Why are Emotional Triggers Important in the Age of Google’s Panda and Penguin Updates?

I have seen bloggers out there that just integrate emotional triggers in blog post naturally, while others struggle and wonder why their blog post don’t seem to help their SEO campaign. Many of us already know the correlation and causation relationship of social media and SEO, it is one strong reason behind the drive to do inbound marketing. And if you think of it, it is not that hard to wrap your head around.

When more people find you easily in search results because of your good ranking and you have something of value to the user, the probability of them leading to talking about you in social media increases. Conversely, the more people that talk about you in social media, the probability increases of it ending on other websites like blogs, forums, news sites, etc. These sites would give natural links with higher CTRs on organic search results and higher mentions/citations, thus improving SEO.

• Panda is all about quality content. And low quality content does not get shared that much on social media sites.
• Penguin is all about natural links, and no matter what blog post, article, or press release you put out there on the internet, if nobody knows about it, no one links to it. A page that naturally attracts people to shares it, votes it, tweets it or bookmarks it in whatever way, it has a higher probability of reaching the right people who would be linking to it naturally.

What I will discuss is how emotional triggers help get your content out and shared more to other people; shared and liked on Facebook, tweeted and retweeted, +1’d, commented on, pinned and repinned, bookmarked, dugg, stumbled, voted, etc. The more it is shared, the more it is deemed to be of better quality (anti-Panda) and the more the links would be natural (anti-Penguin), just the way Google would want it.

Emotional Triggers in Sales is Very Similar to Emotional Triggers in Blog Post

There are many people that are emotional buyers than logical buyers, as Perry Marshall states on his site:

All people make buying decisions based on emotion; therefore your marketing must use emotion to sell what people want, not what you think they "need" or want them to need.

In sales you are selling a product or service for some monetary value. In blog post, you are selling the content, but not for money. You are selling the content and the person buying is the ones that decide to read it. What makes some blogs read and unread is highly influenced by the large amount of competing blog post on the internet. Going against several sites listed in a search engine results page, or going against multiple URLs shared on a friends wall on Facebook, list of shortened URLs on your twitter feed, or whatever similar situation, calling the attention of readers with these emotional triggers can help gain extra clickthroughs from these sites, making user buy into what you are offering.

These emotional triggers can be used in various areas of a blog post:

• The Blog Title
• The Title Tag
  In most cases this is the same as the blog title, but customizing the title tag to be different from the blog title may be ideal in some cases.
• Heading & Subheading
  Usability studies have shown that users scan before they read. They quickly gaze over headings to get an idea of what the blog post is all about. After briefly looking at the headings, this may help make a reader decide to read a blog post or not.
• Blockquotes
  These are specific quotes from other people, if the person is of some authority, or even perceived authority, it helps spark more interest and credibility in the blog post.
• Social Media Sharing Sites
• How things are shared by others, can help spread blog post more, depending on how it is shared.

Warning: Emotional Triggers on a Gun Don’t Fire Magic Bullets

Just because you came up with a good compelling headline, a highly clickable title, a good strong emotional call to action description, doesn’t mean you are all good to go and you will be out of your Panda and Penguin problems. Getting someone’s attention is just one piece of the puzzle, there are many other things that makes a blog post successful and this is just one piece of the pie.

Using emotional triggers in your title is like getting your readers through the door, and keeping readers reading and influencing them to share it to others is another story. Although the main use of these emotional triggers is to serve as a call-to-action on search engines results or on other social media sites where the site is bookmarked or shared and it is what pushes visibility to actual traffic, you can also use emotional triggers in helping to persuade people to read the rest of your content, or to share your content through the various channels online.

Often these emotional triggers will be used in bringing in traffic first and once you have brought someone in, it is not the ultimate solution to make your blog post popular. And the scope of this blog post will be more on using emotional triggers to bring in the traffic coming from search results and social sites where users can read the titles of the blog post or articles you create.

Theory + Learning by Example

We can go all day and create a whole book about this, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just talk about blog titles. I have seen some people pick this up easily, and some that know the concept in their head, but what they write still sounds boring from the very beginning. I have seen writers very good in grammar, finding spelling errors and integrating keywords in the content when needed, but still lack that emotional trigger when they write.

I have helped train several people on the SEO team at Internet Marketing Inc., and have written our main copywriting guidelines based on my own blogging experience back in 2006 to 2008. During those days, I was mainly concentrating on how to get to the homepage on Digg and Reddit where it was more of persuading more readers to read your blog post. Those practices still hold up for search results and other social media sites today. Many of the lessons I learned were through just observing other popular posts, doing trial and error on my own blog posts, and brainstorming with others for good ideas.

