Psychology of SEO by Rebekah Edwards of Clara Agency

Rebekah Edwards, CEO of Clara Agency, joined the Clearsope webinar to discuss the psychology of SEO.

Rebekah shared the 5 ways customers make decisions before digging into decision fatigue, friction, conditioning, and reciprocity.

In case you want to re-watch the presentation or didn't have a chance to make it live, here's the link to Rebekah's slides.

Watch the full webinar

Read the transcript

Bernard:

Everybody, we have here Rebekah Edwards. Rebekah is the CEO of Clara and an avid believer in doing SEO with integrity. Her primary goal is to develop transparent, empathetic content experiences for every user that interacts with what she creates. Clara does content led SEO for B2C brands in health, wellness, e-commerce and personal finance. Rebekah, the stage is all yours. If you have questions, please drop them in comments or the Q and A module. We'll do a good job moderating them, and Rebekah is more than happy to answer them on the spot. So drop those in if you have questions that pop up. Rebekah.

Rebekah:

Definitely. Awesome. Thanks, Bernard. So just before we begin, I wanted to introduce myself briefly and make it clear. I love psychology. I have a bachelor's in psych from a university here in Nashville. I say here. I don't live in Nashville as of a week ago. So I have a bachelor's degree. I am not a licensed therapist. I just loved the marketing aspect of psychology. And so when I first got into my career, I thought, wow, I really don't want to be a therapist. I want to market crap. That was kind of my whole spiel at the very beginning. And so I ended up getting into SEO. So let's dive in. I'm going to share my screen with you and let you know ... As they say, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you, and then I'll tell it to you.

Rebekah:

All right, let's talk about ... oh, not that. Let's talk about the area of consumer psychology. So consumer psychology is ... As of, I think, 1960, it was formalized as a branch of psych by the APA, the American Psychological Association, if I can say that correctly, in 1960. So we've got about 60 years of data. There are a ton of different areas of consumer psychology that can impact SEO in what we do. But for the purposes of this, I thought the three most relevant were, number one, decision making and how consumers make decisions based on what they see with the content you provide. The second thing is behavior and how they choose to behave when they're on your website or in relation to your brand, and then cognition, which is your attitudes and feelings about a particular brand.

Rebekah:

So Google has really nailed something amazing that people have been trying to do for decades in marketing, which is they created a win-win situation in terms of providing information. So there's a ton of research from pre-internet, pre Google about the way that customers choose to find information. And there's two models. Basically, one of them is cost versus benefits. So can I get this information for free? And is it going to benefit me? And then the second one is, what can I do that requires the least effort to get the most information? Google answers literally all of those really, really quickly. And so while obviously word of mouth marketing and Instagram ads and whatever else, they still work, but basically people are still looking for the least effort, lowest cost and most beneficial way to get information.

Rebekah:

So let's start with how customers make decisions. So we're going to talk about five different ways customers make decisions in behavioral ... or, sorry, in decision making psychology. And we're going to kind of use an example of a deodorant choice. And I just went on Amazon and looked for deodorant for women. And we're going to look at the little pieces on this that people use in different decision making. So the single feature model of decision making is just when you're in a hurry and your decision's not super important and you choose one factor. And so for this ... And if you're a deodorant company selling on Amazon, this can be really relevant.

Rebekah:

From the screenshot, there are a bunch of different ways that a customer might choose one single feature and just make a decision. So they might look at price and say, oh, the one on the left's the cheapest, don't care about anything else, click the buy now button. They might also do that with something that has the most reviews. They might choose something based on its branding. They might choose something based on the fact that one of these is from a small business. And so whatever those single feature decisions are, that model basically says, if you have very little time and you're not spending a lot of money, you can pick one thing that matters to you and just make your decision based on it, dismiss everything else extraneous.

Rebekah:

This also impacts how someone's going to decide to sign up for your email list or your text list, when they're in a piece of educational content. A lot of times, because it's a really short decision, it doesn't cost them anything, the little bit of copy that you write or the creative that you use is going to be the one determining factor. And so if you are having trouble with, hey, nobody's signing it for my email list or whatever, simplify the copy, simplify the design. Maybe you're talking about too many things. And so that's the single feature model. And next we have the additive feature model.

Rebekah:

So back to the additive feature model, as you might guess, basically it just takes that single feature model and says, eh, I care about more than one thing. And so this is for people who like to create pros and cons lists and choose based on a lot of factors. So say that you're really sensitive to aluminum in deodorant and you're on a budget and you've had bad experiences with natural deodorant before. You might use the additive feature model and look at this list and go, I need something that says natural. I don't want to spend a lot of money, and I want to make sure that this has a lot of reviews. The obvious choice on this page is going to be, for instance, the Native deodorant, because that one is natural, cheaper than the other natural deodorant, and has the most reviews, and it has a lot of them.

Rebekah:

And so it can take a lot of time. So I love talking about this in content, because this is where ... The kind of people that make decisions that way are the kind of people that love Wirecutter reviews. And so when you review a product ... And I'm going to give tips throughout the presentation that may not be on the screen, so if you have any questions about them, feel free to interact, and Bernard will let me know.

Rebekah:

If you're creating product reviews or if a lot of your content is based around product reviews, there are a couple of different things that you can always include that are going to be really good for this decision making model. So photos or screenshots. You want to make sure that it's clear that the photos you take or the screenshots you use are yours. Don't use the brand's photos for what you're trying to cover because people will notice, and they will think that you're being dishonest. You also want to include details, who reviewed this and how they reviewed it. Why are they qualified to review it? What are the standards? How are your choices selected? So that is the additive feature model that people are making decisions based on.

