Recently one of my freelance clients got me onto their SEMRush account. It’s a nice tool, it has its place in Search Engine Marketing. But it’s also important to remember, behind those numbers and algorithms, that there are people behind those screens. I try to always look behind the SEO to figure out what motivates the users in the first place.

Hot new acronym to play with: E-A-T

SEMRush has its own blog to help with content marketing. In their obligatory end-of-year post looking ahead into 2020, they bring up E-A-T a lot. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust,” and it’s the latest Google indexing bugaboo which everybody is struggling to ascertain. What everybody forgets is that behind the numbers and algorithms, Google cares about what motivates people too.

Turning to SearchEngineJournal, E-A-T is a human-driven link quality control method, where Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines is “used by humans to assign quality scores to search results for specified queries… In other words, pages that would receive high-quality ratings from raters applying these guidelines are the kinds of pages Google wants to rank well.”

And then those pages, in turn, get stamped with the “Expertise Authority Trustworthiness” seal of approval. That doesn’t change the algorithms directly; instead it guides the engineers in adjusting those algorithms to bring up those pages more often.

The bottom line: Users – the humans behind those queries – want to see results that are actually helpful, engaging, and informative. That’s as opposed to mechanical SEO content churned out to appease the algorithm gods. Now that I’ve humanized the mechanical search process, watch as I mechanize the human angle all over again:

Dopamine drives your desire to discover

The reward system is the human brain network of neurons and neurotransmitters which motivate the brain to seek out the things it needs to survive. It’s a little squirt of happy-juice that your brain gives you in exchange for doing things to promote your survival and perpetuation, from basic nutrition to reproduction. It’s a system common to all vertebrate creatures more or less, just with an expanded feature set in humans, because our well-being is dependent in part on being social.

This links to E-A-T. Not to keep you in suspense, but we’ll see that just as the Internet functions as a collective conscious brain for humanity, so does human-ranking of information bits compare to dopamine.

Because, you see, discovering new information triggers our dopamine guns as a stand-alone feature. In short, it’s the reward system that drives curiosity. Curiosity is an essential survival instinct. It helps us in a primitive sense to discover new food, safe shelter, and interesting new ways to survive. Learning, itself, makes brain happy juice.

So do many other things, of course. Simply getting a like on Facebook, an adoring comment in reply to your thoughtful blog post, or a retweet of your tweet feeds your brain a dopamine cookie. This has been well-understood as the individual effect of social media, so much so that “dopamine fasting” is the latest eye-rolling silly trend among Silly Valley elite. The idea of dopamine fasting is ridiculous, because you get dopamine literally every time you eat, drink, have sex, or even get a hug from a loved one. But I digress.

From the NCBI paper on “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity”:

“Curiosity is such a basic component of our natures that we are nearly oblivious to its pervasiveness in our lives. Consider, though, how much of our time we spend seeking and consuming information, whether listening to the news or music, browsing the internet, reading books or magazines, watching TV, movies, and sports, or otherwise engaging in activities not directly related to eating, reproduction, and basic survival. Our insatiable demand for information drives a much of the global economy and, on a micro-scale, motivates learning and drives patterns of foraging in animals.”

“Information is not a primary reward (as juice or water would be in this context), but is a more indirect kind of reward. The fact that dopamine neurons signal both primary and informational reward suggests that the dopamine response reflects an integration of multiple reward components to generate an abstract reward response.”

 

There’s a difference made between primary rewards and indirect rewards. Information gives us an indirect reward, because it’s part of the process of getting a direct one. For example, say you’re hungry, you need food. You turn a corner and discover a restaurant you never noticed before. The vision of the restaurant sign doesn’t satisfy your hunger directly, but it gives you a trickle of dopamine telling you that you’re on the right track to solving your primary problem.

Engineers, artists, developers, and scientists can all tell you about the glorious dopamine joy of a breakthrough discovery. The problems that keep you up at night vex you, but when a solution comes to you at last, it’s such a relief that we draw it in cartoons as a literal light bulb. You feel happy right there! That’s dopamine working.

How does this tie into content marketing and E-A-T?

If you’ve read this far, chances are I’ve been leading your brain on with a little trail of dopamine bread crumbs. Each paragraph is treating you to new information you never knew before. Even if it’s trivial information that you’ll have little chance of using, your brain still fires the dopamine gun to tell you “that’s interesting!” It then swaps a couple neurons deep in your brain plumbing to file this information away for later reference.

Knowing that better E-A-Ting stimulates the Internet’s dopamine is still good insight to have. It helps you see the macrocosm in the microcosm. If you have a website that relies on content marketing, knowing the link between dopamine and being a trustworthy and expert authority on a topic helps you have a lower bounce rate.

But look at a bad bounce-rate scenario: See, a user searches for something and clicks a link on Google. Their dopamine system goes on standby: We anticipate a reward! Well, you get to the page and are disappointed: it’s just a clot of SEO keyword soup written to trick the search algorithm and not to be helpful to the person reading it. You click back and try somewhere else.

What just happened is that your brain waited for a dopamine hit that didn’t come. Imagine how angry you would get if you were really hungry, and somebody gave you what appeared to be a cookie, but was actually a rubber fake replica of a cookie? That’s what the SEO-spammer just did to your brain.

Take-away: In content marketing, make your content stimulating, interesting, informative, and entertaining. Even if the “extra” text doesn’t drive SEO directly, it helps engage readers with dopamine crumbs along the way to your product, service, or cause.

Google craves dopamine too

That’s just the thing, is that we can replicate a neural network using servers and cables all we want to, but it lacks the neurotransmitter system, the chemical side of brain functioning. So we have humans, who are efficient dopamine sensors, to do quality control on search result hits. They guide Google’s algorithms to seek out tasty dopamine caches on the web for users to find. In short, humans are replicating the missing neurotransmitters from the hivemind’s neural net.

Paying too much attention to search algorithms and not enough to dopamine rewards is one way in which people overthink SEO.