Part 3: User-Centric Focus - MozCon 2024 Series
10
minute read time
In the ever-changing digital marketing world, balancing innovative SEO tactics with strategic marketing plans is crucial; as is understanding user search biases and leveraging emotional drivers behind purchasing decisions to create personalized, impactful content. By shifting to a user-centric focus and aligning SEO efforts with overarching business goals, marketers can build a holistic strategy that resonates with users, increasing their likelihood to convert. Read on to learn more and see how you can implement these strategies in your marketing.
SEO Tunnel Vision
In the digital marketing industry, sometimes it may be hard not to get wrapped up in what is referred to as “SEO Tunnel Vision”; meaning SEOs are eager to deploy their latest trick learned from a colleague or online resource, then over-rely on their growing bag of tactics. However, when everyone uses the same SEO tools and follows identical recommendations, websites start to look and function similarly, which Google does not like since they are always on the hunt for hidden gems and unique content.
Instead of falling into this trap, SEOs need to adopt a more critical, holistic, and long-term mindset. Strategies should always tie back to overarching business goals and user needs. It is also important to keep in mind that while something may work for a month or two, there is no guarantee it will continue to work forever. Understanding a website’s purpose and revenue model coupled with knowing the target audience and their online behavior helps craft strategies that resonate and stand the test of time rather than chasing short-lived trends.
“Every time you introduce a new SEO tactic, you need to be able to answer ‘Why?’ and connect to business goals.”
Lily Ray
User Search Bias
User search bias is a critical aspect of SEO that significantly influences the outcomes of search queries and the visibility of content. A slight change in a single word within a search query can lead to vastly different results, reflecting various biases. Each user brings a unique context to their searches, and as SEOs, we must anticipate these diverse perspectives to ensure our content aligns with user intent.
Confirmation Bias in Search
Often, individuals search for terms that validate their existing beliefs, avoiding information that contradicts their views. With this, we need to examine how users search, whether they use similar terms that yield consistent results or dissimilar terms that produce varied outcomes. Ensuring our content addresses these diverse search behaviors can help capture a wider audience and drive business value based on actual user queries.
Familiarity Heuristic
The familiarity heuristic highlights our tendency to favor familiar concepts over new ones leading to users being more likely to engage with brands they recognize. For SEOs, ensuring consistent visibility and leveraging familiar elements can help build and maintain user trust.
Authority Bias
Authority bias reflects our inclination to trust information from authoritative sources, such as government or scientific articles, often without scrutinizing their accuracy. As SEOs, striving to establish our brand and content as authoritative can help earn user trust.
Halo Effect
The halo effect demonstrates how users tend to trust brands associated with other reputable brands or those that are widely known, leading to enhanced trust and credibility for your brand. By forming strategic partnerships and building a strong, recognizable brand, user preferences and search behaviors can be influenced.
The Power of Emotion in SEO
Understanding why people buy from you is crucial; it’s easy to get lost in the numbers and forget that behind every click is a human being. Emotions play a significant role in decision-making, and consumers are often even willing to pay a higher price for a product if they perceive personal value in it. There are two main clusters of emotions that may impact purchasing decisions:
Self Image
Pertaining to how individuals want to feel about themselves. When considering a purchase, people often ask themselves if the product will enhance their self-esteem or self-worth.
Social Image
Pertaining to how individuals want to be perceived by others. Buyers consider how a product will affect their social standing and how others will perceive them after making the purchase.
By tapping into these emotional drivers, brands can craft stories and experiences that resonate more deeply with their audience, leading to better user experiences and higher conversion rates.
Community Input & User-Generated Content (UGC)
Leveraging UGC is becoming increasingly valuable in SEO, especially with the introduction of AI and chat bots. Forums have become a standout here for UGC content in search since they prioritize user intent, provide a platform for people to share opinions and firsthand experiences, and bring a human element to search that bots can’t replicate.
You may have noticed Reddit becoming more prominent in Google Search results. This is partially due to being an exemplary model of community-driven content rich with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals. Upvotes indicate trust, while comments and moderation reflect expertise and active engagement. The credibility of posts is often bolstered by verified users and the number of answers they attract. Google values these authentic interactions and signals, making Reddit an excellent resource for understanding cultural trends and consumer behavior.
SEO experts can utilize Reddit to gain insight into what truly matters to people, which in turn helps shape more effective marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience.
So, what are the next steps as SEOs?
Targeting Audiences and Crafting a Content Strategy
To effectively market to your audience, focus on engaging those who already love your brand and those who are not yet familiar with it. Your content strategy should incorporate audience biases and prioritize what matters most to them. Build your content strategy around three key pillars: keywords, relevance, and brand.
- Keywords: Use a variety of keywords and topic clusters, identifying bias opportunities that resonate with your audience. Focus on what makes your audience feel good about you.
- Relevance: Ensure your content appears in relevant searches by presenting new information and demonstrating expertise. Add your own opinion to satisfy cognitive biases and support decision-making.
- Brand: Enhance your brand through digital PR placements, coordinated campaign messaging with branded landing pages, visual content, and partnerships with likable brands.
Leveraging Emotions to Boost Conversion
When creating your strategy to increase conversions, it is important to make sure you are speaking with actual customers, determining what the real problems are that result in users visiting your site. With a focus on understanding your customers' pain points and emotional triggers, you can incorporate emotions into your ad copy using the aforementioned self image and social image formulas, as well as the formula for emotion-centered ad copy.
Optimizing User-Generated Content (UGC) and Forums
You can optimize for UGC and Forums by making UGC comments crawlable and indexable, using schema markup since Google now includes forums and discussion boards more prominently, and adopting UGC/forum tactics to create people-first content. Reddit can be leveraged for content ideation by searching for brand-related questions and using them to inspire new content which can help you fill content gaps on your site. Lastly, you should engage with relevant communities by contributing content and nurturing your own community.
Breaking free from SEO Tunnel Vision requires a shift towards a more holistic and user-focused approach. By understanding user search biases, leveraging emotional drivers in purchasing decisions, and embracing user-generated content, SEOs can create more personalized and impactful marketing strategies.
Read the full 3-part series of what we learned at MozCon 2024!