Rebekah:

There's another one called elimination by aspects model. It's very similar to the second one, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, but you basically look at characteristics that matter to you, and you kind of say, well, this one's most important. This one's next important. And you compare options until only one option remains. You get rid of the ones that don't meet your standards. So are you with me so far? And, Bernard, you can tell me if everything I'm saying is making sense or not.

Bernard:

Making sense to me. I was like, oh, Rebekah will probably cover this later, but some thoughts around video. And you're saying, oh, if you lift the photo off the brand, it doesn't look authentic. And I resonate with that because I'm usually looking at the review and I'll look at the website that they're reviewing, and I'm like, that's the same screenshot.

Rebekah:

I mean, I feel like we've all been there, Googling something and, oh, I want the best flat screen TV. And half the time, it's like Google's trying to give you obviously the best option for your search. But how often do you get on an article and go, this is just an affiliate thing? They just picked a bunch that they had affiliate links to and arbitrarily told me what they think is best, and I think that's why the Wirecutter model and websites like that go out of their way to do custom reviews, they're so impactful because their information is actually real and physically tested by an actual person. Oh, my gosh, my husband is very much the I want a review that someone spent months creating. He's always like that. All the YouTube videos he watches kind of go by that same thought process as well.

Rebekah:

So those are the first three that are ways that you can make decisions about buying products. There's a couple of different ... They're called heuristics that also are ways that we make decisions. So with the availability heuristic, basically, this just means you're going to estimate the likelihood of something based on your previous experiences. So say you've never been in a tornado before and you have a foster kid that comes in your home and tells you he's really afraid of tornadoes. This is a real story you might tell the kid. You know what, it's probably not that likely that you're ever going to be in a tornado. It's really not something to be afraid of. And then you are in a tornado, and you have to correct yourself because you made a decision to say that based on an availability heuristic and not reality. This actually happened. This was right next to my house a couple of years ago. Obviously that has nothing to do with marketing, but it was the first thing I thought about when reading about that decision making model.

Rebekah:

If you look at it in terms of products, this is a product of a company I talked to recently just that was asking for some guidance. This is a drink made from cascara. Bernard, do you know what cascara is? Because if you do, you'll be better off than I was at first.

Bernard:

I do not, but it says sparkling caffeine in words that I can barely read. And I'm into the idea of sparkling caffeine though.

Rebekah:

So I did not know what this was. I had to Google it myself. Basically, it's the skin of the coffee fruit, and it creates a fruity beverage, and it has a little bit of caffeine, but less than like typical coffee from that fruit. And so this is something in marketing where a lot of people, if they end up on this website looking for ... Say I'm looking for a soda alternative, and so I happen upon this website. You use the availability heuristic in your mind when there's ambiguity. So if you land here and you go, okay, what the heck is cascara, then you have to figure out what it is. Is it beneficial to you? And people will start to go through the what ifs in their mind. What if I don't like the taste? What if it's not actually healthy for me? What if people don't really like it? What if the company isn't reliable or isn't creating something good?

Rebekah:

So if you are working for a company where maybe, pardon me, what you're selling is not necessarily a well known thing, or if it's a brand new type of software or just anything that people aren't really familiar with, there are a couple of ways to reduce friction in them making the decision based on this decision making availability thing. So you want to link to reliable sources of information in your content. So if you're a cascara drink, you might want to find studies that people have done on cascara or news articles where people have traveled and gone to these coffee farms and seen how cascara is harvested or whatever. You want to use information about where you're sourcing your product from. This is a great way to use storytelling in your SEO so that people can feel a lot more confident in their decision.

Rebekah:

This is also why you would use badges for, hey, this is how our stuff is third party tested. It's also another reason to use customer reviews because that's social proof that help overcome the what ifs within that decision making. And we're talking about decisions. This decision can go from, are they going to buy your product? Are they going to set up an appointment? Do they want to sign up for my email list? And anything where ambiguity is involved and you're having to kind of educate your consumer, those reviews and all those different things become even more and more important over time.

Rebekah:

And, finally, I promise we're almost to the end of these decision making ones. The final one is the representativeness heuristic. And so this has to do a lot with your branding. And every time someone finds you from a Google search, you are combating this particular decision making style. So representativeness heuristic has to do with the way that you prototype the situation that you're in or the product that you're looking at or the website that you're on and determine who you think is the prototype of who would use it. So a little later on their homepage, this particular brand uses a couple of recipes. Now these aren't pictures of people, but these are pictures of, say, design and decor. So the representativeness heuristic would say, hey, when you look at these, if you see something that you think would look pretty in your house, you're in the prototype of person that would use this.

Rebekah:

It also has to do with say even the types of stock photos that you use as headers on your blog posts or how you design creative for landing pages that are transactional in nature. When you put people on them, the person on the other end of the screen is literally looking at the people on the page going, does this look like me? Am I the prototype? And so, if you are advertising to B2B SaaS founders that live in Austin, your design and branding and creative and the way that you speak and the way that you write copy is going to look a lot different than if you're talking to retired factory workers from Maine.

Rebekah:

And so the biggest takeaway in this representativeness thing is, on your website, in doing good SEO, you want to make sure that you are representing all varieties of the people that are your target market. And so, if you're looking for founders of B2B SaaS companies, what words do they use? What pop culture do they care about? What do they look like? How old are they? And so the pitfall is that I think a lot of people want to make everything on their website so diverse in terms of we want to make sure everyone's represented and everyone feels like they belong that for many brands, unless you're Amazon or a lot of those big brands, there are specific age groups or, maybe specific genders that are interested in what you sell or whatever. And so within the content that you create, you want to consider those things while crafting it to make sure that you're actually reaching the target person. So still with me?

Bernard:

Definitely.

