How to make SEO and CRO more human with behavioral psychology

Behavioral psychology reveals a lot about customer decision-making. Principles like the fresh start effect, fast vs. slow thinking, the speak-easy effect, and social proof can be applied to SEO to better understand and influence customer intent. 

This article uncovers how these specific behavioral concepts can enhance your SEO and conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts by tapping into customer psychology.

Inside the customer’s mind

Imagine, it’s the New Year, and you have a few resolutions you want to tackle. Maybe you’re looking to learn more about digital marketing. Perhaps you want to work out regularly, read more, spend less – whatever it may be.

And, funnily enough, if you set these new goals for a new year, a new month or even a new week, you’re actually (probably) more motivated to do it. This is all because of a little something called the “fresh start effect.”

In simple terms, when you decide to begin something new on a significant starting point, like the first day of the year, the beginning of spring, or the start of a week, it triggers a mental reset in your brain.

This helps you leave the past behind and motivates you to think about and strive for a better future.

Wondering what this has to do with your SEO efforts? Quite a lot.

Modern SEO and CRO are about many things, and plenty of that is around understanding the intent of the user, their journey, and how to create content that answers those questions. 

Enter behavioral economics, which helps marketers understand why user intent is what it is sometimes and why certain things nudge intent while others don’t.    

For a brief history lesson, behavioral economics is essentially a response to the concept of “the rational man” in economics. When presented with a choice, humans will respond logically. At its core, behavior economics calls that concept out as a lie. 

Humans do not make decisions rationally. We implicitly know this as human beings, but the systems we created to determine whether a behavior or pattern falls within the “expected” range did not.

For example, several forecasting systems are based on the rational man rather than behavioral economics. 

Below are a few common behavioral economics principles to use in both SEO and CRO, including: 

• Fast and slow thinking
• Speak-easy effect
• Social proof

Dig deeper: Boosting search conversions: 5 behavioral strategies to test

1. Fast and slow thinking

Fast versus slow thinking, and the tension between them, is the foundation of behavioral economics. In many ways, it measures how good we are at using logic rather than emotions to make decisions.

And acknowledging that sometimes, while we think we may make decisions rationally, we make them emotionally and then justify them logically. 

If you’re curious about learning more about fast and slow thinking, I’d suggest reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. It’s dense and deeply explains the concepts and tension between our two brains in decision-making. 

Fast and slow thinking, and the friction between them, is why product detail pages should mix aspirational and factual content.

Folks buying the latest iPhone may want to think they’re making a decision rationally by looking at the storage or camera specs and comparing them.

Still, they’re also looking at how pretty the photos taken on the phone are or how good that new color looks in someone’s hand. 

How this applies to SEO

While it is important to have the specs and details of the product on the page, it’s important to research and include answers on some of the product’s more emotional and aspirational elements.

So while it may be tempting to remove all the “marketing fluff” on the page when you’re optimizing a product page for search engines, I’d advise against it. 

Maybe even add more emotion – think of questions that answer how this product is “leveling up” the person who buys it.

If you’re a local electric car dealer, rather than just sharing the charge range, mention some specific landmarks the new, cool owner could get to on a single charge. Maybe even include some pictures of the car there with a driver enjoying an amazing sunset.

It’s cliche, but honestly, it’ll probably work to drive more interest, both at the top and bottom of the funnel. 

Some CRO tests to consider

Fast and slow thinking tests have a lot of variations. A few to consider would be: 

• Isolated vs. in-situ/in-hand product photos.
• In-situ/in-hand vs. aspirational “leveled up” product photos.
• Highlight features vs highlight benefits in product details.

2. Speak-easy effect

The speak-easy effect is when we tend to trust something more just because its name or idea is easy to say. It’s kind of surprising, but generally, if it’s easy to pronounce, we’re more likely to trust it without question.

How this applies to SEO

Remember to keep it (stupid) simple (K-I-S-S). If a question can be answered in a single sentence, answer it directly in a single sentence. 

If there’s a lot of technical language for a specialized piece of equipment, translate it for the layman. Keep the technical language in parentheses or include it elsewhere on the page or website for those who want the specifics. 

Write so a random person landing on the page can understand what you’re talking about without previous knowledge. 

This is also an important concept for how natural language processing works, particularly the concept of dependency hops – and keeping those to a minimum. 

So, while it may be tempting to pad out the “SEO content” on the page with big, industry-related words, it may do more harm than good for your website visitors and their trust in your brand, which can harm your SEO in the long-term. 

Some CRO tests to consider

• Clarify your call-to-action button language.
• Simplify all the language on your product page.
• Simplify all the language on your product collection pages.

I say “all the language” because I am an advocate of big changes first in CRO.

To know which changes had an impact, I would suggest doing a down test to confirm each change individually.

For me, it’s more important to have changes large enough to make an impact to get to statistical significance and not have the experiment running for decades to do so.

If all the changes you make on the page ladder up to the same hypothesis, that’s fine. 

Dig deeper: 5 behavioral strategies to make your content more engaging

3. Social proof

Social proof is widely recommended in ecommerce because it’s proven effective. Its enduring popularity is rooted in scientific evidence.

Social proof (sometimes called the bandwagon effect) gives our brains a shortcut to decision-making: other people have liked it for x, y and z, so we probably will, too. 

With social proof, it’s important to be aware of “the positivity problem,” both that folks online are a bit biased to giving higher starred reviews and that folks generally don’t trust straight 5-star reviews. 

How this applies to SEO

Collect and use user-generated content in as many aspects of your website as possible. This might be testimonials, case studies, product reviews or customer photos. Think outside of the box and specific to your product or service.

Check your customer service records and talk to customers to determine what convinced them to purchase. Share more of that information. If it’s user-generated content, add the appropriate markup using relevant schema. 

Some CRO tests to consider

• Pulling customer reviews higher on the page.
• Changing the display or design of reviews on the page.
• Including reviews on the homepage.

How to use behavioral psychology long-term in SEO

Using behavioral psychology is more than simply a one-and-done, and there’s no requirement to know all of our cognitive biases as humans (though it does help). 

I would suggest taking forward one principle with you as you learn and grow in SEO: 

• How is my customer persona/ideal customer feeling as they’re considering this? 
• How do I want them to feel after they’ve made a decision? 

When you start considering how you want your ideal customer to feel, both in the process of making a decision and after they’ve done so, you’ll likely come naturally to include or consider many different cognitive biases. 

Even if you don’t know the names of those feelings, you’ll probably develop a few guiding principles if you think about and understand what actions lead to those emotions.

Feelings are commonly considered in user journeys, but they may not be as frequently taken into account in creating customer personas, keyword mapping or conducting standard SEO research. Moving the idea of customer feelings forward can streamline these processes.