Using “Yes” Content for Effective Emotional Content Strategy and SEO
You and I are created as emotional beings. We fear. We hate. We love. We laugh. We want. We feel. Feelings have a lot to do with your decisions – especially quick ones. Ones made when browsing the internet.
This is part of a tutorial series entitled Content Strategy from SEO School where you can learn SEO that works.
Here and There
Reading blogs and other pieces of content in the internet is very different from reading an article in a magazine or newspaper. In the magazine, you only have a handful of articles, some photos for your perusal, and that’s pretty much it. You don’t have much of a choice when you want to read about something else. What’s in the magazine is what you have.
In the internet, things move way faster and the choices are limitless. You want to read about food? It’s one search away. You saw a post in Facebook about Love? Click it. You want to learn more about SEO? It’s all available – you don’t have to buy another magazine. You don’t have to stick with your newspaper. In the internet, information can be accessed and it is limitless.
Do I know you?
What does all these tell you? Well, it simply means that if people don’t like your content, they can easily click the ‘x’ button or the ‘back’ button and bounce off your page. They can easily move on to another site. They have choices – who are you to stop them?
But it goes way before your content. It all starts with your title.
The 2 Second Rule
If your title does not grab a visitor’s attention in 2 seconds, you’ll lose that person – probably forever. They have a lot of titles to go through in a day. Even if your title is the longest, most descriptive title, if it does not touch base with an individual’s emotion, it will not get any attention.
So what do you do?
Create Great titles that Grab Attention and Trigger Emotion
Grabbing attention can be done in a lot of ways. It can be done using strong eye-catching words like ‘Sex’, ‘Discover’, ‘Free’, ‘Help’, ‘Know’, ‘Money’, ‘Powerful’, ‘Secret’, ‘Proven’, ‘Save’, ‘Trust’, ‘Understand’. These are most often used in internet copywritten articles as head-turners. Notice these words touch base in one way or another with the reader’s emotions? Because if you want to grab attention, unless you’re running a porn site, your words have to trigger your user’s emotion.
Now that you have their attention, what’s the next step?
Create “Yes” Content
This is the kind of content that gets people’s heads nodding. The kind of content that backs-up your title and completes that emotion that your title has triggered. This is the kind of content that your users will say “yes, yes” to. “Yes, that’s exactly how I feel.”, or “Yes that’s where I am right now – what’s your solution?”, or “Yes that is just what I need!”
Yes content is important because it brings your reader to your side. It establishes an emotional connection between you and your reader. It makes your readers relate to you and somehow it makes you someone who relates to them. Yes content helps build:
- Loyalty
- Trust
- Familiarity
- Likeability
- Word of Mouth
- Branding
In short, Yes content builds your readership. It builds a following – people who have emotionally touched base with you and what you’ve written and are eager to read more of your stuff.
How does all this relate to SEO?
Simple.
Without readers, you won’t have any user activity. User activity affects Author Rank and Dwell time Metrics.
Dwell Time Metrics consist of:
- Bounce Rate
- Time on Site
- Page Views
- Social Engagement
These Dwell Time metrics sends a positive signal in your site’s SEO and can cause and/or verify rankings. Your content has to be read – this sends a positive signal to your Author Rank (which is rolling out soon – you should read how to implement Author Rank and how it affects SEO here.)
Having a higher Dwell Time per user in your website can consequently lead to more Word of Mouth links – which will consequently increase your rankings even further.
Here’s my deck where I took this post from by the way – I made it available for downloading if you want to use it in your own circle of influence. You can use this deck to teach them about Yes content and creating great Titles that Grab attention and Trigger Emotion.
