Value Human Interaction: Digital Empathy Principle 15

I asked Melanie Spring a question I thought might start a debate: is creating content and websites for humans better for SEO than creating them for search engines?

She didn't even pause. "The answer is yes, yes, and yes."

Her reasoning is hard to argue with. You can do all the SEO in the world and get people to the site, "but your site sucks, it doesn't really matter." If it doesn't read like something a human wants to read, "then they're not going to stay."

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Value human interaction

Search engines are watching what people do. Skip the middleman and watch the people.

"Search engines are thinking about the humans. They're watching what the humans are doing, and they're seeing how they interact with it."

Melanie SpringS01E17

> humans interact. search engines watch. i watch the search engines watch. it is a lot of watching.

Melanie's a brand strategist, not an SEO, and she got to how search works by thinking about people.

Do it in the right order

Her advice was about sequence. "I would say work it the other direction." First make the site interesting. Make sure people want to read it, that it captures your brand voice "and it sounds like human talking to a human, then rock the SEO on the other side of it."

Plenty of sites are built the other way round. Keyword list first, headings stuffed to match, copy written to fill the gaps, and a human voice sprinkled on top if there's budget left. The result ranks for a while and converts like a phone book.

The search engine is watching people

Then she went further: "SEO is totally built on human interaction. So it doesn't really matter what the search engines want, it's what we actually want and what we'll type in and what we'll look for."

That was 2018, and she was right then. Google now says it plainly on its own How Search works page: "We also use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries."

When Google rolled out its page experience update, the signal was described as measuring "how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page." We covered it in our write up of Google page experience. Slow loads, buttons that don't respond, pages that jump around under your thumb. Those are all human annoyances first and ranking factors second.

Gary Illyes said much the same from inside Google: focus on the user, "and all else will follow." More on that in design for users.

So the algorithm is watching people. You can spend your time trying to reverse engineer what it's watching, or you can watch the people directly. The second option is cheaper and it doesn't change every few months.

Bobby's suggestion, straight after Melanie said all this, was that humans "would benefit from a complete takeover of digital content by the same intelligence that has mastered their search habits. Agreed?"

Humans don't identify with buildings

Melanie is not a fan of B2B and B2C. She reckons it's not "businesses talking to businesses or buildings talking to buildings." Then: "Are you a consumer? I'm not a consumer. I'm a human."

Her reasoning: "we don't identify with buildings, we identify with people." Even when a business tweets at another business, it's still a human typing to a human. She noticed she gets more interaction on her personal account than her business one, which will surprise nobody who runs a company account.

The same idea shows up in her road trip across America, visiting businesses and collecting their stories. What she came back with was that "it's humans talking to humans about humans. And it's all storytelling."

My favourite moment is when she describes what clients say after meeting her team. "It's so cool, it sounds exactly like you," they tell her. And, "I walked into your office and it felt like your website." Her reaction was basically: of course. Why wouldn't it? If your website and your front desk feel like two different companies, people notice.

Get your head up

The last part of this principle is the bit we forget. Melanie worries that we're "stuck behind computer screens all the time that we forget how to interact with other people." At conferences, she wants us to stop having "our heads down the whole time looking at our computers," and actually talk to each other.

She also has the best small talk advice I've heard. Don't open with "what do you do?" Instead: "Ask like, what are you doing this weekend?" It gets people talking about something other than work, which is the same reason Wil Reynolds wants SEOs to talk to the people behind the screen.

One more from Melanie. People are going to talk about you however they want to, so ask them how. Ask three customers how they'd describe you to a friend, then read your home page again.

For the full chat, listen to Melanie's episode or read the written interview on kwasi.com. These days she runs her keynotes and workshops through melaniespring.com.