To explain these emotional triggers, I will use another website and teach by example. I will be calling out the work of an article writing service I found promoting itself on Facebook, and also asking for feedback within a closed Skype chat group that runs 24x7 all about SEO. And since he was asking for feedback, I gave him my feedback. I said his articles were somewhat boring and did not have the emotional triggers. He had four sample articles where I gave different suggested titles and from then, he told me they are now editing their site and improving their craft after I made the suggestions and are fully integrating it into their work.

Below is a screenshot of the old page they had showing some sample articles.

They already updated that page after I have given them suggestions and said they had an internal meeting and underwent some extra training with their writers. To their credit, they did tell me the advantage they have is that their writers are really knowledgeable in the subject matters, like they have nurses, medical technologies and other people in the medical field writing medial articles. They also have law students and paralegal professionals writing law related articles. But again this is where informative, grammatically correct, reliable information is not enough.

Although I told them I would be criticizing their work publicly on this blog post and asked their permission to do so, they agreed since will are improving their work anyway and believes any kind of publicity is good publicity, all they have to do is prove that they are now better than before.

Not all topics will be easy

Whenever you write titles, think of the emotion you are trying to evoke. When we say emotion, it does not always have to be overly dramatic, or some kind of feel good-inspirational thing. It can be any feeling. It can be funny, inspiring, interestingly moving, bizarre, shocking, very weird, it can be a tear-jerker, it can be super funny until your tummy aches or crying from happiness. You can also trigger intrigue, or any kind of curiosity, even greed, anger, lust, or love. Now some topics may be hard to think of ideas, some may be easy. But to give you some ideas, I will give six different topic ideas I use whenever writing a new blog post. And to learn by example, I will apply these ideas to some of the articles on the sample page of the article site I mentioned above.

Using the same titles in the article sample screenshot, here are six different topic ideas you can use as a guide when thinking of your blog post and how this translates into better titles with emotional triggers.

Six Real-World Examples

1. Solving a Problem, Giving a Solution

Here would be several of my twist on this title, instead of just saying:

• Your Waist Measurement as Your Health Check

I would suggest titles like:

• Proven yet Simple System of Waist Line Measurement for Health Satisfaction Monitoring
• How a Tape Measure Can Successfully Monitor Health and Save Lives
• Overcome Unhealthy Living: Monitor Waist-to-Height Ratio
• Your Simplified Risk Measurement of Possible Diabetes or Heart Attack Problems

I am not suggesting making words bold in your titles; I am just making them bold for the purposes of our discussion. I just want to highlight the added emotion it can bring to the reader and I will do this also to the rest of my examples below.

Illnesses are a problem. Diseases are a problem. Make the readers feel the problem. And make the title also show that there is a solution to the problem.

2. Controversial Post, Conflicting Ideas

The fact that this title starts with "how" sounds like the first topic idea, solving a problem and giving a solution, but it just lacks the feel for it. Instead of just making the readers feel the problem, another thing you can do is to show controversy or conflicts of ideas. The original title:

• How to be practical with power-of-attorney for assets

My suggestion to really bring out the reason why it is practical, make the reader intrigued why it is practical, and also to bring up conflicting ideas about it.

• Giving Power-of-Attorney for Asset Inheritance: Practical Decision or Security Risk?

The key here is, you do not want to be one sided, as much as possible, try to give both sides of the coin some equal coverage, stating the advantages and disadvantages of both sides. Now this can be a problem if you are writing for a client whose product or service will lean towards one side of the story and they don't want you to give equal coverage of both sides since it also promotes not buying the product or service at the same time. Your client may not even approve your article if it is written that way. So this technique might not always work for all clients, but for some, they might have no problems with it. Since in any product or service, there will always be people that will like and dislike a product or service. And in comparing two different things will just help the customer in their decision making if they would really use a product or not, if they will use a service or not. Thus it prequalifies the customer also so the salespeople would find it easier filtering out the people that do not like the service or product anyway, saving time by spending it on those that are really interested.

But the nice thing about this is conflicting ideas promote discussion. And the more people discuss and debate on a topic, the more popular the discussion gets, the more it is also shared in various websites from blogs, forums to social media sites.

3. Numbered Top List

Many people know about these rubber bracelets already. Lance Armstrong has been sporting these for a long time. Describing what they are is probably not interesting anymore. So with this original title and topic:

• The Trending Rubber Bracelets

I suggested coming up with something like:

• 5 Charity Organizations that Profited the Most from Rubber Bracelets

There is some research required here since you have to figure out who are these top five organizations. If you cannot find these top five organizations, but found five big ones, then say "profited a lot" instead of "profited the most." If you cannot find five organizations but found three, then use three. If you found eight, then use eight. For some reason users like numbered list because they feel they are an easy read. It will not waste much time, even if you place the same amount of words to read on a numbered blog post and a non-numbered blog post. If there are numbers and mini-headlines on each number, users would just read the headlines for each item if they do not feel like reading the whole thing. If they get so engrossed into it, they read all of it. Just because of a finite small number made the article look small and easy to read. The main objective here is to come up with an interesting topic but use the number to make the topic appear as a quick and easy read.

