Your content strategy serves to boost brand awareness and drive traffic and conversions. Staying informed about the latest developments in the industry and testing out new strategies is essential to improve your overall results. Interactive content could be the missing puzzle piece you’ve been searching for to take your SEO strategy to the next level. Today, we’ll take a closer look at interactive content and examine how to employ it in your SEO strategy.
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What Is Interactive Content?
As its name suggests, interactive content is any form of content that requires users to engage with the content. While static or passive content like blog posts serve as a great foundation to improve traffic and rankings, interactive content adds an extra element that encourages users to get involved.
The goal of interactive content is to encourage engagement and create an authentic relationship between the company and the consumer. It’s not just about providing useful information or positioning yourself as a thought leader — it’s about fostering a connection between your brand and your audience through an exchange of ideas and information.
Think of it as a conversation rather than a speech. Rather than simply stating your point of view, interactive content allows you to gain valuable feedback and make customers feel more involved in the media they are consuming. It makes consumers feel like active participants in your content, rather than just third-party observers. It can be a great way to build brand loyalty and customer retention.
According to a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 81% of respondents reported that interactive content is better than passive content in capturing the attention of consumers. Today’s digital media landscape is so oversaturated with competing information that any strategy that helps cut through the white noise is highly valuable to marketers and business owners. Therefore, interactive content is a great tool for attracting new customers and showcasing what your company has to offer.
What Are Some Examples of Interactive Content?
According to SEMRush, interactive content is a hit among consumers. It’s estimated to produce twice as much engagement as static content. Plus, 77% of marketers agree that it has re-usable value, which indicates multiple brand interactions and repeat visits to your website.
Interactive content is great for encouraging engagement from your audience and increasing the chance of web users returning to your website in the future. It also allows you to extract valuable data from customers that they agree to provide voluntarily.
This gives us a clear picture that interactive content is indeed more efficient than static content at what it does. But while we know what it is and that it works, it’s important to see some examples for yourself.
What does interactive content look like?
Quizzes
One of the best and most common examples of interactive content is a quiz. Quizzes are a fun, simple way to engage your audience. Plus, they are great for sharing on social media and can help you reach new customers organically.
Quizzes are great because they offer endless possibilities — you can make them fun and light or serious and informative. They can also provide valuable information on the thoughts and opinions of your audience that you can use to make business decisions or create new content.
Interactive Videos
According to a 2019 study, 43% of consumers prefer interactive video content over static videos because it gives them the option to choose what they want to see.
Interactive video refers to a technique used to blend traditional linear film with interactive content. It allows users to choose from a set of options that dictates what narrative or video content they see next. This creates a new kind of viewing experience that allows consumers to feel far more engaged with what they are watching.
While interactive video may not be the most cost-effective, businesses should consider it as virtual reality and the metaverse become more ubiquitous in the digital media landscape.
Interactive Infographics
Source: informationisbeautiful.net
Infographics are a great way to present data that is digestible and easy to visualize. Interactive infographics allow marketers to take it a step further and let users consume and engage with that data in new and innovative ways.
They typically feature dynamic graphics, animations, clickable buttons, or images that change as you scroll to reveal new insights. Interactive infographics are not only visually stunning, but they are also fairly simple to create and offer endless possibilities for customer engagement.
Interactive Maps
Interactive maps are another great way to engage with your audience and boost customer retention. They allow customers to zoom in and out, toggle through the map, identify areas of interest, and sort based on specific search criteria.
Interactive maps can be a great tool for bringing your customers on a journey and allowing them to visualize a certain geographic area. Perhaps you sell vacation packages and want potential clients to see the different destinations in real-time. Interactive maps can be a great way to do that.
Or maybe you’re expanding your business to new locations across the country and want your customers to be able to find you. Interactive maps provide the potential for engagement and exciting digital experiences that static maps simply can’t compete with.
Tools
Digital tools and calculators are also popular forms of interactive content that are great for lead generation and customer engagement. These interactive tools range from mortgage calculators to calorie counters and everything in between. They can be fun and engaging or simple and utilitarian. But either way, they invite engagement and provide customers with valuable information that positions your website as a trusted source of information.
Surveys or Polls
Surveys and polls are also popular among digital marketers. They are great for encouraging engagement, as well as extracting valuable data from your audience.
