How to Lose Readers and Alienate People Part 1

How to Lose Readers and Alienate People Part 1

Aug 19, 2019

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Pop-Ups and Autoplaying

User experience is an essential component of SEO. Google has been updating its search algorithm for years, trying to tie search rankings to UX so that users online can have the best possible experience. Much of SEO now revolves around providing users with the best possible content and making it easy for them to find.

But what will provide a good user experience? It’s impossible to please everybody. Your target audience isn’t usually everyone on the entire Internet, so if there’s a smaller demographic that makes up your user base, there may be more specific guidelines for what they’re looking for. If you do have a very broad audience, you can still try to appeal to most of them.

And there are some things to avoid doing that will help improve the user experience on your website.

Bad Advertisements

If you’re trying to sell a product or a service, advertising is necessary. It may sometimes seem like users hate all ads, but that’s not necessarily the case. They hate bad ads, which will make up to 82% of Internet users click away from a website that hosts that ad.

Some behaviors to avoid:

  • Pop-up ads
  • Autoplaying videos
  • Autoplaying audio
  • Unpausable ads
  • Retargeting

As nice as it may seem to try to force users to look at your ads, that won’t actually convert them to customers. In fact, it may do the exact opposite. No one likes it when an ad begins to autoplay and won’t let them pause it. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself – would you do that behavior in person? If not, then don’t do it online.

Intrusive and annoying ads can actually harm your brand and your company’s reputation. Users form bad opinions of brands from just a single negative experience with an ad for a product or service. That’s not to say you should avoid advertising altogether – advertising itself is fine. Just make sure that you aren’t creating bad advertisements that will push customers away instead of interest them in what you have to offer.

Pop-Up CTAs

It’s nice that you want your users to sign up, subscribe, or visit another page on your site. But repeated pop-ups asking users to do these things can actually drive them away from your website instead. You don’t need to avoid pop-up CTAs altogether, but be careful in how you use them.

Remember the philosophy “all things in moderation.” That will serve you well with pop-up CTAs. Have them pop up only at certain places on your site or during certain stages of the user’s experience on your website. You can create smart CTAs that will only pop up at certain stages.

It’s also important to make sure the copy on your CTA is polite. If a user has to view a pop-up, they’ll be less annoyed if it’s at least polite. If your CTAs come across as too pushy, that may alienate your users instead.

Autoplaying Multimedia

It’s not just autoplaying ads that are annoying to users. Videos content is important to engaging with your users, but if it’s set to autoplay, that can turn off many potential viewers. Not everyone is always in a place where it’s okay to watch a video with audio. Some users may be at work or in public and they just want to view your site without having a loud video forced on them.

It’s easier to click the back button than it is to try to pause the video or to turn down or mute the volume and most people will do exactly that.

 

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How to Create Backlink-Worthy Content

How to Create Backlink-Worthy Content

Aug 5, 2019

Reading Time: 3 minutes

[tweetshareinline tweet=”Backlinks are vital to your SEO strategy. They tell Google that your content is of high quality and that others think it’s good enough to link to.” username=”BrainVineSEO”]But getting backlinks can be difficult. You could always offer a guest blog in exchange for a backlink, but not every site that you want to link back to you wants to take that offer.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have a backlink strategy and employ other methods of gaining backlinks. But you can increase the number of organic backlinks to your site simply by offering high-quality content that people want to link to. So what kind of content generates organic backlinks?

Think

Think About Why People Link

The first step to creating backlink-worthy content is to know why people link in the first place. If you link to an external site either on a webpage or on a blog post, why do you choose that site? Usually, it’s because you get something out of it – it lends authority to your own content, there are images or video content that you want to reference, or even because you think it would be helpful for your own readers.

Take a close look at content that you choose to link to and think about what characteristics led you to link to that content over something else about the same topic. Then, try to create your own content to reflect those characteristics.

high-quality content

Be an Authority

A key characteristic of high-quality content is that it’s informative. It’s something users want to read. Sure, it’s important to include keywords and alt text for SEO, but your content should cater to readers, not to search engines. The search engines are taking user experience into account when ranking sites, so it’s important to make sure that you’re creating content with your users in mind.

[tweetshareinline tweet=”Research what’s already out there and then put your own spin on it. Make sure to link back to credible sites. If your content is better than the other content that’s out there, then yours will be what people will naturally link to.” username=”BrainVineSEO”]

use videos or images

Use Video and Images

The Internet is steadily moving towards video. Users will spend more time watching videos than they will reading text. So not only will this help with your SEO, but it’ll also attract more users who will spend more time on your page. And it’s not just about videos, either – images and infographics are also essential to your content.

[tweetshareinline tweet=”Visuals can help break up the text so it’s less intimidating to users, as well as helping users understand what your content is about.” username=”BrainVineSEO”] It makes your content much more engaging to your users, who will spend more time on your page, improving your bounce rate. Studies have shown that in addition to all of that, visual content also helps you obtain more organic backlinks.

The quality of your content and how it resonates with your users is the most important thing. Adding visuals improves your content, which has the knock-on effect of improving user experience, which increases your CTR and the number of backlinks you can get, which then improves your search rankings.

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