Sales and marketing can never be separated. Marketing mavens often look forward to predictive technologies and make use of effective psychological theories to design an effective strategy.
As far as businesses are concerned, they are more inclined towards the returns on their investment.
So, in the end, the responsibility for effective marketing that drives real results rests on the marketers’ shoulders.
There’s no doubt that marketing is dependent upon how effectively experts can manage to predict future trends.
To do so, they need access to reliable information and tried measures. One such theory is “Maslow’s Law of Needs.”
What is Maslow’s Law of Needs?
Consumer behavior is a complex sensation. Motivation to make any purchase is highly dependent on individual needs.
According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, every purchase decision is driven by five basic needs or motivations.
These include physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization. Additionally, these motivations are fulfilled in subsequent order.
This means, unless consumers’ physiological needs are not fulfilled, they won’t pursue safety and other needs.
You must be wondering what does this hierarchy has to do with SEO? If you look closely at the hierarchy, you shall find that consumer expectations are met step after step.
In a similar manner, the optimization of any website or digital entity is preferably best carried out after certain basic needs are fulfilled.
What’s the Hierarchy in SEO?
SEO refers to search engine optimization. It is perhaps the practice of improving the performance of a piece of content online.
For beginners, before moving on any further, a brief introduction to how to do SEO like a pro can be a pretty helpful guide.
You may learn the basics and it would help you make the most out of your efforts.
Nevertheless, let us take you on a short ride through the hierarchical progression that you can follow for your SEO needs.
This would help you understand better how Maslow’s law can affect your overall marketing strategy, including SEO.
Step 1. Make your content crawl accessible
To begin with, the most critical of things that you need to do is optimize your website or blog for crawling.
Unless the search engines can crawl your website, it stands no chance to rank anywhere in the SERPs.
Usually, the search engines crawl every content online on its own.
This is to ensure that the content is registered, known as indexing, so it can be organized and presented before a searcher when needed.
To make sure that your website is getting indexed, you can search in Google search box- “site:yourdomain.extension.”
For example, if your website is xyzseo.com, then you can enter “site:xyzseo.com”, and the results will list down all the pages from your website that are registered with Google.
Step 2. Create content for the user
Even if your website is crawl accessible, there’s no point if the content does not answer to the user query.
After all, you don’t need bots to visit your website. Instead, you need real human traffic.
So the next thing you should pursue is to create content that answers to your target audience.
In fact, Google has also updated its guidelines for content that receives benefits in search results.
It states that the content that delivers the online user with an answer to a problem or offers a solution by educating them is preferred in SERP rankings over weak content. And in the end, it’s the content that matters.
Step 3. Include keywords for the search engines
One of the most important factors that can help improve your website’s ranking in search results is keyword optimization.
Often marketers suggest keyword research and optimization as the first step towards a successful SEO strategy. The truth is not far away from this opinion.
To make your website visible before the right audience you need to learn what they are looking for.
The terms they usually search for are the ones you need to target.
These are the keywords that you need to optimize your content with.
Thus, assuring that the search engine ranks you whenever the relevant terms are searched.
Step 4. Improve users’ experience on your website
So, by now your website should start receiving traffic. Pure organic traffic. But if the users do not experience your website to be greatly appeasing, they will bounce back.
Search engines keep an eye on the user experience and rank the content in search results accordingly.
For example, if your website is interactive and offers easy navigation to its visitors, it is more likely to improve in search results.
Similarly, mobile-friendly and user-oriented websites are rewarded with higher ranks in search results.
It all melts down to how great an experience you offer to your audience.
Step 5. Expect amplification for your content
Till now, the practices were concerning the elements that were on your website. But, for successful SEO external factors also play an effective role.
These practices are commonly known as off-page SEO. Google and other prominent search engines consider links as a critical measure to assess the authority and worthiness of content.
Consequently, you should be focusing on securing high-quality backlinks to your website.
A typical example of such links is the shares that your content receives across social media. Of course, if your content is share-worthy, you’ll receive natural backlinks to your website.
As a result, your website will rise higher in the SERPs.
Step 6. Keep an eye on the Click Through Rate
It is a well-known fact that higher traffic to your content helps improve its ranking in search results.
More traffic agrees to a higher user preference for your content. But, there’s a catch to this.
Despite having a higher click-through rate, if the dwell time dips or the bounce rate increases, it can affect your website conversely.
So, you need to monitor the CTR that your website receives.
To make sure that the CTR improves, you can optimize your titles, URL, meta-tags, and meta-descriptions to relate to the user-query more effectively.
This helps the searcher understand what they are going to get once they click on your page.
Step 7. Improve technical aspects to stand apart
Till now, all these practices helped rank your website in search results. The better, aforementioned elements are optimized, the more your website will improve. As a result of this, your business will also improve.
But, to stand apart from the rest of the jargon online, you can incorporate a few more changes to your website. Mostly these changes concern the technical aspects of your website.
For example, you can include snippets in the backend of your website. Or you can also optimize schema markups to improve relevance to the search queries.
This can open up the window to special features of the SERPs, such as feature-box and answer box in Google.
Following the steps mentioned above, you can optimize your website, and improve its visibility online. Especially for businesses, higher visibility is bountiful.
But, still, the question- how Maslow’s theory is relevant to SEO, remains unanswered.
If you’ve been following this piece consistently, then you must have noticed that the steps involved in SEO are slowly but gradually improving towards improving the user-engagement.
The Relation Between Maslow’s Theory & SEO
As Maslow’s theory suggests the consumers’ motivation is only improved if the basic needs are met.
Similarly, SEO is successful if only the basic necessary steps are taken.
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Higher goals can only be achieved after the basic ones
There’s no denying that without content your SEO is pointless. Furthermore, even if you have great content on your blog or website, if it does not reach the desired audience, your efforts are in vain.
So, the content searchability is similar to the physiological needs as mentioned in Maslow’s theory.
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User Experience Improves Belongingness & Esteem
According to Maslow’s theory safety, belongingness and esteem are higher up in the motivational hierarchy.
Similarly, the user experience can only be enhanced if the content reaches its intended audience. Better user experience is also related to the reputation of your business.
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Amplification helps you with Self-Actualization
To understand how well your website is performing, you need insights such as organic traffic, referral traffic, backlinks, likes, shares and comments, and much more.
All of these figures act as KPIs for measuring your website’s performance. So, these help with self-actualization for your business/website.
Including Maslow’s theory into your SEO strategy is not just good in improving traffic, but can also help target the apt audience.
Essentially retargeting the potential customers for your business. After all, the sole purpose of SEO is to help your business reach your desired market, digitally.
At this point, it is important to mention that SEO needs a lot of patience. You may not witness results soon enough, but you’ll see them eventually.
If your strategy is aligned with your consumers’ psychology, you can experience the effects perpetually.
Given that you follow the webmasters’ guidelines and do not indulge in black hat practices.
This may drag your website down the runt, and your business may feel the blows pretty hard.
In the end, the mix of psychology with marketing has always been a fruitful practice.
Now with modern tools and fresh marketing approaches such as SEO, the combination can be a blasting success.
Just make sure that you add value to your customers’ life by offering your products and services as a solution to their problem and not the other way around. On this note, we bid adieu!
Happy Marketing!