Summit Insights: Using upfront consumer research to support back-end SEO performance

I must admit that I was not fully aware of how Google’s page rank system worked but after attending some sessions I had an insight: Qualitative research should be studied and leveraged to help with Search Engine Optimization.

As someone involved in retail and service innovation, I spend time conducting and studying customer interviews.  Frequently these interviews delve into the how’s and why’s of customer engagement. They are an exploration into motives, needs and wants. They hope to uncover pain points, workarounds, stakeholders, activity patterns, key moments, the usual range of outcomes that can help designers get closer to meaningful truths and designs.

I never thought to study the research to help with the development of title pages, URL’s, tag’s, attributes, blog content, and other content to help improve SEO performance.

If the conducting of interviews seems like too much work, don’t worry. The fancy new field of digital anthropology – analyzing web reviews and youtube content for clues on how people talk about your space  – can be an easy first step.

It frequently takes four times the length of the content on a really good day to make sense of raw content. But the end result may be worth it.