found, or those kind of things to be finding our site.”

Then, I would ask, “How can I best serve my own marketing goals, the marketing goals of my website through the pages that are targeted at search or social?” Sometimes that’s going to be very direct, like it is over here with JellDagon.com trying to convert folks and folks looking for Viking jewelry to buy.

Sometimes it’s going to be indirect,. A Moz Whiteboard Friday, for example, is a very indirect example. We’re trying to serve the intent of searchers and in the long term eventually, maybe sometime in the future some folks who watch this video might be interested in Moz’ tools or going to MozCon or signing up for an email list, or whatever it is. But our marketing goals are secondary and they’re further in the future. You could also think about that happening at the very end of a funnel, coming in if someone searches for say Moz versus Searchmetrics and maybe Searchmetrics has a great page comparing what’s better about their service versus Moz’ service and those types of things, and getting right in at the end of the funnel. So that should be a consideration as well. Same thing with social.

Then lastly, where are you going to focus that keyword targeting and the content foci efforts? What kind of content are you going to build? How are you going to keyword target them best to achieve this, and how much you interlink between those pages?

I’ll give you a quick example over here, but this can be expanded upon. So for my conversion page, I may try and target the same keywords or a slightly more commercial variation on the search terms I’m targeting with my more informational style content versus entertainment social style content. Then, conversion page might be separate, depending on how I’m structuring things and what the intent of searchers is. My click-bait piece may be not very keyword focused at all. I might write that headline and say, “I don’t care about the keywords at all. I don’t need to rank here. I’m trying to go viral on social media. I’m trying to achieve my click-bait goals. My goal is to drive traffic, get some links, get some topical authority around this subject matter, and later hopefully rank with this page or maybe even this page in search engines.” That’s a viable goal as well.

When you do that, what you want to do then is have a link structure that optimizes around this. So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they’re going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you’re trying to sell people something. That’s not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, “Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it’s fun and funny and interesting.”

What plays well in search, however, is something that let’s someone accomplish their tasks. So it’s fine to have information and then a call to action, and that call to action can point to the conversion page. The click-bait pieces content can do a great job of helping to send link equity, ranking signals, and maybe some visitor traffic who’s interested in truly learning more over to the informational page that you want ranking for search. This is kind of a beautiful way to think about the interaction between the three of these when you have these different levels of foci, when you have these different searcher versus click-bait intents, and how to bring them all together.

All right everyone, hope to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.