Evolve your approach from SEO into HEO

Ken says: “Focus less on SEO and more on HEO. It’s a term that I heard from the HubSpot CEO, but I am changing it from Human Experience Optimization to Human Engagement Optimization.”

What is Human Engagement Optimization?

“In essence, it’s a perspective shift. It’s like saying you’re a marketer who cares about performance or revenue outcomes, which forces you to think less about tactics and more about strategies.

When I think of SEO in 2024, I don’t think about driving traffic as though that isn’t humans with needs and jobs to be done. I think, ‘How can we get somebody at one stage of their buying or decision-making journey to continue that journey, with each aspect of our content on our website, and take a specific action?’ For us, working mainly with B2B companies, that’s engaging with the sales team as part of the sales pipeline. That is the kind of engagement I’m talking about: not just with content but further into the pipeline.”

How do you create web content that delivers on user experience without starting with keywords or technical?

“Google has published their helpful content guidelines now. It’s not about removing the tactics that we all know and love – picking target keywords, optimizing the technical aspects, the authority, etc. – it’s going a few layers deeper.

We all talk about search intent now, and commercial or transactional queries. When a potential buyer lands on a page, if that information isn’t presented in a way that will take them to the next decision-making stage, then it’s all for nought. You can be ranking number one and getting 800 potential customers per month but, if there isn’t a price point or a good call to action or the page load speed is terrible, then you’re not going to get that person to take the next step.

In B2B, that’s where the money is. We don’t care about rankings and traffic as much as we care about qualified opportunities. It’s in those steps after they get to the site, and making sure you know what kind of decision they’re going to make. You need to structure the page, the content, and the messaging that will get them to continue that engagement.”

How do you go about establishing the likely user intent for each page?

“There are some easy tips and tricks that we’re all familiar with. Certain modifiers – like agency, consultant, services, price, etc. – indicate that somebody’s either looking to make a comparison or a purchase decision.

However, we can and should take it a step further. Carry out customer interviews when they onboard, right after the sales process is done, and ask, ‘What triggered you on the site to want to reach out to sales?’ Alternatively, after the onboarding customer success team, what five frequently asked questions do folks have? Put those on the page right before they convert to eliminate some of that friction and help move them forward.

We’re talking about CRO, verbal identity, messaging, etc., but those steps should be considered upfront as part of a broader SEO and content strategy.”

Is it customer service or post-purchase teams asking those questions or should SEOs actively be involved?

“It’s a collaboration. Different teams are having to become more interdependent, and I think that’s a good thing. It creates a more holistic buying experience on the site. It’s a collaboration between user experience teams, brand teams, customer success teams, sales teams, and SEO and content teams.

If your customer success team says, ‘This is what everybody says after they are finished onboarding.’ and sales says, ‘This is what they say in their customer conversation’, but it’s not a keyword, then does it make sense to have it on that page? If it gets 50 people to convert, even though only 150 people use the page, that’s a win for most companies. Ideally, all of those teams will be working together.”

How do you persuade organizations that SEOs should be involved with the whole marketing conversation more holistically, rather than just focusing on keywords and traffic?

“First, you’ve got to get good at the pitch to get by in an organization. Due to the black box of Google’s algorithm, a lot of marketers and SEOs do not understand how to make business-focused use cases.

They might say, ‘I need to take up all the customer success team’s time and $10,000 to do X, Y and Z.’ Instead, you can say, ‘We are only converting 10% of our pipeline. The user drop-off rate is X. If we improve the time spent on the site and improve the messaging, this is the kind of revenue we’re going see in the next 12 months.’ Most executives’ ears are gonna perk up. Get a better understanding of business metrics and map them back to the tactics or initiatives that you want to use.

Secondly, take a look at those helpful content guidelines that Google posted. SEO is moving outside of the technical. For example, AI and machine learning are a big thing now. It says right there in the documentation, ‘We don’t care if you use something to create AI content’. However, they also say, ‘If it’s mass-produced and doesn’t have a quality assurance process from an expert and a trusted site, forget about it.’

Getting imaginative about rounding out that journey and thinking about what a customer is likely to engage with on the page is something every SEO can do – even if you don’t have a new budget or the resources to work with other teams. Broaden your understanding of the customer journey.”

Can you utilise AI even though the process is very people-centric?

“I’m pro-technology, pro-GPT4, and pro-AI tools. They’ve been around for a while and it’s no secret. The number one thing, again, is that you can drive all the traffic in the world but if your actual buyer doesn’t enjoy, engage, consume, and take the next step, it’s all for nought.

