The biggest difference between traditional SEO and SEO in 2022 is that traditional SEO is focused on optimizing a website for search engines, while SEO in 2022 is focused on optimizing a website for people.

While the goal of SEO is still to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), the approach is now focused on creating a better overall experience for users. This means creating content that is relevant and engaging, making it easy for users to find what they need, and providing a smooth and seamless experience on all devices.

In the past, SEO was often about gaming the system and finding ways to trick search engines into giving a website a higher ranking. This approach is no longer effective and can even result in penalties from search engines.

The focus on user experience means that SEO in 2022 is more about providing value to users than it is about keywords.

It is important to remember that, while keywords are still a part of SEO, they are no longer the only or even the most important factor.

Here are some of the other changes that are likely to occur in SEO over the next few years:

1. Increased focus on mobile

As more and more people use mobile devices to access the internet, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to be optimized for mobile. This means that websites need to be responsive, meaning they adjust to the size of the screen they are being viewed on. They also need to load quickly, as users are likely to abandon a website that takes too long to load.

2. More personalized search results

Search engines are becoming more sophisticated and are now able to personalize search results based on a user’s location, search history, and other factors. This means that the results a user sees when they search for something may be different from the results someone else sees.

3. Increased use of voice search

As voice-activated assistants become more popular, it is likely that more people will use voice
search to find what they are looking for online. This means that websites need to be designed in a way that makes them easy to find using voice search.

4. More use of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in SEO. AI can be used to help identify relevant keywords, understand user intent, and create better content.

5. Greater focus on user experience

As mentioned above, the focus of SEO is shifting from keywords to user experience. This means that websites need to be designed in a way that is easy to use and navigate, and that provides a good user experience.

6. Increased use of structured data

Structured data is a way of organizing information on a website so that it can be easily
understood by search engines. This can help search engines to better understand the content
on a website and to provide more relevant results to users.

7. More use of video

Video is an increasingly important part of the online experience, and this is likely to continue in the future. Video can be used to engage and inform users, and it can also help to improve a website’s SEO.

8. Greater focus on local search

As more and more people use the internet to find local businesses, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to be optimized for local search. This means including relevant keywords and providing accurate and up-to-date information about your business.

9. Increased use of social media

Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to promote a website and to engage with
users. Social media can also help to improve a website’s SEO.

10. Greater focus on security

As the internet becomes more secure, it is important for websites to be designed in a way that is secure. This means using HTTPS, which is a more secure way of transmitting data, and ensuring that your website is properly protected from malware and other security threats.

A recent article by Pernell Cox (Director of CX Consulting at Material+), caught our eye. It hit upon some themes we’ve been hammering on our blog in recent months.

The article was entitled, “Enabling with technology, differentiating through humanity.” Sounds like what we wrote about “having a human side” and “bringing humanity into your voice.” This is important because “the need for human touch varies throughout the customer journey” and companies have to “be mindful of” their customers’ “rational and emotional needs.”

Basically, if you lose the humanity in your marketing, it comes off as cold and impersonal, which turns off potential buyers.

 

Key Takeaways

We also noted that Pernell writes about the importance of engaging your employees. After all, your employees are your human side and can be the human face of your brand.

He also underlines the need for brands to “be inclusive.” Meaning, “don’t just focus on the CEOs in the ivory tower: you need to co-create with (and learn from) your frontline employees.”

As we’ve pointed out before, giving your employees a seat at the table is one tangible way to demonstrate your commitments to equity and inclusivity. It will also help you attract and retain younger workers.

An important part of keeping the humanity in your branding is treating the actual humans in your company with dignity and respect. That means everyone, not just the C-level staff.

 

Balance

As the world becomes more digitized, it’s becoming at once more convenient and more impersonal. We can get everything we need with the click of a button, but that means there’s less casual human interaction. With Facebook’s recent rebrand as Meta, we’ve been hearing more in the news about the coming “metaverse.” While some people are excited for virtual reality, others are hesitant.

In his article, Pernell notes that people are naturally a little averse and shy to the digitization of everything. The self-checkout is convenient, but a little lacking in human warmth. Counterintuitively, if you move too fast to digitize everything so that you can “personalize” every customer’s experience, you might make their experience impersonal.

Pernell recommends listening to your customers, and your employees, and hearing out their concerns. As you digitize and modernize, make sure you demonstrate to them that you still have their best interests at heart. Don’t move so fast that you lose sight of who and what really matters.

This is how you balance moving towards the future with keeping your “humanity.”