Rebekah:

All right. Sweet. This is one of my favorite parts of what I was researching. And I think that this is one that we encounter without realizing it all the time. So another decision making thing that really impacts the things that go on, when someone finds you from an organic search, is decision fatigue. Decision fatigue basically just means you have had to make a bunch of decisions all in a row, and now you have lost the ability to make well reasoned choices.

Rebekah:

Interestingly, decision fatigue is not actually about the amount of time you've spent making decisions. It's about the number of decisions you make. So if you have a really, really big decision, say you're deciding I want to buy a house today and you choose the house that you want to buy, if you've only had to make one decision that day, it's actually better in terms of decision fatigue than if you've made 25 small decisions about budget for this and whatever in a row.

Rebekah:

So I found a couple of really cool studies about this. There was one in 2011 that this graph comes from that I thought had some interesting takeaways. So what this graph represents is there was a group of judges that were examined. They were making decisions about prisoners and who they would put on parole. And what you're looking at on the graph is, every time it's up higher, they were approving a higher percentage of prisoners to be able to go on parole. And every time it gets lower, they stopped approving as many. What you're seeing as it goes left to right is the time of day, and those little dotted lines are when they go to lunch. And so this is literally a visual representation of when you're angry and decision fatigued, you begin to make less reasoned decisions, because in the study they talk about there's not a difference between the qualifications of the prisoners or whatever. It just is about whether or not they had made too many decisions in a row to be able to say yes. What ends up happening ... and again, it's like we've all probably experienced this to one degree or another. You become decision fatigued, and not only can you not make good decisions, a lot of times you'll just say no because it's simpler. You can't self-regulate your decisions in a reasonable way.

Rebekah:

So I have a couple of examples of like how this works. So we're going to think of a single mom. She's a manager at work, and she's been managing her employees all day, had a lot of one-to-ones, and she's spent all day making pretty impactful decisions about what she does. Walks in the door, and her kids immediately go, hey, what are we going to have for dinner? So she's already decision fatigued. She's not ready to make a big impactful decision. So she's probably going to go back to that single feature model we talked about where she's just going to say, okay, I'm going to decide based on this thing, and I don't care about anything else. And so say she decides, I'm not going to cook. We're going to order out.

Rebekah:

So this is a screenshot from Postmates. So she goes on to Postmates and filters by fastest delivery time because that's what she cares about the most. And then she has these to choose from. So she's already said fastest delivery time is the most important. In this example, that would mean, hey, we're going to go with Burger King. And so if you're Burger King, this is SEO too. Remember, Uber eats and Postmates and all of these things are search engines. It's not just about Google and your Google My Business listing.

Rebekah:

And so from this page, there are also other things that may introduce a second factor that she chooses between. So for instance, all of them but one have a $0 delivery fee. And so she's probably not going to pick the one with the delivery fee because, why would she? And then there's also one that has a review of 4.5 on it. The others don't have review ratings. So she might try to pick the one with reviews if it had a $0 delivery fee.

Rebekah:

And even little things ... As you're looking, as a marketer, it's more important, obviously ... I don't know who all's on the webinar. And the biggest thing I can say is it's going to be super different for your example. Feel free in the chat to drop some examples of a business you work for and how we can ... I would love to go through some examples of how to make this work for you.

Rebekah:

But for this I even thought, well, what about the hearts? Is anybody putting a sticker on their bag? Say I'm Burger King and I'm like, hey, I know that we have really, really amazing delivery time. Our customers are very satisfied. I do love Burger King. I can't deny it. And so say they're like winning on all of the factors right now, but they choose to start adding little stickers to their bag that says, hey, don't forget to heart us on Postmates for the next time you're making a choice. Three months from now, she might be in the exact same situation, and this busy, single mom looks this up and goes, oh, I had a positive experience with them in the past. I must have because I clicked to heart. She's not going to remember the experience more than likely. It's not going to be this big, memorable thing, but she is going to want to choose them again. And so obviously this is kind of an example for local restaurants, but there are other ways that this also can come into play.

Rebekah:

So actually I'm going to use Clearscope as an example. When you are working for ... And I do a lot of B2C, but a lot of these things apply to B2B content as well. So bear with me. And if I say anything crazy, Bernard, feel free to call me out. But in the initial purchase decision for a tool like Clearscope ... It is definitely a budgetary consideration. It's not cheap. It shouldn't be. It's really valuable. What are the things that your purchasers are likely to be making decisions about that day or that week? Not only what kind of decisions are they making, but how many decisions are they making by the time that they make a decision about you?

Rebekah:

And so I thought, if I'm choosing, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for Facebook ad spend and I also am trying to figure out which creative we want to use in this email to a million people and how it's going to convert, and then I also need to know which of our 75 freelance writers gets this particular project or whatever, that's a lot of like pretty heavy thought decisions. And so then I'm stuck with, oh, I'm also supposed to be choosing this software.

Rebekah:

So the first time I learned about Clearscope, I requested a demo, and I got to do one with Bernard's team, which was super exciting fun for me. So if you give demos and you're asking for a sale, for instance, on the call, why not skew all of your demo times to be early in the morning? And so instead of offering just these four fields, you could also add another field to say, what time works best for you? And try to give times that are all before noon or something. That way you're trying to avoid decision fatigue from someone who's having a 5:00 PM demo with you. It's the end of their day. And it's just easier to say no. It'll just make my life a little easier to say no. And I don't want to think about the effort it's going to take to make the decision.

