The Role of Psychology in SEO: Extended Symbiotic Intelligence ' ); h3_html = ''+cat_head_params.sponsor.headline+''; cta = ''+cat_head_params.cta_text.text+'→' atext = ' '+cat_head_params.sponsor_text+' '; scdetails = scheader.getElementsByClassName( 'scdetails' ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], h3_html ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], atext ); sappendHtml( scdetails[0], cta ); // logo sappendHtml( scheader, '' ); sc_logo = scheader.getElementsByClassName( 'sc-logo' ); logo_html = ' '; sappendHtml( sc_logo[0], logo_html ); sappendHtml( scheader, ' ADVERTISEMENT ' ); if("undefined"!=typeof __gaTracker){ __gaTracker('create', 'UA-1465708-12', 'auto', 'tkTracker'); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'dimension1', window.location.href ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'dimension2', 'seo' ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.set', 'contentGroup1', 'seo' ); __gaTracker('tkTracker.send', { 'hitType': 'pageview', 'page': cat_head_params.logo_url, 'title': cat_head_params.sponsor.headline, 'sessionControl': 'start' }); slinks = scheader.getElementsByTagName( "a" ); sadd_event( slinks, 'click', spons_track ); } } // endif cat_head_params.sponsor_logo The task of the marketer has, at its deepest level, remained constant over the years. The digital revolution has brought technology to the fore, but we are ultimately in the game of communication. Successful marketers understand the motivations of their audience and know how to persuade people into taking action. This is particularly true in the arena of search. The average consumer’s relationship with search engines has changed fundamentally in the mobile-first era. When they want to go, do, or know, consumers reach for search. The whole premise of “micromoments” was built entirely on this insight. Google now wants to usher us into the “Age of Assistance”, where every need is fulfilled by speaking to our phones, our speakers, and pretty much any object they can put their software into. Predictions estimate that the Google Assistant will reside on more than 1 billion devices soon, while Amazon has already sold over 100 million Alexa devices. Search is not a niche or specialist discipline today; it is ambient, it is dependable, and it is connected to consumers through a wide range of intent states every day. As search marketers, the holy grail is, therefore, to deliver exceptional experiences for the customer from inspiration through to loyalty.
Keyword-stuffed copy doesn’t cut it anymore in such a demanding and competitive environment. Technology can help us to bridge this communicative gap to our audience in new, innovative ways, but only if we maximize the potential of human psychology – both to understand our audience and to develop the skills we will need to thrive. Technology & Psychology Can Deliver Extended Intelligence The marketers who excel over the next decade will be those who understand the strengths of both technology and people. This will enable enlightened marketers to use technology in the areas where it is best suited to perform, using this base to enhance and extend the capabilities of the marketing team. MIT scientists have termed this “extended intelligence,” which is a helpful way to consider the beneficial role technology can play. There have been numerous sensationalist headlines about how artificial intelligence (AI) may take our jobs, but closer investigation reveals that this unlikely to be the case. The World Economic Forum expects technology to create 58 million more jobs than it will replace by 2022. As John Smith at IBM Research stated: “It’s easy for AI to come up with something novel just randomly. But it’s very hard to come up with something that is novel and unexpected and useful.” In short, its strengths are complementary to ours. AI is likely to take over from people in areas where it can perform the task faster and more effectively than people can, such as data analysis. In fact, the 2019 Digital Trends report from Adobe finds that 36 percent of large businesses are now using AI for data analysis – a 50 percent increase on last year’s figure. In theory, this liberates people from mind-numbing tasks and allows them to focus on the areas where their uniquely human skills can have the most impact. However, this will not happen without our active participation. The automation of so many tasks can, in fact, lead to complacency, rather than increased productivity. It is up to marketers to identify the areas in which they would like to sharpen their skills, then implement a development plan over time. For example, without knowing which questions to ask and then how to interpret the findings, an automated data analysis technology will have little business impact. While AI can tell us which article topics are likely to resonate with our audience, we still need to create the compelling content that will keep them engaged.
In essence, marketers have become the interlocutors between technology and their audience. Every data point, whether it is a search query or a conversion, leaves a trail that tells us something about the person who created it. It is up to marketers to turn that knowledge into a more effective content strategy. The Role of Psychology in Decision-making The hyper-rational world of algorithms is not a reflection of how we, as people, make our decisions. In fact, we are driven by irrational factors much more often than had been assumed a few decades ago. By understanding the role of emotions in decision-making, we can start to make better decisions for ourselves and also nudge others into taking beneficial actions. When we look at a search results page, there are numerous listings clamoring for attention, all on the decreased screen size of a smartphone. Knowing what really makes your audience tick can be the difference between an impression and a click. Taken from ‘The Advertised Mind’ by Erik du Plessis, the image below displays the COMMAP model. From a database of 10,000 television commercials, du Plessis set out to pinpoint the factors that lead consumers to like and remember a brand’s message. He found that the broad concept of “likability” is the key to persuading people. This currency is created when a commercial achieves entertainment, empathy, or relevance, without leading to confusion, alienation, or familiarity.
