Giulia says: “My Additional Insight is to know how your customers think and make decisions to be the brand they'll always come back to.”

Why is it important to know what your customers think and how your customers think?

“I think the long-term goal for SEO should not only be getting a click, but also to help the business gain or retain customers, but sometimes we lose focus on that.

When trying to get back clicks, we’re trying to reach the customers, the real people behind the screen who are making decisions every second.

When customers need or feel something, people's decisions are driven by emotions, needs, and the ease of information processing.

Getting to know what those drivers are is a must if you want to feature as a preferred brand from an SEO perspective and have the SEO to help with the overall strategy. But also because search is evolving and will continue to do so, we see more how Google and search engines have stressed customer centricity.

They've been focusing on each update on something different, but it's always related to the user. The Helpful Content update has authority, authenticity, and trust. Some of these elements directly mirror how humans make decisions fast because we also display certain decision-making patterns modulated by mental shortcuts or cognitive biases.

As humans, we respond to different things. Some of these things can be relevancy or even a violation of expectancy, for example, something unexpected we don't expect to come, or we respond to familiarity and social proof.

The same goes for search engines. Now, they reward authoritativeness, familiarity with brands, and social proof. We've seen that the EAT guidelines now have become EEAT to add the experience as a factor for content quality. Google also added the perspective filter in the SERP to give more prominence to different views.

Ultimately, if you focus on the customer and know what they decide and think, you can eliminate some friction points to give them what they want and reliably respond to their needs so you will be the brand they’ll return to. If you think about it, we all have websites that we always go back to when we need to shop, and they might not be the very best ones or offer the most convenient offers, but they are the ones that have proven reliable to us. So, we keep going back because it saves us from all of the evaluations that we otherwise need to make in deciding to purchase something.”

You said ‘modulated by mental shortcuts’. What does that mean?

“The way that we make decisions, which we don't even realize, is sometimes very implicit. We make decisions at every stage of our journey, not only in the search, but also in the real world. The way we make those decisions can also be determined by some cognitive biases, which are errors in judgment that we're not mostly aware of, and they have to do with information processing.

An example of this is that there are attentional shifts that are modulated by cognitive biases. Certain information is processed more quickly if it's more prominent on a certain part of the page because we respond more to primacy. This works for the page, but also for persuasion. There are also a number of other biases, I think there’s around 150 that have been isolated. I recommend everyone look at that because there's so much to unpack.

We use all of those shortcuts in decision-making because we don't have the cognitive ability or the cognitive resources to deal with the potential outcomes of a choice and all the possible options. So we use these shortcuts to give us a point to move forward. Some of these, for example, familiarity bias, means we go for what we already know because we feel like we don't need to use any more resources to evaluate options.

Authoritative bias is also something we go for. We place more value on something that comes from an authoritative source. We don't even need to check, and sometimes we don't make the needed checks to validate that. Some of those are negativity bias. It's when we place more value on something negative than something positive or neutral.

These biases also apply to the SERP and how we interact with it, because we see media exploiting this bias, and we know that whenever it's something strategic or negative, we always click on that for the most part.

It also implies how we interact with a website, because if a website is doing everything right, but we come to this frustration point, then we remember that frustration point more than all of the good we've encountered that far. That's the reason why SEOs now have to also engage with other teams, such as UX teams and design teams, to make the experience flawless.”

I want to get your opinion on maybe enhancing the content or better positioning the content on a web page to enhance conversion rates and improve conversion rates further as well because that has a bigger impact on SEO if people decide to stay on a website and make a purchase from that website and come back to that website.

To do that, I want to share a little story about how I tend to structure a sales page and a website and maybe get your feedback to see if there's a slightly better way to do it. There are different types of pages on a website, and there are different types of landing pages for long-tail keyword phrases that SEOs will be more familiar with. But ideally, you want to keep them on the site, drive them toward your product pages, and hopefully get people to decide on your business about what you do.

So, I follow the structure Simon Sinek recommends for product-type or sales-type pages, with what a great business does. A great business starts with ‘why’, moves into ‘how’, and finishes with ‘what’.

So, they try and resonate with someone by bringing them on that journey. This is what we do as a business, this will solve your challenges, and it's not necessarily talking about their product at all. It's talking about the emotion to begin with, and then moving on to how the business or the product delivers on that before explaining what the product offers.

Is that a way that you would agree with in terms of structuring a web page? And if not, why and what would you recommend?

“Absolutely, and I think you brought up two very important points. You talked about feeling relatable, and that's super important. Relating to the pain points of the customers and wanting to solve those.

The other thing that you mentioned is that you place it first. We tend to place more value on the first information we see, and the last one we see, but the primacy effect in particular is the one that we respond the most to.

