Picture yourself on a stage and the audience is a bunch of five-year olds. Your goal is to keep them from getting distracted and have them look at you while you talk to them. Since they’re five-year olds, you know how distracted they are as kids.
So, you’ll put on a show, ask questions, make jokes, and probably even a small skit. What do you think you’re doing with the audience? You’re sustaining a high level of interaction enough to engage them in your conversation.
Now, think about that stage as your website and those five-year olds are a group of entrepreneurs owning startups. How do you keep an audience engaged with the content of your website? You use interactive content – the hero of the show. Look at interactive content as your set of questions, jokes, and that skit that talked about. It’s all about interaction at a more meaningful and valuable level.
How does interactive content benefit the target audience?
Content marketing uses different and creative methods to get an audience to land on your website. An SEO agency will ensure to publish content across the net on a relevant platform where your audience is present.
Nowadays, one of the most effective ways of content marketing is to use interactive forms of communication.
Interactive content includes:
- Quizzes
- E-books
- Animated infographics
- Assessments
- Calculators
Several business owners have content creators and SEO teams working together on interactive content. Their aim is to keep users on the site while delivering their messages more effectively.
But, why keep people on your website for so long and what’s the benefit?
You keep someone long enough on your website; they’re bound to explore your products and services. When people interact with content online, they are more likely to stay on the site longer. This means that the experience you are giving to the user is fun, exciting and personalized. The information presented to the audience is encouraging them to interact with your website, causing them to develop a bond with your brand. The more they interact with your website over time, the deeper the trust and relationship they’ll develop with you.
The content you put out there will also show you when and how a person interacts with your brand. The materials you generate and publish are most likely richer data as compared to your competitors.
The impact of interactive content on SEO
SEO feeds on relevance and personalizing content for the audience. SEO is all about giving to the audience what the audience wants from a brand.
Create an experience that the audience will remember long after exiting from your website. Put up calculators, quizzes, e-books, and other experiences that will engage and delight your audience.
Provide links to your content and promote social media sharing, encouraging your audience to market your brand with their friends.
For instance, if you’ve never heard of link baits, it’s time you stop whatever you’re doing and focus here for a minute.
Link bait refers to baiting users to link to the content you offer. How do you bait a user to link to your content? Generate content that is unique and fun to use. This step leads to brand awareness that regular and static content does not do as effectively. You have to create an experience that is memorable and is likely to get more links.
Speaking of brand awareness, it gets your brand name out there and over time, helps build a reputation. To put it simply, when people view and browse through multiple pages on your site through links, it helps build your brand name. The high-quality content also helps create a sense of reliability among the website visitors.
Therefore, brand awareness lets consumers know that your name is linked to whatever you sell – products or services. At this stage, your brand is sailing beyond the ocean of competitors and you’re on your way to newer audiences. This is because your brand has developed great quality and unique characteristics.
From an SEO perspective, navigational searches are increased which signifies a direct and positive impact on organic marketing.
Also, people are more likely to click on your pages when they type keywords relevant to your brand. Once trust and familiarity is developed with a brand then no matter where your results show up; even if it ranks lower, people are likely to click on your site link. This is not wishful thinking – it really can happen – believe it!
Another example is social media sharing as we mentioned here. Social media does not directly help SEO but it does these backlinks and social media sharing indicate that people love the content you’re putting out there. In sharing your content, the audience shows that they want to be a part of your communication. They believe in what you have to say! Use this to your advantage and create similar content and grow on it at the same time.
Moving on to SEO metrics where we look at the two most crucial metrics: content quality and answering the searcher intent.
What metrics do you look at to know whether your audience loves what you put out there?
- Time on page – the duration that people are spending on your page.
- Bounce rate – If the bounce rate increases, something’s not right.
- Pages per visit – How many pages on your website is the user visiting?
So, no matter what kind of website you have, you will want over a thousand visitors each day to visit and stay long enough. As an SEO agency, we work towards generating interest in your content. We’ll create the best tactics to get the audience to link to your site and come back to it again.
All of these interactive content methods we mentioned above can help grab people’s interest. We’ll get them to interact and stay longer through creative link bait analogies.
Static content was a thing of the past and even though it’s the easiest form, it depends on what the audience has moved on to! If your audience loves videos or GIFs, you can’t give them a 1000-worded article.