Why an informative article for SEO is more effective than an entertainment based SEO article…
There is this belief in the online community that, when it comes to content for the web portal, an SEO article that tries to entertain the reader is the best. This is a flawed belief as was revealed by a survey conducted by AOL and Nielsen in 2011. According to the survey that is titled ‘Content is the Fuel of Social Web’, the online community prefers SEO articles that are informative in nature more than SEO articles that are entertaining. In fact, the sharing of content that is only designed to be entertaining had the least importance in the survey.
Informative Type and Commentary Type SEO Articles Certain Leaders
While the informative SEO articles took the cake, when it comes to people preferring to share them, they were followed by content for the web that was opinion based. Even the marketing type content won out over entertainment style content. The survey done by AOL and Nielsen covered four sectors separately while assessing the content for the web portal. These were the automotive sector, the technology sector, the financial sector and the entertainment sector.
It is worth noting that the percentage of people preferring to share an SEO article that puts across some information such as news, product information and how to articles in the automotive sector was 64%, in the technology sector was 74% and the financial sector was 67%. Even within the entertainment sector the entertainment type content lost out to informative type content with the latter getting 58%.
What Wins Out Within The Informative SEO Articles Category?
It is fairly obvious that informative content is a vast category that can include anything and everything because of the loosely held definition of information in most people’s minds. This means that unless the informative content category is studied in more detail, practical implications cannot be taken out in the business sense. The survey, therefore, tried to understand what kind of information people liked to share.
As can be predicted, people liked to share information from trusted sources the most at 38%. This was followed by information that they think could help others at 36% and information pertaining to pop culture i.e. 35%. These were followed by information on common interests (32%), generic information that may be interesting (31%) and completely new information that not many people are aware of (27%).
Creating Trust amongst Your Readers and Customers
It is evident from the aforementioned information that trust is the biggest criteria for people to share content and as shared content leads to better page ranks and search result position, becoming trustworthy about your content should be on the top of your priority list. Creating trust amongst your readers and customers is a gradual process that will require the investment of either a lot of effort and time from you or a little amount of money.
The trick is to genuinely care about your reader and customer. If every single piece of content for the website, be it an SEO article, a viral video or an image, is designed from the sales perspective overtly then your website visitor would view it with a lot of skepticism. On the other hand, if your content for the website is categorically designed to help your visitors, then you would gradually start building a lot of following.
Investing Your Money or Your Time and Energy
In order to cater to your reader, you would have to invest something because creating content for the website that is actually helpful for the visitor is like creating art. You have to not only present a helpful and reader centric concept or idea but also present it in a manner that the reader can understand. If while doing all this, you manage to enthrall your reader as well, then you are on your way to building authority and credibility in the market.
Hence, if you plan on writing, shooting or designing your own content then you will have to devote a considerable amount of time and your grey matter on it. Alternatively, if this is something you lack then you can just throw your money at it and it will be done. While ‘throwing your money at it’ may seem a little crass and inelegant, at the end of the day, that is what it is. You have a problem and you pay some freelance content writer, freelance video creator or freelance image designer to fix it for you.
The Pitfalls of Throwing Money Too Callously
If you are creating your own SEO article, viral video or content bait image then you can completely control every aspect of the exercise. However, if you are going to hire a freelance content writer, an external video production expert or a third party image designer then you would find that you are giving up a little bit of the control and would instead have to rely on sharing your vision and, subsequently, your supervision.
Thus, if you are going to do this, it is highly recommended that you carefully examine the writing qualities of the freelance content writer, the video production acumen of the freelance video producer and the designing skills of the image designer. While the latter two should have online portfolios, the freelance content writer should be able to offer you a heavily populated blog like we, at the WordsManShip are doing here.
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