How My Background in Neuromarketing Makes Me a Better SEO with Amanda Cifuentes
SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing that aims to help users efficiently find what they are looking for while also assisting those with a website in being discovered by their target audience. Consumer psychology seeks to understand consumer behaviour, their pain points, decision-making processes, and interactions with products.
Neuromarketing is very interesting as it serves as a bridge between psychology and marketing, studying brain and attentional processes that later influence certain interests or the choice of certain products over others.
Taking all these aspects into account and understanding how the brain reacts to specific stimuli allows for the application of SEO strategies that result in more engaging content, improving the user experience and potentially achieving better rankings in the SERPs.
What is Neuromarketing and How Does It Apply to SEO?
Neuromarketing is a discipline that studies consumer behaviour based on neuroscience, focusing on where consumers direct their attention and how they make decisions. This enables more effective marketing strategies that capture consumer attention more precisely.
Neuromarketing knowledge can be applied to SEO in various ways, from content creation to UX design on a website. For example, where you place certain buttons—whether on the right or left, at the top or bottom—where specific content is positioned, and even colours all influence how a user perceives what is in front of them. The colour blue is associated with calmness and tranquillity, while green can be linked to nature and ecology. With this knowledge, you can help your client create a website that aligns precisely with what they want to convey, making users feel more comfortable and connected when interacting with it. Everyone wins!
Essentially, SEO and neuromarketing intersect in several ways:
- How users process information.
- What emotional triggers influence attention, interest, and, ultimately, conversion.
- Cognitive processes behind search intent and decision-making.
Improving Keyword Strategy with Neuromarketing
It is crucial to understand that keyword selection is an essential part of SEO, but there is much more to it than just search volume. A keyword having a high search volume and stuffing it into titles and paragraphs is not enough. There’s much more!
It is necessary to recognise that there is a search intent behind every keyword and that the people interacting with our web pages are humans with interests and a strong desire to find exactly what they are looking for. As SEO professionals, our mission is also to reduce frustration for these users and make their search as easy as possible.
In my keyword selection process, I always analyse the SERPs. Google, through its metrics, understands user preferences and prioritises content accordingly, so it is essential to observe what types of websites and content rank for specific keywords. What are competitors doing well to appear at the top? I often try to see things from a user’s perspective—what is capturing my attention and why, and what could be improved to enhance my interaction?
User intent is crucial; keep in mind that a transactional search is entirely different from an informational one. Evaluate the type of keywords, the website, and the content to be precise and deliver exactly what the user is looking for. They’ll appreciate it!
Enhancing User Experience (UX)
The way a website is designed is crucial for UX. It is a key factor in helping users complete the desired action and reducing bounce rates.
Here are some essential points:
- Important elements should be easy to see and interact with.
- The website design should be simple and clear, reducing frustration and improving information retention.
- Information should be structured clearly, precisely, and in an organised manner.
- Page speed should be fast—optimize your images!
Content Optimisation
When creating SEO content, it’s essential to always keep in mind that we are writing for people and the human mind. Yes, we want Google to rank us, but our ultimate goal is for people to find us, read our content, and, most importantly, be satisfied with it.
For blogs, for example, use well-structured storytelling to enhance information retention. Provide interesting details and elements that people can remember. Create engaging content. Spark curiosity on specific topics. Also, depending on the type of website, you can use emotional language—words that evoke emotions tend to have a greater impact.
For product pages, you can also appeal to exclusivity, which captures the brain’s attention and creates a strong connection. Additionally, use familiar and conversational language—users remember familiar and simple content more easily.
Don’t forget to include internal links as early as possible. As mentioned in the UX section, important elements should be easily recognisable. If a blog reader loses interest halfway through, and you placed a relevant internal link in the last paragraph, they might miss it.
Practical Recommendations
As we’ve discussed throughout this article, it’s essential to always keep in mind that in SEO (and with neuromarketing in mind), our goal is to make life easier for users interacting with our websites—empathy is key. Here are some strategies to better understand search intent and user behaviour:
- Use heatmaps to analyse user behaviour on web pages.
- Implement A/B testing on metadata to determine which generates better emotional responses and engagement.
- Optimise site speed with tools like PageSpeed Insights.
- Recommend new pages based on competitor analysis. For example, a review page is often very useful.
Conclusion
Neuromarketing provides an interesting approach to SEO and digital marketing in general. Understanding brain processes and practising empathy with users offer valuable insights that allow for the implementation of impactful strategies that truly connect with people- and most importantly, satisfy them.