 

Keeping Humanity in Your Content

If there’s any palpable coldness in your content, it will hurt your ROI. If people can’t relate to it, they’ll disengage. Perhaps more important than any metric is maintaining a human touch in your marketing.

How do you do that?

First, ditch the jargon. If you overuse phrases like “generating fresh content” and “optimizing your CX,” it comes off as strangely cold. I know, I use these terms too. It’s okay to write like that some of the time. But if all you talk about is numbers and acronyms and metrics, your audience will turn away. Use language that speaks to people.

How do you speak to people?

Well, part of keeping “humanity” forefront in your content marketing is remembering to keep it forefront in your content marketing. If you treat it like an assembly line, where you’re churning out “stuff” for faceless automatons to “consume,” people can tell. If you want content that converts – that has a high ROI – you’ve got to keep in mind what you’re actually doing.

What are you doing?

You’re producing articles and videos and graphics (and podcasts, social posts, etc.) that present your audience with the information they need and want in a way that is enjoyable and engaging.

Who is that audience?

It’s not made up of faceless automatons. It’s comprised of diverse individuals. But if you treat those individuals as faceless automatons, they will view your company the same way. Your company isn’t comprised of faceless automatons, either. It’s also made up of diverse people with diverse backgrounds and skillsets.

Which brings us right back to where we started: keeping the “humanity” in your online brand-building. Keeping your human voice human when producing content. Engaging your employees by treating them fairly. Including your employees in your digital brand. After all, the “human side” of a company is made up of all the humans who work at the company.

Ultimately, it’s just less stressful when you stop trying to force yourself to take your natural humanity out of your business interactions. Trust us. If you relax and just “be a human,” you’ll start seeing better ROI in your content marketing than when you just churn stuff out.

 

I recently stumbled across an excellent article on Neil Patel’s marketing blog about user-generated content (UGC). I’d like to use that article as a jumping off point for what I’m going to write about today.

User-generated content is, in Patel’s own words, “Content created by individuals rather than brands.” This includes testimonials, reviews, tweets about your products, videos customers create of themselves using your products, and unboxing photos they post to social media, among other things.

Given that 63% of Gen Z customers (and most older ones, too) prefer to hear from real people instead of brands, as we’ve written about in the past, it’s increasingly important not to rely solely on advertising for promoting your product.

 

“People trust real people, not brands.”

That’s how Patel put it on his website. Sounds familiar!

It should be intuitive at this point, but most customers are more likely to trust organic content rather than traditional advertising.

People like seeing verification from someone who hasn’t been paid to say nice things about a business. It’s more “authentic.”

How can you really trust something if you know the person saying it was paid to say it? But if someone takes time out of their day to say it for free, they must really think it, which means it must really be true. User-generated content validates the claims you’re already making about your products, because presumably the users are unbiased, outside sources.

Furthermore…

“It humanizes your company, helps people connect to you on a deeper level, and shows (not tells) your audience that your product will deliver on its values.”

Couldn’t have said it any better than Patel, there. We’ve talked previously about “being a human” or “showing your human side.” UGC does just that.

How do you get UGC?

Well, one time-honored method is asking customers for reviews and testimonials. If you treat them like humans, they’ll often be willing to reciprocate. You can also ask people to tell their friends and neighbors about your business – even in the digital age, word of mouth is one of the best ways to build brand awareness.

 

How does employee advocacy fit in?

It’s pretty clear that a lot of the reasons that make UGC a valuable marketing tool also make the case for employee advocacy or employee ambassadorship. These include:

1. Marketing by individuals, not brands

Your employee ambassadors are real people. They’re interacting with your audience as representatives of your company, but also as real people. If you give them the freedom to “be themselves,” your audience will recognize that they’re not all the same. Buyers will implicitly trust someone who appears honest and authentic more than they trust branded advertising. Which brings us to…

 

2. Organic content

The key to making employee advocacy work is not scripting it. Let your workers decide when, how, and what to post on their own. It’s not organic from your audience itself. But it’s organic from your workforce. And especially if you give your advocates freedom to speak their minds, people will recognize that they aren’t reciting a script. Meaning they’ll trust what your advocates say.

 

3. Humanizing your brand

Letting your employees share videos, photos, posts, articles, and other content they’ve created gives faces to your company. Especially if you let your workers “let their hair down.” We’ve written about how audiences are hungry for stories. Your employees can provide those stories.

 

Employee advocacy could even help you get user-generated content

It isn’t a stretch to suggest that if you let your workers become digital ambassadors for your business, they might begin to develop online relationships with members of your audience. (Not that kind of relationship! Business relationships.)