4. Money Savers & Money Earners

In a tough economy with some people unemployed, anything to save money or give more money attracts people to read these.

• How to Seek the Right Lawyer

This is probably a topic specifically for people looking for a lawyer, and when looking for the right one, or any similar professional service, money can always be an issue. Now like any other product or service, the cheapest is not always the best. Telling this to readers right away in the title assures them of the value they are going to get once they read the blog post. Now a title like this is narrowed down to specifically talk about and this persuades the cost-sensitive users to read the rest of the blog post.

• Selecting the right Lawyer that fruitfully saves move money in the long run

Some can debate you can include in the blog content anyway, add it somewhere in the body of the article, but if it is not apparent in the title, people may not decide to read the rest of it right away. If you cover a wide variety of topics, and not as laser focused as this, then maybe it is a better idea to break it up into smaller chunks and focus on a single topic, this even gives you more blog post to write.

5. Things Not To Do, How Not To Do List

Using the same previous example:

• How to Seek the Right Lawyer

You can come up with your own how not to do list. This is usually a humorous type of post. I guess the best way to explain it is they are just plain ridiculous, and it is the ridiculousness of it that makes people laugh and pass it around. So for this example, I may come up with something like:

• Uncovered: 5 Biggest Mistakes You Can Make When Not Choosing The Right Lawyer

Now I am not a lawyer to really come up with good suggestions here, but I am sure people close to this industry may think of something. Now people outside of the industry may not even get the humor of the blog post. The only people that will get it are the people in the same industry. And if it is funny enough that they start talking about you, sharing your post, linking to you, you even start to get links from industry peers, which may get you links from highly relevant sites. For this example if you are a lawyer and many lawyers find your humor funny, then you may get links from website also about lawyers, the law, and other legal stuff making your links more relevant.

6. Inspirational / Motivational / Dramatic

• The Trending Rubber Bracelets

What else can you do with these rubber bracelets; they are just pieces of oversized rubber bands? But if you can concentrate even on a single charity with a great cause, the purpose, the lives it saved, you can make this a video, or even sometimes an image with a story along with the photo. You can drive the emotion of the reader and inspire them. Usually these types of blog post are the tearjerkers, or they cause the warm fuzzy feeling inside. Some title suggestions are:

• Successful Rubber Bracelet Charity Campaigns Saved a 10-year old Cancer Patient
• Rubber Bracelet Gave a Roof and Food for a Homeless Multi-Awarded War Veteran

Now of course, if you have nothing dramatic to talk about, or is just not for your product or service, then there is really no need to come up with something dramatic. These are just topic ideas you can use, to evoke emotions than just the plain old title and if it is not applicable, then do not use it.

Wrapping up...

This blog post talks about titles alone, and remember if the title is really good, most of the time this would also be the title in your HTML title tag, and when this is the title in your title tag, it is also the title that would appear in search results most of the time, and would also appear in social media sites when shared, thus evoking the same emotional trigger to get people to click on them.

Again this is just one piece of the puzzle in gaining great traffic to your site, and if the content also gives enough justice to the title, providing value to the user, making people just love your blog post, then more links come in.

If you feel you are not creative enough to come up with these ideas, you can always brainstorm with several people. If you work in a company, you can simply ask several people in the company. Actually you can even ask people you live with, your family, a relative, whoever, since most people are online these days and getting the perspective of a person outside of the SEO industry, is also like getting the perspective of ordinary blog readers out there.

I once talked about SEO and the background knowledge needed these days are more writing and marketing and less on the technical side, and this was not to discount the value the technical people bring to the table in SEO. My main background how I got started in SEO is through web design and web development. I was more on the technical side of SEO in the past, and have tried all the blackhat tricks under the sun (but never on any client site, all on experimental R&D types of sites). But in order for me to survive in this industry no matter what algorithm change Google does, is for me to adapt, how I learned how to write content and how to market well is imperative if I want to remain competitive in the SEO industry. So to those that are just relying on mediocre articles just for the sake of having articles, with some text and keywords and links, then spinning them and syndicating them through whatever submission or distribution service, you should know by now that this is not the best way getting out of Panda or Penguin problems. If you want to show Google quality content, you have to have the readers that prove it. And if you want to show natural links, your site should be reflecting the reasons why people are linking to you.