Controversy to Improve Your Blog’s SEO

Most corporate blogs suck… very few people actually read them. Perhaps we hope, at best, that our business comes across as engaging & thriving.

One way to improve this is to have controversy within your blog.

Professionally, this can be as simple as taking a firm stance on a contentious issue. Other ideas include brand comparisons or sharing a perspective on current events and news, but only if it truly aligns with your product or service.

Here’s why controversy works, specific to SEO:

  1. Bold statements in titles improve clickthrough rates, driven by curiosity.
  2. Google and other search engines like to show different perspectives, via sentiment analysis, in search results.
  3. Your content will be cited in online arguments, earning backlinks to improve your page and domain authority.

We have a survival instinct that developed as we evolved, heightening our awareness for potential conflict. Less status could mean losing support from our community. Therefore we “super-react” to controversy, as Charlie Munger says.

The stakes are usually far less severe today. Remember too that this involves psychological bias, clouding good judgment. Nonetheless, controversy used thoughtfully will bring attention, that you can then leverage, to help those your company serves best.

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