Rebekah:

So this is also a reason ... You guys have talked about this a lot in other webinars, so I'm not going to just like go on crazy tangents about it. But from a search perspective, having clearly written instructions of how to use your software, the results that you can expect, what customers have to say about it and who you've worked with, those are the kinds of things that'll also make this a much easier yes, because when people are seeking out that information, it signals that they actually do want to make the decision. They are ready to make the decision. And if you make it available on demand, then they're a lot more likely to say yes, because they're already ready to make it. And that's difficult with things like having to schedule a demo, because how do I know that when I schedule this tomorrow that I'm not going to be decision fatigued at that point? You don't really know unless you're scheduling it for, hey, can we do this in 15 minutes? So those on demand options can make things a little bit easier.

Rebekah:

Another thing that can help improve decision fatigue ... And I thought this was really fascinating. There was a study that I found about how when people are making decisions between two similar products or services, so say two people that do similar things, they like to see, A, that the things are pretty similar so they feel like there's probably not a really wrong choice. And, B, they like to see very small differences that you as the product owner or creator may not even think are super relevant. So the minor differences that are displayed, even, again, if you think that they're extraneous or not important, can help improve the effort required to make a decision. It reduces the effort. The user can say, these are two similar things. So here's a couple of little differences, and that's what I'll decide based on. They don't have to learn each thing from scratch.

Rebekah:

And so I found that SurferSEO, which is one of your competitors, actually does have a page that compares themselves to Clearscope. And on their page, they use this Surfer versus Clearscope. I'm going to disclaim this and say I haven't really used Surfer much, just a tiny little bit a long time ago. However, I have used Clearscope. I don't particularly love the way that this table's set up because I think it's a little misleading. However, the whole point of this is, as a user, I can kind of look and see the similarities and the differences. This is skewed really far to make Clearscope look negative. So, Bernard, I recommend, if you do one of these comparing yourselves to Surfer, we're going to talk a little later about some attitudes and emotions as we decide how to choose a website or how to choose the software to buy or whatever. The more that you can display similarities in a positive manner and not just try to make it look like the other guy's really bad, the more customers will actually trust you and be more likely to say yes.

Rebekah:

And so I think you should do this with all your competitors because I think that Clearscope is better than all of them. And so that way you can also lean into what makes you different is that you are focused on something very specific, and you do that very specific thing very well. So I'm going to pause and take a drink of water so that you can totally interrupt me if you have anything, Bernard.

Bernard:

I think it just gets my gears turning. I can see where I feel like where you're building up, where it's like, okay ... And when you're presenting then content to the end user, how do you prevent decision fatigue? And also how do you convince that person in a fraction of a second that they can trust what is on your website? And it's really signaling those things. I've been a big fan of Cialdini's book, Influence. And it's just like, oh, as humans, we're wired in very certain ways to respond favorably to these patterns, I suppose, that we all innately have. And I can see how applying those models to SEO content can lead to a lot of interesting conversions and higher engagement, which oftentimes is going to be net better for your content.

Rebekah:

For sure. So the next thing I wanted to talk about ... And this is the last piece of the decision making portion. I talked way more about decision making than the other pieces because a lot of the other pieces I'll talk about tie all that back in. But the last thing in decision making that matters to us as SEOs ... And we talk about this a lot in UX design and web design, is reducing friction and applying the law of least effort. So friction means whatever obviously in marketing stands in between a consumer making a choice to purchase or engage with a particular brand. The term law of least effort was coined by Deepak Chopra in his book, Seven Laws of Spiritual Success. But the path of least resistance is what it's based on, which is mentioned in 1825, actually, in literature the first time.

Rebekah:

And so, in general, you use this in a lot of decision making. I've heard it said like that we are just wired to be lazy. I don't love that way to say it, but mentally we are wired to make the decision that we feel like requires the least effort on our part. So I had an example for this one that you can kind of think to how this works.

Rebekah:

And so we're going to talk about Roger. Roger is a middle aged man. He's from Seattle, and he goes to the bathroom a lot unexpectedly, and it's really tough, and it controls his life, which is very unfortunate, and honestly something that a lot of people deal with. We have a lot of clients that work with gut health issues, and it's kind of incredible how many people live thinking that's really normal. So depending on the cognitive processes, his attitudes and emotions about what he knows about health and wellness and all these things, he might make a couple of different searches. So he might search for medications to fix gut. He might search for what to take for diarrhea. So these kinds of terms obviously have to do with medicine and more traditional medicine, rather than natural medicine. And he might also search for something like how to reverse constipation naturally. So in that example, he's probably going to fit better into the customer profile of someone who's looking for more crunchy people who wants to reverse their condition naturally, whatever that means. But say you are a pharmacy or you're a medical practice that deals with helping consumers fix their gut issues and medication is a big part of that, those first two searches might be more relevant.

Rebekah:

And so in making content strategy and determining like, hey, these are the topics that we're going to focus on for X months or whatever, one of the things that you can do is say, hey, if we're trying to reach a consumer that's dealing with say a gut issue, one way that we can reduce friction is providing as much data, and not just data, but content as possible on topics about reducing gut issues. And so if you are someone coming from a more natural angle, you're going to target more of the topics that say how to reverse this naturally, supplements for this, things like that. Versus if you're in the more traditional medicine sphere, you might do more targeted articles on medications or different kinds of traditional treatments for these things.

Rebekah:

And so in Roger's case, there are some ways that you can reduce the friction in him deciding, hey, I'm going to purchase your product. And so I had the idea of, hey, in this example, we as the marketer, we're a supplement company. We're going to think, okay, he searched for natural alternatives to fix his problems. So when he gets on your site, there are a lot of things in UX and web design that you can do that reduce friction that he's not even going to consciously recognize, but if you don't do them, you will add friction and make it more likely that he's just going to bounce off the site, that he doesn't feel comfortable buying, whatever.