In essence, the keys to a successful advertising campaign lie in these underlying psychological motivators. This occurs for some clear biological reasons. It is now widely accepted that the amygdala (a part of the brain associated with emotional processes) is active when we make decisions. Fear, envy, and excitement can all play a role in a purchase as seemingly rational as taking out business insurance. Of course, rational factors are vital too, but when all else is equal it is the emotion that leads us to make a choice. Findings such as these have led to the creation of the behavioral economics industry. Researchers have identified hundreds of irrational biases; shortcuts our brains use to make quick decisions, even if they do not always turn out to be beneficial.
• When we are confronted with too many options, it causes “decision paralysis.” • We are prone to “confirmation bias,” where we seek out information that reinforces what we already think. • People are guilty of “herding,” as we tend to follow the crowd. These are all survival instincts, in major and minor ways. The creation of elements like landing page images, call-to-action text, and meta descriptions should all be fueled by these insights. At the intersection of quantitative data and qualitative insights, a brand can appeal to its audience both rationally and emotionally. We have always understood the elements of this in the SEO industry. For example, when it comes to link building, we know that we must incentivize a site to link to us. We must also add value for the reader, if they are to click through to our site. Moreover, there is a growing recognition of the importance of psychology across all marketing disciplines. A huge 94 percent of marketers believe soft skills are as important as technical skills to have a successful career in the industry, according to an Econsultancy report. The term soft skills has always somewhat diminished the importance of interpersonal capabilities, but that is changing. Marketers can see that symbiotic user-friendly AI-driven technologies rise to prominence and help SEO professionals focus on the ability to communicate, persuade, and convert. Research from BrightEdge last year highlighted how marketers see this opportunity in terms of: • Understanding the customer. • Driving productivity. • Creating better performing content.Uses of Psychology in SEO The interplay between technology and human psychology will continue to be a driving force behind successful SEO strategies. In particular, the following areas will be accelerated by this relationship: 1. Customer Insights AI can reveal relationships between variables at a huge scale, leading to new insights about a brand’s audience. By understanding the psychology of the audience, we can use this information to deliver better content across the customer journey. 2. Uncovering Intent
It is no longer sufficient to know what our audience says or does; we also need to know why they do it. • Why does my audience use a specific search query? • What job do they want to complete? Answering these questions will tell us more about their intent state. 3. Incentives We are programmed to choose incentives, to take an action because it will benefit us in some way. Brands need to incorporate this knowledge into their SEO strategy, through messaging that foregrounds the benefits of a product or service. This applies to link building, too. If we understand what leads people to link to content, we can create much more effective campaigns. The psychology of linking differs from that of sharing content on social media, for example. 4. Visual Content 90 percent of information transmitted to the human brain is visual and people can identify images seen for as little as 12 milliseconds. When we factor in the emotive impact of visual content and the wide-ranging field of color theory, the room for experimentation is vast. Video and images are often overlooked by SEO pros, but they represent a great opportunity to reach an audience. 5. Social Proof People are shaped by the opinions of their peers to a much greater degree than they typically imagine. At a deep level, we trust the feedback of other people because it provides a useful shortcut. We don’t need to try everything out for ourselves; we can just read some reviews and make a decision from there. SEO professionals should, therefore, maximize the potential of social proof by using reviews and any customer accolades or testimonials on landing pages. 6. Professional Development Through an understanding of the relationship between marketing and technology, SEO professionals can elevate their own career.
Build on skills that will allow for effective use of technology, and communication skills both for within the marketing team and presenting results to the C-Suite. 7. Mindset for Change One of the most important soft skills for any marketer today is the ability to thrive on change. This is ultimately down to developing the right mindset, which is within everyone’s grasp. Knowing how to cut through the noise in the marketing industry and isolate the factors that really matter will set SEOs apart from their peers. Summary The unifying thread within so much disruption is that the factors that set us apart from the machines, such as our creativity, empathy, and strategic perspective, will be a defining trend in the evolution of search marketing. Although these lessons apply to all marketing disciplines, they are doubly important for SEO. Search has been elevated to an ambient phenomenon, there for consumers at any time of day. The only way we can humanize our search strategies is to develop a deep understanding of what influences our audience. From there, we can use technology to uncover insights, deliver our messages at scale, and report on the outcomes. Marketers who embrace this new landscape will see their results improve dramatically. More Resources: Image Credits Screenshot taken by author, February 2019In-post Image: John Manoogian III Subscribe to SEJ Get our daily newsletter from SEJ's Founder Loren Baker about the latest news in the industry! 02 The technical SEO hierarchy of needs
What makes a site become the best site it can be? Healthy, functional sites that have reached their full SEO potential have been optimized based on market and keyword research, E-A-T, content relevance to search intent, backlink profiles, and more. But they all have one thing in common: their technical SEO needs are met.
