Everyone wants social interaction, website clicks, and search traffic. Clickbait is appealing and a simple technique to persuade people to click on your social media postings. It almost appears acceptable and justifiable in an age when attention-grabbing news about politics or celebrities take up an increasing amount of space. Then why clickbait sucks?

As a business, is this the greatest method to attract customers’ attention? No way, no how. In fact, it can have a negative impact on your company’s website. So, here’s why you shouldn’t use clickbait headlines.

So here’s 10 reasons why clickbait sucks:

1. You’ll attract the wrong kind of visitors.

Clickbait gets a lot more people to click through, which is partly what you want. However, a large number of people clicking through does not guarantee that you will receive the correct type of traffic to your website.

If you’re attempting to increase brand awareness and loyalty, which you undoubtedly are, chances are the type of viewer who clicks on a clickbait headline isn’t the type of viewer you want to click on.

2. Clickbait will increase your bounce rate, and algorithms will despise you.

There’s a lot of discussion about how important bounce rates are—because they’re so easy to manipulate. Google may consider a bounce rate significantly less important than many people believe.

However, having thousands of people visit your site for five seconds and then leave, unlikely to return, is not a good look. In a 2014 blog post on clickbait, Facebook addressed this exact topic, indicating that they would penalize writers who used the often deceptive methodology.

Because clickbait rarely contains deep, meaningful content, users tend to leave quickly. They may form a negative opinion of your website, which will do you more harm than good in the long term. That’s why Facebook started assessing time spent on a page as a quality indicator—exactly why authoritative, extended postings perform well.

Also read: How To Write A Youtube Video Description | 10 Tips For Better Results

3. Clickbait contributes to oversaturation.

Determining the truth becomes much more difficult. People have a tendency to believe that if they read something in an article online, it must be true, regardless of whether it is supported by facts. And if one individual publishes incorrect material in an article, it’s only a matter of time before others write more on the subject. Because of clickbait, a large section of the population soon believes a lie.

I’m not implying that clickbait authors are evil. I don’t believe any clickbait authors are intentionally intending to mislead readers, unless they set out to do so. It’s just that inaccurate information spreads a lot of the time, and a lot of it is due to clickbait authors who don’t pause to fact check. And with so much information available, it’s difficult to distinguish what’s true and what’s not.

4. Misleading clickbait harms brands and undermines trust.

Few things will upset and damage your audience’s trust faster than purposely misrepresenting them. When people click on a piece of material, they want to be directed to content that meets their expectations.

If you purposely deceive people for the sake of a page view, they will not only leave almost instantly, but they may also have an unfavorable perception of your brand as a result.

Also read: How to Make Video Go Viral | Top 10 Strategies

5. Clickbait contributes to society’s lack of depth.

Clickbait posts are frequently superficial. Simple listicles that say the same thing as every other listicle on themes that are, to be honest, really uninteresting. They are passionate rants about current events with no sources to back them up. They are emotional grabs, using an extremely happy (or tragic) story to make people feel inspired, angry, or good about themselves.

People are finding it difficult to think profoundly as a result of this lack of depth. If you feed a society shallow material for an extended period of time, that culture will lose its ability to think critically.

People who spend hours browsing through Facebook or Twitter, reading clickbait after clickbait. I’m not suggesting clickbait is the root of all evil; after all, if clickbait disappeared, people would just watch slime videos, right? I’m just suggesting that it’s contributing to a larger problem, and why should we?

So, I hope this provides you with some insight into my aversion to clickbait. The combination of sensationalist titles, zero content, and manipulation leaves me feeling disillusioned and unsatisfied after reading clickbait. This can create a vicious cycle of reading more and more in the hopes of being content, or you can do what I do and avoid it.

6. With Clickbait, you will most likely disappoint your audience.

Clickbait almost never lives up to its hype. This is directly related to the first two reasons why clickbait is a bad idea: disappointment leads to bounces, which leads to low engagement and, eventually, a loss of trust in your material.

This is why, in general, the game has shifted away from imprecise titles and toward particular headlines that tell people right away whether the article contains the information they require.

7. Your page bounce rate will increase.

Is the page bounce rate as important as we all think it is? Perhaps, perhaps not; after all, the Google algorithm is constantly changing. But do you really want thousands of one-time visitors who leave in less than ten seconds and never return? Probably not, because it doesn’t look nice and won’t help you establish any form of brand awareness or brand loyalty.

Clickbait headlines rarely signal to readers that your post will be full of engaging, useful content, so even if your piece is valuable and instructive, people are unlikely to stay on the page for long. People who click on a clickbait headline are typically not in the correct frame of mind to read a long piece, thus a trashy clickbait headline ends up undermining your high-quality content.

8. Clickbait Will Confound Your Site’s Crucial Information

Let’s look at this from an analytics approach as well. Assume you’re selling ad space on your website to specific clients—a number of long-term corporations are assisting you in monetizing your site.

If you tell them you get a large amount of hits a day, they might be impressed at first. However, any advertising agency or marketing specialist nowadays would delve deeper:

• How long do they stay on your website?
• What is their demographic make-up?
• Where do they call home?

These critical aspects become muddied when you rely on fleeting clickbait. You’ll have a low average time spent on your page and won’t be able to mine your data as readily for vital demographic information that marketers care about. In short, you may receive numbers, but those numbers will be meaningless

Also read: Top 5 Video Optimization Tips for YouTube

9. It will make it harder to grasp the data on your website.

When looking at your website’s statistics, you’ll want to obtain a true picture of what’s going on, especially if you’re selling ad space or collaborating with other organizations to monetize your site.

Ad agencies and influencer networks may be thrilled if you say you receive 50,000 hits per day, but they will not simply ask you how many clicks you get. They’ll want to know how long readers stay (your bounce rate) and information about your audience (demographics, etc.)

You simply cannot gather that information if you rely on clickbait, because users will not stay on the page long enough, and they will almost never convert to a paying customer.

10. People are simply sick of clickbait these days.

We’d be showing our age if we told you how many years we’ve spent online reading clickbait headlines and rolling our eyes at how stupid the headline is, or how bad the article is once we’ve been lured to click through. These are strategies that journalists and marketers have used for decades before the internet was even founded – thus employing clickbait just feels a little old. Most internet users are aware of clickbait and will not fall for it.

There’s also some books on the subject for better understanding how clickbait works.

Book: Clickbait: Win the War for Your Mind in the Age of Distraction

Conclusion

There are numerous reasons to avoid employing clickbait content, but there are also some compelling ones to do so. If you want to improve your ranking in search engine results pages or increase the number of page views on your website, clickbait might be an effective tactic. However, we urge that you use it with caution, especially if your sector is very conservative in terms of marketing approaches.

You don’t want your company’s name to be known for all the wrong reasons. If you’re going to utilize a clickbait-style headline, make sure to follow it up with genuinely good content to ensure your customers are happy they clicked through for the correct reasons.