Understand human psychology to get your users to do what you want

Sarah says: “Start using psychology to stay ahead in the SERPs.

The reason why I say that is because, if you don’t have any content, you’re not going to rank. If you don’t have any user experience, you’re not going to get any conversions. If you don’t have any CRO, you’re not going to get any conversions.

In order to understand these things, and create content that actually does what you want, you need to understand the basic principles of what drives people to do what they do. You need to understand what makes people tick, but from a proper psychological perspective, in order to get them to do what you want.”

Is psycho-marketing essentially using psychology in marketing?

“Yes. You’ve probably heard of neuromarketing a little bit more than psycho-marketing. There’s a bit of a difference between the two.

Psycho-marketing is using general psychological theories, like social psychology, and combining those with marketing. Neuromarketing is going deep and using things like EEGs and brain scans to find out how people react. I don’t do that. Psycho-marketing is what I tend to use.”

Why is psychology important to understanding the SERPs?

“Before I decided to have a midlife crisis and go back and study psychology, I didn’t think that psychology had much to do with SEO, if I’m completely honest. Now, having studied psychology and worked in SEO for so long, there are so many different psychological theories that you can take, adapt, and use when it comes to marketing.

They’re all based on what motivates people to do what they do, and what motivates people to make certain decisions. It’s the same as what we’re looking to do as marketers. We want people to go to the website and we want them to take a particular action. People have these biases, and everybody is biased a lot of the time. By understanding things like biases and the reasons why people behave the way they do, we can use that to our advantage.

It’s one of the key concepts of marketing, and SEO is a form of marketing. In order to do SEO well, you need to have those foundations of marketing in place to understand where it fits in the greater scheme of marketing as a whole.

Marketing psychology is a massive area in consumer psychology, and there are so many different principles that you can bring in. You’ll have to adapt them slightly because what you learn in a degree is very much geared towards the clinical side of things. However, if you adapt it a bit and think outside the box, you’re able to find ways that certain parts of psychology can be implemented into SEO really easily – and it makes a world of difference.”

What are some of the areas within SEO where you can implement this?

“There are so many different ways that you can use it. Giulia Panozzo did a really great talk at brightonSEO on negativity bias. She showed that, if you use negative words in titles and meta descriptions, people are more likely to click through because people react more strongly to negative stimuli.

On top of that, when you’re writing content, people’s biases come into play. The consumer mindset, whether it’s a fixed or growth mindset, will also come into this. People don’t realise that, depending on whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset, you’re going to react differently to different copy on a website.

If you’re a luxury brand, you’re probably going to be targeting people with a fixed mindset who use items to boost their status. By creating content that’s geared toward these kinds of people – their wants, wishes, and motivations in life – you’re able to hit them right where they can feel it, and get them to do what you want.”

SEOs are often very focused on ranking for phrases associated with a target keyword, and not the other elements associated with copywriting, so how do you counter that?

“From my experience with SEO, people tend to be too focused on the technical. They forget that, even if you have the best website technically, if you don’t have content, you’re not going to rank. You also have people who just see content as something that they can push out and rank with and hope for the best.

However, if you want to get results in SEO, you don’t just want to drive people to the site, you want them to take an action. You want them to make a purchase or you want them to fill in a form. You want them to do something. For them to do that, you need decent copy, and you need decent content.

This is where things like psychology and good copywriting go hand in hand – even when it comes to keywords. You can learn so much from different keywords because, from the way certain keywords are phrased, you can tell the biases that the user has.

I did a talk about this at brightonSEO. You can take two keywords that are similar but have different biases associated with them. If a user puts, ‘Is ADHD caused by sugar?’ into Google, because you phrased it in that way, Google will feed you back information that confirms your existing belief. It will give you information that says, ‘Yes, ADHD is caused by sugar.’ Whereas if you put, ‘Is ADHD not caused by sugar?’, it will feed back different information.

That’s confirmation bias. In that way, psychology impacts keywords. It’s everywhere. We can’t escape it. We just need to learn to embrace it.”