This means that your employee advocates could even ask some members of your audience to create their own UGC for you. They could solicit reviews and testimonials, or just pose questions on social media like, “What do you like best about our products?” or “How old were you when you first tried our product?” Or they can even post a status asking for employee shoutouts, where your customers can personally thank members of your workforce.

Imagine if one of your line-workers or cashiers or engineers started a hashtag campaign where your favorite and most loyal customers could post on social media what they liked most about your company.

Brands already do something similar, but not many brands let their frontline staff or design team go out and initiate these campaigns on their own.

 

Innovation

I’d also be willing to bet that, if you ask enough of them, some of your employees can come up with their own novel and innovative ways to combine the best of user-generated content with the best of employee advocacy.

That’s the beauty of both forms of content marketing: they’re decentralized. Which means you’ve got so many more minds thinking about how to generate high-performing content. The more people you have applying creativity to coming up with ways to promote your business, the better.

The possibilities from UGC and employee advocacy are many. Which is why it will take crowdsourcing to fully exploit them all.

Organic, real-people content is the wave of the marketing future. Which is why we recommend you combine employee advocacy with user-generated content to reach the widest audience possible in diverse ways.

The well-known pollster Frank Luntz recently teamed up with Conversate Labs to have a conversation with a group of professionals who’d left their jobs during the “Great Resignation,” which Conversate Labs argues should be called, “the Great Disconnect.”

There’s much to unpack from the interview, but I thought a number of insights were worth highlighting in particular.

Anyone who’s been reading our blog will recognize some themes we’ve been hammering on for months.

 

Employee-Employer Relations

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the focus group was that lack of engagement and poor communication – more than money – drove the wave of resignations. That’s why Conversate Labs is calling it, “the Great Disconnect.” Employers were blindsided, but they shouldn’t have been.

It turned out that professional after professional identified problems in their relations with managers and bosses as the source of the problem. These quitters weren’t “entitled.” They were fed up and burned out.

Luntz put it well in a tweet: “Every CEO you see now talks about being “inclusive” and treating their employees better – but people don’t believe most of them.”

It’s hard to put it better than that. It’s not enough to talk about employee activation. (NOTE: When Employee Activation Post comes out, link to that here.) You have to walk the walk.

People who quit their jobs last year knew their employers weren’t walking the walk.

 

Why They Quit

When asked to explain their reasons for leaving, each of the individuals in the focus group identified problems in their former work environments. They talked about lack of respect from managers, zero communication from up top, and being forced to work with people who’d tested positive for COVID – and then being punished if they spoke up or tried to do anything about it.

One woman actually said, “People aren’t quitting for money.” She went on to explain that employees want to feel like they matter.

Another member of the group talked about having time to put the kids to bed at night. Others spoke of unrealistic expectations from managers, and not getting the support they needed from their bosses.

When the moderator asked for a show of hands from those who had a good relationship with their manager prior to quitting, very few people raised theirs.

 

What They’re Looking for in a Better Job

In another tweet, Luntz highlighted his takeaways about what people who resigned are looking for in a better job.

Yes, they’re looking for better pay. Lunch isn’t free in life. But they’re also looking for flexibility. Especially those with families.

Most importantly, they say they want future employers to “treat me like a human being.” “Not a robot.”

 

What Does that Mean?

They wanted “real-time feedback” from managers. And listening. Listening is perhaps one of the most important parts of “treating employees like human beings.” Listening is a sign of respect. Which is at the core of “treating people like human beings.”

Respect doesn’t mean unearned praise or “everybody-gets-a-star” appreciation days. It’s not about giving every employee a participation trophy.

It’s about treating them with a little bit of dignity, instead of as a cog in a machine.

One thing respect is definitely about is taking employees’ COVID concerns seriously. It’s been a difficult two years for a large number of people. Workers are struggling with fear, loss, getting sick, burnout, stress, and worrying about loved ones.

Treating people like human beings means taking seriously their need for time off to grieve a lost family member. It means letting them sleep at night instead of pestering them with emails. It means affording them the respect of hearing out their legitimate concerns about contracting COVID, especially if they have elderly or immunocompromised relatives. It means listening to what they’re saying when they say, “I can’t take this anymore,” or “I can’t deal with it,” or “I feel like I’m losing any lines between work and home-life.” It means giving them some space.

We don’t live to work; we work to live.

 

Big Takeaway

The pressure is on employers now, not on employees. Oftentimes, hiring managers have the upper hand in negotiations, but right now the momentum is on the job-seekers’ side. So, if you don’t want to lose any employees, you need to treat them right.

If you want your employees to be engaged, you need to engage with them. The onus is not the other way around.