Perhaps you want feedback on a new product you’re offering or the content you’ve been creating. Surveys and polls are a good way to get useful feedback straight from the horse’s mouth.
Or maybe you want to tap into some pop culture trend or recent news event. Surveys and polls can be a good way to check the temperature of your audience and use those insights to brainstorm new content or product ideas.
Interactive Webinars
Interactive webinars are a great way to interact with your customers on a personal level. Video conferencing has become a normal part of doing business, and there are no indications that this trend is going anywhere any time soon. So, why not include your customers in the conversation?
Applications like Zoom and GoToWebinar make it easy to host a webinar that can be attended by your audience. These webinars offer great value to your customers, sparking discussions, and answering any questions they may have.
While online surveys and quizzes can be great, there is something special about creating an open dialogue with your audience through interactive webinars. It not only makes attendees feel more engaged with your brand, but it can also be valuable to hear their opinions on important topics and gain direct feedback on how you can better serve your customers.
Augmented Reality or 360 Videos
Augmented Reality is the future of content creation and it’s only going to become more prevalent as time goes on. While it may not be feasible for every business, AR and 360 videos are a great way to get in front of this trend and show consumers you’re at the cutting edge of the industry.
Augmented reality combines real-world experiences with computer-generated graphics to create a new kind of user experience. 360 videos give users a lifelike view of a particular environment from behind the screen of a computer.
Both techniques can be used in innovative ways to provide stunning interactive content for your audience. They may be a bit costly and complicated to implement into your current content strategy. But those with the budget and technical know-how to do it will be at the forefront of emerging trends that are sure to dominate the future.
Does Interactive Content Boost SEO?
So, does interactive content bolster your SEO efforts? Absolutely. But how?
Better Customer Engagement
Interactive content encourages users to interact with your content rather than passing it by or blocking it out entirely, which may sometimes happen with various banners and other forms of static content.
Great content is meant to spark ideas and create discussion. It can be frustrating to write a well-researched blog post or design a beautiful web page just to have web users skip right past it. Interactive content not only leads users to spend more time on your web pages but also encourages them to share their opinions and personal information, which can help spark new content ideas in the future.
Solid engagement with content is crucial for good SEO, and creating some form of interaction with your content is a simple way to incentivize that engagement.
Better for Backlinks
According to Ahrefs, “66.31% of pages have no backlinks.” Generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google. Much like digital marketers rely on assets like infographics to encourage others to link back to their website, stellar interactive content can be used to gain more backlinks and drive up your domain authority.
Backlinks signal to search engines that your website is a useful and authoritative source. While providing static infographics and data can help get quality backlinks, it can often be difficult to separate yourself from the competition this way. Investing in the creation of quality interactive infographics, maps and charts is a great way to attract the attention of other content creators looking for information to use for their own website. This will create organic backlinks that will help you achieve your SEO goals.
Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the most important metrics for identifying the success of a digital marketing campaign. This refers to the amount clicks a piece of content receives relative to the amount of time it was seen.
A high CTR indicated that the content was effective in attracting the attention of consumers. The average CTR is around 2%, but this can vary depending on the region and the type of ad. Interactive content is known to produce higher CTR because it offers users an extra incentive to click on the link.
Plus, it’s also known to increase social shares, which can be a great way to increase brand awareness and improve SEO. How likely are you to click on a random link in an ad versus a link that was shared by a friend or colleague? Interactive content is the perfect way to spark an organic exchange of ideas that can be beneficial to your brand in a variety of ways.
More Opportunity for Customer Insights
One of the main benefits of interactive content is that it offers more opportunities for collecting valuable data and customer insights. The best way to create content that resonates with your audience is to pay attention to analytics and find out what your customers like and don’t like.
Interactive content allows you to take that a step further and find out what your audience likes directly from the source. This will give you a better understanding of who your audience is and how they prefer to interact with your content, which will be crucial in optimizing future marketing campaigns for better engagement.
As we’ve shown, interactive content can be a valuable asset in your SEO strategy and overall digital marketing campaign. Interactive content can be a great way to improve your SEO strategy and drive even more engagement and traffic to your website. However, creating interactive content and launching your own SEO campaign can be difficult enough on its own. Instead, enlist the help of Coalition Technologies, an industry-leading SEO company, to help you achieve your marketing goals.