Do you think Google should do a better job of presenting alternative arguments?

“Totally. What Google is doing is actually pretty dangerous. I know that their whole mission is to provide the best search experience for searchers, but there are going to be times when people are wrong, and confirmation biases lead to the spread of misinformation.

It’s causing so many different issues and so much polarisation in the world. Google need to be doing a better job. As SEOs, by understanding the SERPs and understanding the keywords, we can do our bit to fight against misinformation, but it’s not our responsibility. Google should be doing it.

We’re all guilty of looking at the featured snippet and just taking it at face value, and then going on and looking for something else. What if that feature snippet is actually wrong? What if it contains false information and then that spreads? People put it on social media, and it can spread like wildfire.”

What are a few things you can include on a web page to really resonate with the mindset of the user?

“At the beginning, you need to understand a bit more about what the different mindsets entail.

When we’re talking about marketing to fixed mindset people, they are traditionally looking for things that are easy to obtain. They want a product like ‘easy weight loss’ or something that’s going to improve their status symbol and how they’re seen by other people: luxury bags, luxury cars, etc.

If you’re dealing with growth mindset people, say you have a learning platform, then those people are going to be willing to put the effort in. You need to focus your messaging on, if you do X five times a day, you’re going to be able to achieve Y.

You need to understand what sort of users you’ve got. Look at psychographics rather than demographics. Then, based on what you think people’s mindset is going to be, go that route.”

Do you advise publishing different pages for different mindsets, or is it better to cater towards the majority?

“When it comes to mindsets you need to look at what kind of brand you are and, traditionally, what sort of mindset is going to come to you. Focus on that.

There are ways to keep things neutral by having a mix of messages, so you can always go that route, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing separate things. That could confuse your message and who you want to target.

When it comes to your target audience, if you’re a big multinational company targeting loads of different people, you can start looking into what sorts of personality traits your target audience has, and then have a range of different messages targeted to people with different personality traits that will resonate with them more.

You can go so deep with personality trait targeting. I wouldn’t recommend it for small companies because you’re not going to have as much data. For large companies that have large datasets and are able to invest in looking into this kind of thing, it’s worth it.”

What steps can SEOs take to implement a better use of psychology in their day-to-day activities?

“Start at the beginning and read some good books, like Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. Take a look at copywriting books and maybe some of the older copywriting giants like Ogilvy, who didn’t have access to AI and had to do it the hard way.

Then take a look at things like cognitive biases – because they’re quite simple for everybody to understand and implement in their day-to-day work. Then you can start diving a bit deeper into individual parts of psychology depending on what you want to do. It’s hard to know which resources are best for your needs.

The best tip is to make sure that the people you’re reading from actually have experience and qualifications in psychology. Make sure you’re not learning from somebody who has decided that they’re a psychology expert on a whim, because that unfortunately happens a lot. Also, don’t be afraid to look at Google Scholar as well. There have been an awful lot of studies on online search and they’re really good.”

Is this something an SEO should embrace by themselves or is it better to have conversations about this with other marketing channels?

“Definitely talk to other marketing channels about this rather than doing it by yourself. Chances are, people in different departments – like content departments – are already doing the basics of this. Speak to people and have conversations outside the world of SEO as well, so that you can learn from different areas.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop the busy work. If you look on LinkedIn, there are so many posts about having to do XYZ or having to do these massive audits that nobody’s going to read. Stop with the busy work. Stop doing what you think you have to do and optimize your time so that you’re doing what you know works, not what you think you need to do in order for it to work.

Then, schedule some personal development time to learn some new skills like this. No matter how senior we are, we’re always learning.

To figure out whether the busy work is productive or not, ask yourself, does it get you any results or does it just lead to hours spent and time wasted in countless meetings? You know what I’m talking about: the meetings that could have been emails or the presentations that have taken months but could have taken a day.”

Sarah Pokorná Presch is Digital Marketing Director at Dragon Metrics, and you can find her over at DragonMetrics.com.