Reflecting on Brighton SEO: Is attention a currency?
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I got the opportunity to attend Brighton SEO. Having never been before I was excited about what the event would include, and when I got there I was not disappointed. The event has been running for 14 years and brings together digital experts to take part in various engaging talks throughout the day.
The first talk I attended really resonated with me, and that was by SEO specialist Sabine Ljunggren on ‘How to maximise your search visibility on social media’. The essence of the talk was gaining visibility and capturing your audience’s attention, but then retaining that attention. Sabine also went on to explain 5 key ranking factors for increasing visibility on social and the power of attention.
Why is attention so valuable?
Something that stuck with me from the talk was when Sabrine mentioned that we should ‘treat attention as a currency’. Something which, upon reflection, is so very true. For me, I’d argue, that when it comes to paid social, a large amount of time and effort can go into targeting, budgeting, optimisation etc. However, all this time and added effort is wasted if, when you get your ads in front of your audience, you don’t get their attention. All the effort that goes into getting a paid ad in front of a viewer has to be backed up with a high degree of creativity else without it, users will simply scroll on by.
The difficulty in generating attention is that it differs from person to person and the modern generation of social users has deteriorating attention spans, making users harder and harder to get a hold of.
Sabine then went on to explain that to increase visibility on social media, there are five key ranking factors.
1) Optimise content
One way to increase your search visibility is by embedding keywords within your username, bio, profile, and copy. These keywords will attract the right consumer to your brand and make it easier to find you.
It’s also important that the keywords used in each title, description, note, or caption on a post must relate to your brand, USP, or industry. This then tells social platforms to showcase your page to the right searchers.
2) Maximise the time the user spends on the platform
Many often think the solution to increase users’ view time on social platforms is to increase the length of the content. If only it was that easy! Keeping users on your social media channel is not just about the length of the video – it’s about attention.
Gaining attention is more of a psychology than a set strategy; being that attention differs from human to human, being creative, and as Sabrine mentioned within the talk, being unexpected helps keep users interested.
This keeps users on your page and provides social platforms with the signals they need to rank your page higher than others.
An example that Sabrine used had to do with a typical YouTube video, which embeds highlights at the start of the video without giving the whole video away, this keeps the viewer enticed and engaged with the current video leading to a longer on-platform time.
3) Focus on improving the click-through rate
As her talk progressed, Sabrine emphasised the importance of click-through rates (CTR) If you’ve done enough to be shown to a viewer in their feed, make it worthwhile.
By ‘worthwhile’ Sabrine meant that all the components of a video – thumbnails, captions, and images – need to be optimised and done to a level that makes the user want to click through.
All this reemphasises the importance of capturing attention within the consumer journey. Within Meta, while audience targeting is aimed at your ideal consumer, the placement decides where your ad is seen, and the budgeting chooses at what cost it will be seen at. Once all these aspects combine and work together all you are left with is a viewer in front of an ad.
And once they’re in front of it you then you want them to take action – be it swipe, click, or tap on your ad. All of which can turn into a lead and eventual sale.
4) Be unexpected and retain engagement
So, how do we obtain it and direct it into a conversion or lead?
Fortunately, Sabrine was on hand to help with two specific words of wisdom: “Become unexpected”.
In short, being unexpected creates curiosity. A lot of the time being abstract when creating posts, writing copy, or being suggestive with your comment section can be confusing and risky to some, but being unexpected and creating curiosity forces attention upon your brand.
Engagement itself will widen your visibility on social. This is obvious, but brands lose engagement when their content is not interacted with and the root cause of this is often that their posts simply don’t attract attention. You capture attention, then you gain engagement, and, when you get engagement, your brand becomes more visible and attractive for the platform to display.
Gaining authority within your industry comes from consistency and having the internal links in place to rank higher. If you can link to other relevant pages/videos your brand visibility can significantly increase.
By constantly creating content you are continually feeding the platform new information, and this information helps you remain relevant and, importantly, seen.
So, is attention a currency?
To conclude, the main crux of Sabine’s talk was about factors that affect search visibility on social platforms. However, the message that kept cropping up was how expensive attention is, and therefore brands should treat it as a currency.
Optimising content and embedding keywords will improve rankings and help your brand gain a viewer’s attention and the time users spend on a platform depends on how well attention is sustained.
Getting users to click through is done by gaining their attention and getting them to act once they view the ad. Being unexpected and retaining engagement is, again, dependent on interested viewers. Viewers are bombarded with constant online advertising making it all the more important that you win their attention with your ads.
Marketing not getting the attention it deserves?
Are you struggling to gain and keep the attention of your customers? Then contact our team of experts who can help you create a strategy that will get attention and grow your business.
Also, check out additional blogs surrounding Embryo at Brighton SEO!