Rebekah:

So I love Medical News Today and Healthline, the way that they're set up. I think everybody thinks that they're pretty decent as far as I know. And so a couple of things I thought that work really well on this particular page that I wanted to point out, their menu has incredibly clear navigations. So if you hover over health conditions, you see a list of health conditions. It's really common to do things like services or products, or you could say health topics. But Medical News Today said, no, we are specifically talking about health conditions, not just general health topics, which they do talk about general health topics, but always in the context of a condition. And then they've got a connect button that talks about how to actually get in connection with them and to join their communities, et cetera.

Rebekah:

So make your menu as clear as possible. If this is on mobile, they use a hamburger menu. It's really important to use things that people expect, rather than trying to be so creative with your design, that people don't know what to do. Because, again, unconsciously, if you get on a webpage and as maybe not a super user, you don't know what to do with it. That becomes a lot of friction, and whether or not the product that they're selling is right for you or whatever, that friction ... Again, people will avoid friction by removing the decision or just saying no to make things easier.

Rebekah:

So in the example of, if we're the supplement company, we could have a menu item that says products, or we could have a menu item that says gut health supplements, and that would be a lot more relevant to Roger in our example. Another thing that Medical News Today is doing really well on this page is ... Again, you've probably talked about this a lot, but clear, not clever headings and sub subheadings. And this is really tricky, especially in transactional content, but I watched a really good webinar with Andy Crestodina back ... I think it was from this past January. And one of the things he said was, "You should be unexpectedly informative, not provide unexpected navigation and design." And then he followed that up by saying, "You can be clear first and then be clever."

Rebekah:

And so again, we talk about clarity a lot in SEO content in general, but it has to do with the way that people interpret and feel about your content. Honestly, if you get on a page and you look at the headings and you're like, I don't know if this page has what I need, you're going to be annoyed. You're not going to have a positive feeling. But if you get to this page and you can see this menu says, hey, these home remedies ... Oh, I know what probiotics are. I'm going to click on those. Or I don't know what that low FODMAP thing means, but I'm okay with changing my diet. You might click on that because it's really clear, and it doesn't make you guess as to what you're doing.

Rebekah:

So another example if we're the supplement company, maybe this is 13 supplements for your gut or whatever, and that could be our title, instead of saying here's how these supplements can help you reclaim your health, or something like that that's the clever copy we use to try to convince people of things that honestly just makes it harder to convince them because they don't know what they're actually looking at. So that's another piece there I think in UX and web design that's helpful.

Rebekah:

And then the other ... Let's see, the other big pieces here are, how can we write like the easiest to understand content about how to address this particular area of gut health from a natural So there's tons of options. Obviously like this one article is 13 different, very different options for this one problem. They're talking about pretty heavy science topics in this article. However, it's important, especially if you're talking to people that are struggling with something and they're likely not in a great frame of mind, like with health content, you need to write simplistically. Write for the lowest grade level that you can manage while still writing well. Not everybody that reads your content speaks English as a first language. Not everyone that reads your content will even have a high school education, much less a college one. So if you start getting into a bunch of medical terminology and your target customer is a high school educated person that learned English when they were in elementary school, writing simpler content will help reinforce the like positive feelings they have about your content.

Rebekah:

I have a lot of clients that ... No, I shouldn't say that, used to have a lot of clients that really wanted to sound smart. And so that was really important to them that they used all of the most accurate medical terminology and the most accurate descriptions of things. And you create this dichotomy where people don't trust you anymore when you begin to do that. Nobody likes feeling talked down to or stupid or anything like that. And those things can have a really long term lasting effect on how you feel about a brand, if a brand makes you feel that way.

Rebekah:

And a couple of other things to reduce friction for somebody like Roger. This is from a company that I used to work for that does actually sell supplements, and basically there's a few things that you can do in your UX and web design, especially for transactional pages that keep things really clear. So reduce the number of steps that it takes for people to check out. Again, these are not new concepts. But if you think about it from the perspective of helping someone make their decision before they have to make the decision, the more steps that someone has to do, the more things that they have to fill out, the more buttons they have to press, the less likely they are to make a decision.

Rebekah:

So when I hopped on this page, the unflavored option was selected. Subscribe and save was selected. The one pack option was selected. Delivery was already set to one month. They weren't buttons that I had to click and select all of the options one by one. And so that's another thing. Anything that you can make default on your pages, whether it's a product page ... We do this a lot on pricing pages, when you're talking about pricing for your software. Whatever is the one that you really want people to do, make it the clear default. Make it the most obvious thing that they're looking at.

Rebekah:

So that is, I think ... Oh, I had one more thing on friction before moving on to just the last couple of things. So there is also an argument to be made that less friction isn't always the right call. So I got this from a book called Friction by Roger Dooley, highly recommend it. It is really, really excellent for marketers. I'm still kind of digging into all of the specifics. But when you create a little extra friction, you also can qualify your leads a little bit better.

Rebekah:

And so what I mean by that is, if you add a fourth or fifth section to your demo form, like I was talking about with Clearscope earlier, you might actually qualify your leads just a little bit better by making them go through one extra step. Because if it's actually the target market that you're going for, there's a sweet spot where that extra little friction can really make sure that you're talking to the right people. So highly recommend the book. I put it on here. I do not have an affiliate link. I just really think it's a great book and highly suggest checking it out. So, again, I'm going to pause. What do you think, Bernard?

Bernard:

I would say that ... What's your opinion about the whole medically reviewed thing that you see Healthline, Medical News Today and everybody else trying to emulate? It's, in a lot of ways, trying to convey trust. What are your thoughts there?

