Much has been written on the guidelines on how to optimize your web pages to appear friendly to search engines and readers. But there are limited resources explaining about the psychology of SEO. In this article, we will tackle five principles on how people think of your website and image related to SEO.
Psychology of SEO
1. Reciprocity
A relationship is always a two-way traffic. This fosters good communication, understanding and everything in between. An offline relationship between friends or colleagues is not different from an online relationship involving two webmasters exchanging links and networks or market reach. To be able to reach success in SEO, you should not deprive yourself of people who can help you achieve the top for your niche.
There are several niches and there are many of these which may not be exactly the same but somehow are related. While one site may be having an expertise in selling automobile parts, another website may be the authorized place where people ask for car insurance quotations. While these sell different products and services, they have a common ground which is car. In this way, they can be associated partners who would likely return favors when asked.
This can be especially clearly seen when guest-posting and exchanging comments actively. Each webmaster can be free in guest blogging in the other’s website and vice versa. This strategy promotes interactivity and increases traffic to both ends. This principle of reciprocity is to help out each other, with the concept of giving what you received and the cycle goes on.
2. Commitments
One very hot search engine optimization technique that never fails to succeed is link building. Related to reciprocity, when you build relationships with bloggers whom you trust, you create golden chains of commitment with them. This is like making a promise that you trust them for being able to also promote the content you shared in their site and also accepting their trust in you that you do the same when they publish articles at your own.
When you have these committed resources in your circle, you have an increased level of guarantee that you can get stronger force in SEO in the future as you have the support you need.
3. Social Proof
Google has taken notice that there are plenty of webmasters who stuff keywords which are unnecessary and somehow irrelevant to their contents only to attract visitors who ultimately don’t find answers and information to their questions and concerns. Because of this, Google has launched updates to police these “criminals” and enforced stricter guidelines on ranking websites. One of those is social proof.
When people see that your content has been recommended, liked, shared and commented by ten or more others, they will be more inclined to take similar action as well and spread your content to their networks. This action can be boosted when your site has accessible and ready social sharing buttons which allow viewing of the social sharing counts. ‘The more, the merrier’ is the key. The more people who shared your content, you can be rest assured that your site is pleasant in the eyes of search engines. This also means that you are doing word-of-mouse marketing correctly. The end results would be that more people will begin to trust your site as they saw how many others felt the same.
You will have more points when you receive comments from really trusted organizations. So make sure to encourage readers to make a response after your article and never pass a moment to answer or thank them in return.
4. Rarity
Competition is too high in certain niches, so no matter how large your effort in SEO is for this field, you may not be successful too soon. To counter this, you can choose another area of expertise you can put efforts into. As SEO requires determination at the start, working on researching for the rarity of a certain niche would be significant for your next endeavor. This will be the foundation of your site, so you should consider finding products or services which are relatively rare for it to appear more valuable to searchers.
For example, given that there are too many information people can get when they search for “best psoriasis treatments,” you can specialize with a rare site which offers info on how to treat their psoriasis the natural way. This is if you also knew that there are only limited ways on how to treat this disease and people cannot anymore resort to taking typical medications that can be bought over the country as they won’t really work.
The lesson here is to keep searching for ones with low competition and note that the rarer the opportunity is, the more likely you will be on top of the search results doing the right SEO.
5. Authority
Last but not least, the principle on authority indicates that readers would trust those websites owned by webmasters who have higher authority levels or points in the niche. How do you increase your authority then? Google SEO thinks that this is related to the author thus they made the Google Authorship markup which webmasters can include in the backend code of their websites. This is to link all their contributions to the web altogether, and Google will rank the authority figures accordingly.
On the surface, the blogs associated with the webmaster will have to appear in his Google Plus profile. People in his circle can view it and searchers should be able to see a thumbnail image of the author’s profile picture in the results page. Psychology tells that people will more likely believe and click through these hits rather than those without pictures and whose authority level is low.
End Notes
Learning the psychology of SEO does not require you to be enrolled in some psychology class or get a psychology degree. With these basics, you should be able to enhance the knowledge through practice and more experience down the road. Learn how to break into the psyche of your intended readers to create SEO effectively and then market your content with different social media and link building techniques.
Spend time asking what the users will mostly want out of your site to determine the essential topics you need to cover, in addition. As the business owner or the website owner, you need to keep seeing your products or services in a positive trend and impression from viewers. Focus on the psychology behind what drives them to visit your website and what keeps them from sticking to your feeds from day one—and improve on this strategy to attract others to generate more traffic through SEO.