If you’re using it for production, what is the framework you’re using to know that your output is going to be successful? We’ve all heard the term ‘prompt engineering’, but why did you create that prompt? Is it strategic? Then afterwards, who is the subject matter expert who’s going to review it? What is the software that’s going to do the analysis? Grammarly might handle the syntax and grammar. Is there an SME in the organization who is going to say whether this is factually correct or not?

The QA process and the prompt engineering on the front end will make the content either follow Google’s guidelines or not. If you’re going to use AI to produce title tags, content, major content assets, calculators, etc., follow those two steps.

Also, you can use it as an AI assistant. I do that all the time, multiple times a week. I’ll bounce ideas off the tool to get outside of my limited range of thinking. That’s the strength: ideating, formulating ideas, making them more concrete, and then scaling the tedious parts of production and coming up with different versions so that the expert can give their final approval quicker.”

What metrics can you use to define whether your content is delivering excellent, exciting experiences for prospects?

“Look at the data. If you don’t have data, stop right now. Go set up GA4. Go set up Hotjar. Go get a free CRM like HubSpot. That’s step number one. Whether you are doing a good job or not depends on who’s coming into your pipeline, how often they are converting, what the value is, and what sources they’re coming from.

Average engagement time is a really easy one. Engaged sessions is a great metric that I love in GA4. Also, how many people from the pages that you consider bottom-of-funnel or high-purchase-intent are actually converting there? That’s the point, right? You drive people to those pages so that they convert. If you’re a B2B company you should be able to see that from your CRM and, if you’re a B2C company or e-commerce, you can see purchases by source.

For the target terms that you’re using and the target pieces of the content that you want to convert folks, is it actually happening? How often is it happening? What’s the value of that to your company?

If you look at a three-month window before your optimizations, after, and then on an ongoing basis, it’s easy to say, ‘Do we have more people converting, viewing, and viewing for longer, or less?’ It’s actually that simple. The hard part is defining what led to those outcomes and deducing that. Knowing whether it’s working or not should be very simple.”

Do we finally have a more sophisticated understanding of attribution?

“Attribution is a dirty word for some people, but I think so. We have the tools, and the ways to build connective tissues around the tools, to get better insights. However, there is a rise in people going to sales communities, marketing communities, LinkedIn groups, etc. Some people call it ‘dark social’ but I just call it what humans have always done. They go to people who sound and look like them and ask them questions. They inherently trust their friends, family, co-workers, etc.

Attribution technology is more sophisticated but there’s also a lot of attribution that’s never going to be figured out. Trying to get to a nine or a ten when you are already at an eight is a futile exercise.

Here’s an example of a real journey. Somebody read a LinkedIn profile of ours, came to the site, left, read a LinkedIn post later, Googled us to make sure we ranked for ‘B2B SEO agency’, and then reached out on the website after a couple of months. There’s no way an attribution tool will tell you all of that.

However, having the LinkedIn profile and the website optimized enhanced each step of their journey. The most important thing is knowing where your buyers are, showing up in those locations properly, then getting that feedback as the sales conversation progresses, rather than just with tools, to really be sure how they found and purchased from you.”

Do you look at the profitability of individual keywords or do you measure on more of a page-by-page basis?

“Somebody out there probably has a more sophisticated blend of tracking on the website or some UTM parameter magic that gets put into a sheet where they blend the data. For us, it’s as simple as looking at the top keyword groupings per page, and then how those pages fit into conversion paths.

Take one of our services pages. 90% of the people convert on the B2B SEO Services page, and we know what our top five keyword groupings for that are. You can assign those a weight.

For us, we are thinking more broadly than taking a number of specific keywords and breaking them down to the dollar. We are thinking, ‘Do we understand how people are searching for these terms and how our buyers actually speak in sales conversations?’ If the whole channel is profitable multiple times over, you focus less on the dollars and cents at the keyword level.

However, understanding the keyword groupings that lead to the page and which pages lead to conversions is a helpful set of metrics to know, and it’s fairly easy information to get.”

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 2024?

“A lot of modern CMSs (Squarespace, WordPress, Webflow, etc.) take the small technical things and bring everybody onto an even playing field. Instead of focusing on the latest JSON-LD schema type that isn’t going to lead to a rich snippet, go back to basics.

See whether your messaging is resonating, and people are actually converting on those pages. See if you can get buy-in to work with cross-functional teams and improve the experience on those pages. Really consider a target customer journey.

What are they likely to do? Have you provided them with a choose-your-own-adventure on the website? Focusing more on human engagement – getting people into your sales pipeline and converting them – and less on technical tactics will pay off.”

Ken Marshall is Chief Growth Officer at RevenueZen, and you can find him over at RevenueZen.com.