Rebekah:

I'm a little on the fence, honestly, because I ... Let me say it this way. I absolutely believe Healthline and Medical News Today have all of that set up and that they really do have things reviewed. But I think that the reality is that people that are writing health content are not almost never, but very infrequently, I would say, are they like for sure experts in the exact field that they're talking about. Now Healthline goes out of their way to hire dieticians to talk about nutrition content and to have them reviewed by those. I think it's a good idea, as long as it's honest. I think that it's just really common to be dishonest and to say, oh, yeah, this person wrote this. But I mean, I run an agency that we ghost write a lot of content. And so, we try not to include author bios if it's not actually reviewed by the person that's in the author bio. The doctor has to review it if we're going to have their name on it. Otherwise it's just written by the brand. Because I'm really big into honest and transparent content. I think people see through it if you don't go that direction.

Bernard:

That makes sense. And a follow up, this is a question that I get commonly is citations. So I'm sure you've done a lot of work since you've come from the health and medical space where you're making citations. What, in your opinion, is the best way to actually do citations? Then we'll call the other one the Healthline and Medical News Today, where when you hover over the one, a little tool tip shows up, and it's like, oh, this is where we got the source from. And then it links out there. And then we'll call the third one just an in-line link where, if I'm citing a source, it'll be like, according to a study done by researchers at Harvard, and then I'll link study, researchers, Harvard, and that will just link out to the study done by those researchers. What in your opinion is the best way to actually do citations?

Rebekah:

I think it's a great question. From a UX perspective, we do option three. I think it's really not a great idea to do the more Wikipedia style, because if you're on mobile, it's very difficult to hit the tiny little button that's the little citation there. So I don't like that one just because it's bad for user experience. If they actually want to click on it, you're making it harder. I like what Healthline does where they've got the hover action that shows you a little bit more about where it came from. Probably that combination of two and three is probably my favorite. I think most or all of our clients that write health content do a combination of those. So we use in-line links, which I feel like are easier to click on.

Rebekah:

And then at the end of the post, we repeat all of the links in the order that they appeared, and we'll either cite just the title of the study or we'll actually do a full APA citation just based on whatever the client asked for. And I think that's helpful. Also it's helpful when you're updating content if you use at least the title and recite the study down at the end of the article. And if we can hide that behind a collapsible section, I'd prefer that just ... Again, UX, a lot of people don't care enough to go through and look at the sources, but for the people who do and the people it matters too, I think it helps to be able to have it there.

Rebekah:

And the other part of that I'll add is something that drives me insane that I wish that more people would do when they're writing health content is to focus really, really hard on primary sources only. So again, Healthline does a great job with this. We have a whole system for this internally in the agency that I run because it's super important to me. But a lot of people use secondary sources as here's the facts. Here's the thing that we found. And in reality, they're linking to somebody else's article on something that anyone could have written. And so I'm like, no, show me the abstract from a journal. If you're talking about science ... And I have all of the citations for the stuff I'm talking about today. I kept track of all of those because, again, it's like, you can make assumptions, or you can read what somebody thinks about something all day long. But I think that the best way personally is to do in line and then have a list of them at the end, and make sure that you're sticking only to primary sources and not just something that someone else said.

Bernard:

Well said, well said. I think I will now use that as my opinion on the matter when people ask me.

Rebekah:

I love it. Feel free. You don't even have to quote me if you don't want to. Well, I feel like I'm like butting up against time, so I'm going to keep going. But if you feel ... Obviously continue ... Feel free to interrupt me, but I may kind of jet through some of this that a lot of us have had in psych 101. So there were two quick things I wanted to discuss, which in behavioral psych, I wanted to talk about conditioning. And then I also wanted to talk about the cognition and the ways that we feel about things. So in behavioral psych classic conditioning, everybody's heard of Pavlov's dogs. Not going to explain the whole thing. You can feel free to read up on it afterwards, but essentially you take something that's a neutral stimulus, something that did not make you feel anything, and you teach someone to associate it with a way to feel. So the dogs learned to salivate because the sound was made when they were smelling food. So eventually they just salivated when they heard the bell, and the food didn't have to be there.

Rebekah:

So there are a lot of stimuli on search engines that we don't even realize that we interpret with classical conditioning. So I looked up pizza near me. So this was based on my address of my office that was in Nashville. And it showed me three options for pizza restaurants. When you were a child learning to read, you didn't realize that stars meant something, but as you get older and as you are conditioned to think it, you associate the meaningless symbol of stars with a positive or a negative thing. So one is really bad. A five is really amazing.

Rebekah:

The little dollar signs that Google has on there, I think all search engines, including Yelp, they now use those dollar signs. So now we know to associate that little dollar sign ... There's a one to a four, and we all kind of have that, oh, a three means it's this much or whatever. And then even on a search page or when you're in a piece of content, people have started to learn to recognize ads. At first the little thing that just says Mediavine or sponsored or whatever, it didn't really have any effect, but over time you learn that, oh, ads may be slightly less relevant to the thing that I'm actually searching for right now. And so you treat them a little bit different.

Rebekah:

So when I was looking at these pizza places, for instance ... And this is more of a local SEO thing. When you pull these up, all of these have three point something ratings. Why would I eat a three point something rating? Who the heck knows? However, I dove deeper into it and found that the ... Let's see. [DeSano 00:49:03] pizzeria is listed ... It's number four if you open up the list. It actually has a much higher rating, but it only has 33 reviews. So maybe Google didn't favor it because it had fewer reviews and they've discovered people care about a lot of reviews. If I were DeSano I would focus on having customers, create reviews so that the next time someone searched for pizza in this area, I pop up.

