Rana Raza
28 October 2023
Can we please come up with some better terminology for the concept of “link bait”? For me, it conjures up thoughts of those evil bait-and-switch advertising schemes.
Link bait is content that is designed to be highly shareable, attention-grabbing, thought-provoking, and valuable.
Whether link baiting is good or bad depends on how it’s executed, along with the intentions behind it. For instance, it can quickly go awry when marketers use deceptive tactics to drive clicks to content that lacks genuine value.
For Matt Cutts, former Engineer at Google, link bait is “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
Because link bait content is so interesting, it’s usually very effective for generating inbound links (remember, it’s called link bait for a reason). After all, people are way more likely to link back to something if they find it interesting.
As a result, link bait content is extremely powerful for boosting your website’s off-page SEO, which we know is the most influential way to increase your organic search rankings.
As you’re creating content you predict will make great link bait, be sure you’re optimizing it using the keywords you want to rank for in search. This will help you leverage your link bait content to boost your rankings for the keywords you want to get found for in search.
Because link bait content is interesting, there’s usually a level of virality to it. As a result, link bait content is also usually a major traffic driver.
The more traffic you generate to your blog or website, the more visitors you have the opportunity to convert into leads and customers. So, make sure your blog is optimized for conversion: use calls-to-action for your top marketing offers on every blog post as well as in your blog’s top/sidebar(s).
As a bonus, because link bait content has the tendency to rank well in search, the traffic it generates is usually very sustainable. Searchers will continue to stumble upon your link bait content long after it was originally published.
Remember how we talked about how link-bait content is usually very sharable? Because this is so, link bait has a lot of potential to expose your business and your content to entirely new audiences you might not have reached otherwise. Thus, it helps you grow the top of your funnel, expanding your reach and attracting new blog readers.