Your site’s technical SEO needs form a hierarchy. If needs lower in the hierarchy aren’t met, needs on the next level are difficult to fulfill. Each level responds to a different requirement in the world of search engines: crawlability, indexability, accessibility, rankability, and clickability. Understanding what each level of the pyramid involves helps make technical SEO look less intimidating without oversimplifying its role in making a website great. The foundations of technical SEO: crawlability At the foundation of the pyramid of technical SEO needs is a URL’s crawlability. Crawlability concerns a URL’s ability to be discovered by search engine bots. URLs that are not crawlable might still be accessible to users navigating your website, but because they are invisible to bots, they can’t appear in search results. Crawlable URLs, therefore, are: • Known to search engines. Search engines discover URLs by crawling links and reading sitemaps. • Not forbidden to bots. Most search engine bots will respect meta robots instructions and directives in a robots.txt file that ask them not to crawl certain pages or directories. • Covered by the website’s crawl budget. Less commonly, the “budget” accorded by Google’s algorithms is spent on other parts of a site, causing delays or problems in getting a specific URL crawled. The first step in a technical SEO audit, for example, is to uncover pages that can’t be indexed, and why. Sometimes this is intentional, and sometimes it’s an error and a quick win for SEO. Similarly, while crawl budget may seem esoteric and difficult to quantify, the basic principle is that when the cost of crawling is optimized and when priority pages are presented first, more traffic can be gained through search engines. Technical SEO uses how pages are discovered and prioritized to promote better crawling; it leverages historical data for crawl frequency and past situations that provoke increased crawling activity to improve current crawl rates. Indexability Just above crawlability in the hierarchy of technical SEO needs is indexability. Indexable URLs are URLs that a search engine can include in a catalog of pages that are available to be presented in search results pages. Even when a URL has been crawled, various properties can prevent it from being added to the index. In the most straightforward situations, pages can be prevented from being indexed by meta robots and robots.txt directives. But Google also chooses not to index pages when a more authoritative version exists for the same content. This is the case when a bot discovers the following elements:
• Duplicate content. • Canonical declarations. • Alternate versions such as printable pages or mobile pages. (In the current move to a mobilefirst index, mobile versions are indexed instead of desktop versions.) • Redirections. To ensure that the right pages can be indexed, technical SEO verifies that these elements are correctly set up and that they apply to the correct pages. Accessibility and website performance An accessible URL is easy to display or render. A URL that is both crawlable and indexable might still be inaccessible at the moment when a search engine’s bot attempts to crawl it. Pages and sites that rank but that have persistent accessibility problems are often penalized in the search results. Accessibility for bots — and for users — covers a broad range of related topics: • Server performance. • HTTP status. • Load time/page size. • JavaScript rendering. • Page depth in the site architecture. • Orphan pages. • Website resistance to spam and hacking. The goal is to discover the threshold at which accessibility and performance metrics negatively impact SEO performance, and to ensure that all pages of a website meet at least that minimum level. Technical SEO, therefore, uses tools to measure anything from server downtime or HTTP status served to bots and users, to the size of resources (CSS, JS, images…) transferred when a page is requested or load time metrics such as TTFB, FCP, or TTLB. Technical SEO audits that conclude you need links to certain pages are often working to eliminate underperforming orphan pages and URLs with excessive page depth. Some will include accessibility for users; a page that does not work with a screen reader cannot be used by many users, no matter how great its content or keyword optimization. Once accessibility issues have been addressed, we can say that the basic technical SEO needs of a page are met. Without them, page and website SEO suffer. As we continue to move further up the hierarchy of needs, we pass from blocking factors to factors of improvement.
Rankability: the role of technical SEO in improving positions Rankability is the first of the two top levels of the pyramid that deal with optimizations. Instead of forming the foundations of SEO, they are sometimes considered advanced technical SEO. Clearly, crawlable, indexable and accessible URLs can rank. Some can even rank well. However, the average URL will rank better with a little help. Using links to boost rankings Linking, whether internal or external, transfers page importance (and traffic!) from popular pages to less popular pages. This second group profits. Technical SEO strategies will, therefore, examine backlinks to determine the most advantageous profile, or use internal linking structures to promote pages. Not only can internal links improve crawl rate (by reinforcing freshness when linking from new or updated content) and conversion (by funneling users towards high-converting and goal pages), but they also transfer page importance and help build content silos, two strategies for improving page rank. Improving positions with semantic optimization Content silos, created by interlinking semantically related content, help groups of pages rank better than a single page could. They build both depth and expertise while expanding keyword reach with pages that focus on long-tail keywords and semantically related concepts. In some cases, it can also be worthwhile to look at the pertinence of a page with regard to the rest of the site, examine keyword density, number of words, text-to-code ratio, and other factors that can be either red flags or content quality indicators for a given keyword group. Clickability: the link between SEO and user behavior The final level of technical SEO optimization concerns technical elements that make it more likely for a user to click on your results.