Rebekah:

Mellow Mushroom is the fifth one on the list. They have a 4.4 star rating and 1,600 reviews. However, they don't offer no contact delivery, which everyone above them does offer. Google may specifically be preferring people that offer that. I don't know. It's just a guess as to why they didn't pop up at the beginning. But there's all sorts of ways that our brains like process that information. In an instant, I might even look at this ... Say I have some issues with my ankle that come up occasionally that makes it very, very difficult for me to walk more than a couple hundred feet. And so for me, I'm the little dot in the middle. Mellow Mushroom's way too far when I'm having trouble and can't really walk. And so you're also thinking about, what kind of accessibility things do people think through that really affect their decisions?

Rebekah:

So I was talking to a client yesterday, and it occurred to me that the way that we do content marketing by providing value, in a way, is based on classical conditioning because we want to offer free value so that a person associates us with free value, and that's a positive emotion. And so a brand name like Healthline or CNN or Twitter or Amazon or Walmart or whatever, those words did not elicit some kind of a response until you associated those words with something specific. And so when Healthline offers you a bunch of really easy to understand content and they give you all of these different options for evidence based content on conditions that matter to you, you become positively stimulated. You feel good about what they give you, and so now the word Healthline, which didn't mean anything, now means something. It's associated with that helpful information.

Rebekah:

And so there's another thing that kind of goes into classical conditioning called reciprocity, and that's just the concept that, when someone does something for you, you want to do something back. And so when a business offers you something, you kind of feel like you should reciprocate in some way, whether that's, oh, maybe I should schedule a call. Maybe I should sign up for their list. Maybe this product that they offer is really great. I'm not going to go through this whole thing, but the slides will be available after the presentation for anybody who wants to see them. But essentially this ... Oops, sorry. Let me go back to what I was trying to show you. I didn't mean to go back so far.

Rebekah:

In this example, I was using a tool, basically a functional tool on a page to help you understand whether or not you should refinance your student loans. This is also from a client. And so there's a couple of things in the UX and web design that you can do to also ... When someone starts to feel that they should reciprocate, these are a couple of ways that you can continue to keep them involved, provide additional value and even keep your brand front of mind. It's the reason I always recommend sticky menus on websites. It's the easiest win in web design in my opinion, because it just keeps who you are front and center. And so they're more likely to remember you over time.

Rebekah:

And so your goal in content marketing should be, every time a customer interacts with your brand, you create what was a neutral stimulus, which is your brand and your brand name, your branding, your logo, whatever, and that starts to be associated with that feeling of receiving help. And then you're making it more likely that someone is going to purchase from you or they're going to purchase again, and you'll get more repeat business.

Bernard:

It's all good. It's all good. No worries.

Rebekah:

The last one, and this operant conditioning thing goes into ... Honestly, there's a lot there that we could ... We could spend a whole hour just talking about all of this stuff, but again, if you've taken psych 101, conditioning is just reinforcement and punishment to either create more of the same behavior or stop someone from creating a behavior. And so if I click a link on your website and it takes me to a 404, that's a punishment because I now have had bad behavior or I've done something that led to something bad, so I associate that behavior with bad. I might not want to continue to click on links on your website. You've taught me that it doesn't work.

Rebekah:

If you get to a site and, just for arriving, they offer you a discount code and you don't have to enter an email address for that, that's a positive reinforcement because you offered me something good. And so I'm going to continue to look around your site because you've reinforced that, if I look around your site, I'll be rewarded with something good. There's a lot of different ... I have a list of about six things I think, where you can use different things in UX and web design and your copy even to reward or punish something.

Rebekah:

And there is a good ... I said punishment, for SEO, in a good way could look like, if somebody's trying to fill out a form and they do it wrong, using really prominently displayed error messages that are very clear when they perform something incorrectly and you need them to fix it. So say they have to fill this format that has their email address for their order form and they don't use an at symbol, if you can use a message that says your email address does not contain an at symbol, please enter your email again, that's a really clear way to punish the behavior because you do need to fix it in the future.

Rebekah:

Another positive punishment is when you block content and request that they display ads in order to see your content. You're teaching them that you have to display the ads if you want to see this great content. And so those are positive ways that you can use conditioning. But there are a lot of negative ways that you can use it as well.

Rebekah:

So I think I'm going to stop there. And we are right at 1:00. I have some other stuff on attitudes and emotions that I'm very much willing to share, especially in the slides later on. But I didn't know if there were any questions or if all of that was helpful, not helpful, if you need clarification. What do you think?

Bernard:

I think it just got my gears turning. I'm like, how do I create positive reinforcement when somebody lands on my page? And I was thinking of, well, it depends of course on the query, the job to be done, the query that the end user has. But I guess in your opinion, what are some of the things that you've experimented in terms of these conditioning sorts of things? Or what are perhaps some websites where you're like, oh, wow, that's negative punishment, and we should stop doing that in comparison to some of the things that you've tried with your clients that is like, okay, this is positive? This is what we're encouraging.

Rebekah:

The first negative punishment thing that always comes to mind ... And I don't know of a website that's still doing this off the top of my head. But how do you feel when you get a website that's playing music when you first open it before you hit the play button? It is the worst. It is the worst experience.

Bernard:

The worst, the worst.

Rebekah:

Of course, you're just going to hit back. Who's even going to look for a pause button at this point? And so that's obviously a part of web design that's kind of gone away because it's so bad. Or another thing that hit me, there was a ... Gosh, what was it? I think it was a CBD site I was on. I was doing some competitor research, and I get on this site. And, literally, as soon as I get on the site, there is a webinar that they want me to attend that is about like the benefits of CBD. And there's a popup thing for that. They want me to sign up for their email list. They're going to give me 10% off of my order. Also, there's a chat box that pops up at the same time and tells me, well, if you want to talk to somebody, you can totally do that.