So as you mentioned, placing it first that that the brand already relates to me from the get-go and they're not trying to sell straight away creates that emotional experience first. That’s something that we connect to. Then we place more value on ourselves than the rest of the experience. So, I think it's a great point and it’s a great strategy.

You also talked about emotions, and I always say that people make decisions emotionally, and then they tend to justify them rationally. We don't realize that because we always want to think our decisions are completely rational, but if you think about it, they're not. We often respond with a gut feeling towards the brand or how it responds to our needs and then we justify if it’s convenient. Does their delivery date match my needed delivery date, and so on? So, I think it's a great strategy, to be honest.”

How do we know what customers think about our web page or our business? Is there some video recording you can make or a panel discussion with a select group of potential customers to determine that?

“I think there are different ways that you can gather information. If we want to stay in the SEO domain strictly and you only have access to SEO tools, then you can have a look at the branded queries and the ones especially where you have lower CTRs, because a lot of the time you will find questions or information that are not being answered, such as delivery dates, return policy for e-commerce, or payment options.

This is information that brands have available because it's part of our business model, but we might not make it visible on-site and might not be very discoverable, but these are all triggers that can stop a journey or the checkout when people are already invested in us but are just not finding the right information. This might lead to them thinking we're unreliable because we don't offer clarity or transparency on that sort of topic.

The other thing I would recommend is to try to with heat maps, because if you do so much work on a page, you want that content to be discovered. There are so many patterns of attention now, especially with how we consume content nowadays, and our attention spans have become much shorter. We tend to display some patterns of attention that might not necessarily match those we had five years ago.

So, try to play with heat maps to see how your pages get consumed. Is there important information on the page? Do they even get to your users? Microsoft Clarity is free, and it's quite easy to use, otherwise Hotjar is a good tool. And suppose you aren’t available to use those tools on your own, but you have a UX team. In that case, I think getting in the same room and watching them doing the testing, or at the very minimum, listening to the results of those tests, because you will find that prospective customers or existing customers will have the same frustrations which will also inform the way that you can make that information on or some of the other things that are asking more available from the early stages of the journey.”

Ultimately, SEO success is about increasing the number of new visitors to a website and improving your rankings on Google. So, can having happier and more satisfied customers on your website lead to having a positive, measurable impact on your rankings?

“We've always debated whether behaviour signals are ranking signals. Historically, no. But now, what we aim for as SEOs is not only that traffic that comes from the first interaction with our channel, but also retaining the customers.

A happy customer is a customer that will repeat, even if they're doing another search. Let’s say that they're looking for shoes, they land on our website, make the purchase, are happy with all of our products, our delivery, etc. Next time they’re looking for a handbag, and they come across our website. Well they had a nice experience with our website in the past. So even if we're not ranking first, they might still click on us because they had that nice experience. They don't even need to evaluate anything else.

I cannot tell if this directly affects rankings, because nobody knows, but I would argue that SEO is not about rankings anymore, especially with how the search is going. We don't even know what Search Generative Experience, what rankings will mean, or what CTRs and clicks will lead to because it's all up in the air.

The way that we can future-proof our brand is actually by making customers happy. Because if they come across us, they'll probably purchase with us.”

If you're building happy customers, you’re trying to encourage more branded searches in the future. So, if, in your example, someone purchases a pair of shoes and then likes the experience, perhaps they'll search for a brand name handbag in the future and look for your website to see if you sell handbags as well. So, that's having a positive impact on your SEO.

“There's so much value in those social signals because the relationship between brands and customers now is not like brands. The customer at the bottom is more bilateral than ever because now brands need to offer a nice journey. You're there and need to respond to the customer's needs, but customers need to validate the experience so others can do the same.

Now, we rely a lot on social proof. How often have we come across a brand, evaluated the options, seen that it's convenient for us, but questioned whether it’s legit? Let me find some UGC that tells me from a group of similar people who have made the same purchase that can validate the experience. I think it's one of the important things that SEOs should also focus on. Look at social signals, look at what comes up when you type your brand, and then read it, and you will find a lot of the other things that you can make more available on your website as well.”

You’ve shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So, what's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Focusing solely on rankings or upper funnel metrics, because right now SEO is changing so much and so fast. We've even seen three updates in the space of a month. Right now, it's not about clinging to the rankings, it's about getting dirty with the other teams. You can't work in silos. Everyone wants to bring water to their meal, but your metrics, which used to be your KPIs, might not be aligned with the business. Right now we're a piece of the puzzle. SEOs should stop working in silos and focusing on rankings only because now it's so much more about the rest of the journey as well.”

Giulia Panozzo is a neuromarketing consultant at Neuroscientive, and you can find Giulia over at neuroscientive.com.