Have you ever been lied to by someone you thought you trusted? Has someone ever told you an empty promise? It’s awful right? Would you want to do that to your customers or your potential customers? In order to effectively advertise or convey your idea, you must state that idea exactly.
Conveying your point in an honorable matter is important and highly respectable. Another advantage to not using the Bait and Switch is that you give a trusting environment for your customers. The Bait and Switch is historically known for giving misleading information.
For an example of a Bait and Switch, if my website were to say click here to find out more about chocolate chip cookies, you would expect to find out more about chocolate chip cookies. Instead of finding out more about chocolate chip cookies, you are taken to a website about the score of the Super Bowl! The Bait and Switch is misleading and extremely unhelpful for customers. It makes customers frustrated. It is harder to get a new customer than to keep a current one. Once you have dosed the customer with a lie, they are unlikely to trust the rest of your website. Before you know it, you have lost your customer, and potentially others, if they tell their friends.
As website creators we should never Bait and Switch because it provides distrust for the customers and anyone on the website. Providing distrust in customers is the last thing a company should do, because you want your customers to trust you. Whenever you have a customer, you want to engage them for the right reasons, not reasons that do not apply to their search. If you are the customer, you are there for a reason, and that is to satisfy your need/desire. You want your website to be click-worthy, not click-baity.
4 Responses
Great post! I agree with what you said about bait-and-switch. From my own personal experience, click bait is annoying both when you recognize it, and when you do not and then are misled. Sure, it might get people on to your site, but it is likely not going to keep them there, since it is not what they were looking for. Overall, bait-and-switch is a bad SEO tactic that should never be used, as it causes distrust with a searcher, as you said.
Great point that consumers might tell their friends not to trust your site if you’re using bait and switch. I talked about the loss of credibility when content creators use click-bait in my post, but I didn’t think about the fact that you can lose credibility with not only the searcher but also their network.
Great point here. I think you’re absolutely right about overusing bait and switch leading to mistrust – it reminds me of the boy who cried wolf haha! It’s a brands goal to build trust and loyalty, especially these days where people value brands who value them. By tricking people with bait and switch, companies are just setting themselves up for failure and total resentment from the public.
Great post! I sometimes don’t trust using bait and switch because it will mislead you and will make you think it’s right information.