Let’s talk about empathy in your online marketing – the fastest way to get more engagement.
Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
I think now more than ever with a global pandemic, your online content needs to take into account your user’s mental state. Are you familiar with how emotions impact your user’s online reading and engagement? If not, we’ll walk through the research and how Google and Amazon measure emotions in today’s SEO tip.
Before we get started, I just want to say that as a parent and a member of our global community impacted by the pandemic, I know first hand how stress and sleep deprivation can influence your decision making.
But I think marketers don’t always think about their target audience’s emotional state when creating personas and writing online copy, which is where I got the inspiration for today’s tip. I was also reminded of this research based on a recent study by customer sentiment surveys during Covid-19 by Mckinsey and Company.
Let’s talk about how Stress Impacts Web Usability – I am referencing a journal article in the IEE looking at how various human stress levels impact human-computer interaction. Studies of anger and its impact on cognition have also been studied and published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision making.
In both articles, they outlined how the following emotions and mental states of impacting your decision making.
- Mental stress = poor problem solving, decision making, and system usability.
- Fear = poor motor control
- Sleep deprivation = decreased ability to focus.
- Anger = impacts what people pay attention to and how much cognitive effort people expend in processing the stimuli they confront.
These emotional elements impact the design layout and UX as well. There’s a great article by Bryce Howitson, a UX designer, and he notes:
“If emotional states like fatigue and stress decrease human motor skills or comprehension, we should be especially careful in creating interfaces.”
And the largest search engines are paying attention to the role emotion plays in human-computer interaction and how they can detect emotion in voice inputs:
This Google patent outlines how the emotionality of users can be determined by analyzing text and voice inputs. The patent then states that that the results can be adapted intelligently depending on the context, choice of wording, and auditive components like the speed of speech, intonation, and tonality.
There’s also an Amazon patent where they are working on using Use Alexa to identify illness signs.
Emotions in your search snippets are critical for capturing attention. The IPA database, which has 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, showed that campaigns with purely emotional content performed twice as well.
What does that look like in the search snippets? It looks like this.
First, think about emotion when creating your personas and researching and developing your customer journey mapping. Make sure to ask your target audience about their feelings during your research phase.
Second, make sure that you have those marketing tools handy when you are copy editing and creating online copy.
Third, double check your sentiment before you publish your copy, meta title, and description by using tools like:
And if you know that your audience is under high stress when researching your product, you need to be aware of the presentation/UX. Additionally, you should conduct user studies to ensure that they are absorbing the information that your site provides even while under high stress.
So that’s your tip for the day. Consider the emotion of your searcher when creating your SEO plan.
Thanks for listening.
Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous episode: Some ranking drops you can’t recover from
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