Rebekah:

Local doctors and dentist offices are the worst about this because they're like, look at our location, call us, chat with us. It just kind of goes off the rails. And so those interstitial things, that's actually one thing I worked with a site called Ask the Dentist. That was actually who I was working for when I first discovered Clearscope. And we were working with an SEO agency at the time and doing some internal research and basically realized that by accident, we had added too many calls to action and too many desired outcomes on each page to actually give anybody an idea of what to do. And so we did some product review pages, but people were clicking on the other ads on that page. So we took off the ads. When we were reviewing a product, we did not display extra ads because we wanted to be really clear. Obviously we're getting affiliate revenue from the ones that they click on.

Rebekah:

And so that was a really cool experiment where we started having better revenue come in for affiliates because we reduced the ads or got rid of them because we stopped asking ... We actually added some of the conditions, like a scroll depth before we say, hey, give us your email. We went away from using a popup and just kind of did a little slide in. So that was one thing that I think has worked really well that I've liked.

Rebekah:

Also the screenshot on the last page with the student loan calculator thing, that's for a current client we have that works in student loan finance kind of recovery support, whatever. And he actually built those tools from ... During his new web web design, he had those new tools built because we started looking at, okay, what are the things that we're missing out on? What are the things that everybody else seems to be offering that we are just not doing? Or what are creative ways to support people?

Rebekah:

And so through all of that, I think that we ended up with three tools that he built into his new website. We also developed collapsible sections for the FAQs on page because there's a lot of topics he writes for where the topic itself is already in a niche. And then people also ask questions that are ... Honestly, they're just super, super, super specific. And if you need that specific answer, we want to answer it. But if the answer's long, it just creates more scrolling that you have to do. And so we're trying to reward people by saying, hey, you don't have to read the answer to this question if you don't need it or whatever. So I think those are just a couple of things that we've done more recently. Actually, I'm going to stop sharing so I can see your face too, if this will let me.

Bernard:

Lots of people in chat are just saying, wow, can't wait for the recording. Are you going to send it? Thanks so much. Overall the feedback was very good. I learned way more about psychology, and it just got my gears turning. I'm like, oh man, our single feature model, and how do I represent my target demographic? It's in a lot of ways trying to target everybody. It's like common marketing. Right? You have your ideal customer profile, and I'm not trying to sell Clearscope to a kid. I'm trying to sell Clearscope to a VP of content or SEO manager. And it's good to have language and experiences that box out, right, like, oh, this is not for you? I mean, I love what you're talking about because I think that the future of SEO is heading towards this culmination of content, user experience and intent satisfaction. And so when you think about them in little circles, all of it does boil down to psychology. What's that frame of mind that that searcher is in when they're landing on your page, and how are you best giving them what they're looking for in a positive way? That is what we should be thinking about, I think, as as SEO content practitioners,

Rebekah:

And I think that, as well, you can also use tools from everything from heat maps to figure out, hey, how are you accidentally punishing visitors? What are they doing that you don't even know? That goes all the way into, how are you writing your content? My editor is a good friend of mine. One of our editors had tonsil stones recently. I have permission to tell this story. So she had tonsil stones, and she went to the doctor, or I think the dentist or doctor or somebody. And they said, "Hey, don't Google tonsil stones." And she said, "Well, why?" And the lady said, "Well, because everything that you see will just make you feel bad because they're all written to make it sound like you just don't brush your teeth and it's your own stupid fault."

Rebekah:

And I was like, I wrote an article on tonsil stones, which actually is on the first page. And I was like, oh God, does this doctor ... What did I do? And so I went back and saw this thing I wrote several years ago. And I realized that because we had had ... Our style guide made a big deal about not making people feel bad or like things were just their fault and really presenting things other than bad oral hygiene that could have caused things. I went back into this article and I sent it to her and I said, okay, do you feel like your doctor was right about at least what I said? And she said, no, I actually read this and don't feel super guilty and bad about it. And so it's everything from how people click on things to the words that you're using and how you make them feel with your language and the way that you present things. And it all comes back to just asking your customer, talking to your customer, interviewing them, just finding out what's going on in their head.

Bernard:

Totally, totally. There is one website that I want to share with everyone who's still here. It's sort of the opposite of what I feel like you're talking about, but it's done in such a crazy way that it invokes this other feeling in me that's just like, what is happening? It's so crazy.

Rebekah:

I'm afraid to click on it.

Bernard:

Maybe you should click on it after it. But it's, I think, a used car salesperson in the UK, and it probably has been cited by other websites, but their website that they put together is this wild thing. And it just kind of reminds me of, okay, you can introduce friction. You could introduce so much friction that it becomes a thing in of itself that's so like unique. Anyways, that's what came to my mind. Any concluding thoughts, questions, things that you want to share with the audience here?

Rebekah:

Oh, man, I love talking about SEO on LinkedIn and Twitter, so I don't have any cool other stuff that I'm doing, but if you found it interesting, come hang out. I talk a lot about like content strategy and content writing. Not everything I talk about is psychology. I just thought that would be a really fun topic to hit today. So that's about it.

Bernard:

Awesome. Well, I'm going to put your Twitter right here in the chat and then we will also send it out to everybody who RSVPed. Thanks so much for sharing all that wonderful wisdom. I think I can speak on behalf of everybody who is here. It Was super useful, super insightful, I think in terms of some extra things that you should be considering when you're creating your content. What is the mindset of the user? And are there things that you're doing that are accidentally introducing friction or decision fatigue? And really thinking more holistically about the content experience is, I think, so not talked about. And I get it. It's weird. It's hard. But when it comes to psychology, it's so subjective. So I think that's why you don't hear as much conversation about it, but I love that you brought it to light.

Rebekah:

And thanks for your kind words. I felt so honored to even be able to come on and chat. And so thank you, Clearscope and Bernard and Travis. It was really fun. Thank you.