This isn’t some entitled, anti-capitalist claptrap about how work sucks and young people want bosses who can “understand their feelings.” Instead, it’s a call to action for employers to create the kinds of work environments where people actually want to work. Or forget even one where people want to work – it’s about creating the kinds of environments where they’re not destroying their physical and mental health every day just to keep up with the rat race.

It’s not about being your employees’ nanny. It’s about being a human.

 

Show the Human Side of Your Company

(The first step is having a human side.)

Assuming you’re good on the first step, here’s what you can do.

1. Follow Through on Your Commitments: Don’t just talk about diversity, or employee engagement, or equity, or environmental responsibility. Take actions that demonstrate the depth of your commitment.

2. Take a Look at this Focus Group: In particular, watch their reaction to GM’s CEO, whom they said actually came off as “genuine,” unlike their former employers.

3. Try Something New: Give your workers a stake in your company – stocks, a stake in decision-making, a seat at the table, etc. Maybe even try our employee advocacy idea.

4. Listen to Your People: Actually listen. Respectfully. Then maybe you’ll understand what they need and how you can serve them better – so that they serve you better.

There’s been a hot debate in some marketing circles about Google PPC Ads, with some people arguing that they no longer work (or at least not for certain types of businesses), and others arguing that they do still work if you know how to use them properly.

But, rather than wade into the debate, we’d like to talk about why we think employee-generated content (employee advocacy) might be a better investment.

Some Common Themes

If you’ve read any of our past articles, you’ll know we write a lot about how consumers (i.e., people) trust real people (i.e., employees, and other customers, and sometimes influencers) more than they trust large corporations.

We’ve also written about how audiences implicitly trust organic content better than traditional advertisements.

Both of these concepts play into making employee-created content a potentially better marketing tool than Google ads.

Think about Your Own Life

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an experienced digital consumer yourself. You’re savvy about internet browsing and you know how to find the content you like best.

Do you think popup ads are working on you?

Even before the internet, most Americans were fairly good at tuning out interruptive ads. When the game paused and the commercials came on, most people muted the TV and got up to use the bathroom or get a beer. We’ve continued to apply this mindset to our digital consumption.

Seriously, ask yourself: when was the last time you actually clicked on a Google ad on your smartphone or laptop?

Most people either use ad-blockers, or they learn how to ignore ads. Even when we don’t successfully tune them out, we avoid clicking on them. That wouldn’t be a problem if consumers went out and bought the advertised items on their own after viewing the ads, but that usually only happens if it’s an item they’re already looking for.

Meaning it’s really only cost-effective for the largest brands to invest in blanketing the internet with ads.

Does that mean it might not be worth it for everyone else? We’ll come back to that.

Bots?

What about bots and crawlers clicking on your ads? What about ad-fraud?

If you spend money on PPC ads, you pay for every click. But if a bot clicks on your ad, there’s zero chance of a sale. Web crawlers don’t convert.

Now, many will clamor that ad-fraud can be mitigated. You don’t have to lose all your money on “fake” clicks. That’s true, but mitigating them can be a bit of a pain – time intensive and costly, a real headache if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So once again, we return to the question: is it worth it?

Perhaps it is. Certainly, some savvy advertisers can make a lot of money off of Google ads. And if you have a 9-figure marketing budget, you can definitely gather some impressive data from massive ad campaigns, meaning you can target them very effectively.

But if you’re a small business, or if your team isn’t already expert at Google advertising, it may not give you a good return on your investment.

Which Brings Us to Employee Advocacy

Whereas Google ads may not be cost effective for every company, businesses of every size can see immediate returns from farming out their content marketing and social media to their own employees.

This is what we call “employee advocacy” or “crowdsourced content marketing.” If you have a workforce of any size, you’ve got a wealth of social media talent and good content at your disposal. Best of all, you don’t have to pay extra for this content (other than rewards for top performers, perhaps).

Employee-generated content is more “authentic” than are Google ads. Content that’s employee-created is more organic and therefore more trusted by audiences. Employee advocacy, or employee ambassadorship, is real people talking to real people.

Which means we think it will convert at much higher rates than any but the most targeted Google ads. People are less likely to tune out employee-generated content than they are Google ads.

In short, we think it will cost you less and perform better in the long run. Making it at least worth a shot. Especially if you’ve been frustrated up to now with the performance of your Google ads.

In a recent post, on Employee Advocacy for B2B Companies, we foreshadowed a future post in which we planned to delve deeper into how to apply the concept of employee advocacy specifically to social media for B2B.

We think our model of each employee as an online ambassador is particularly suited to the B2B approach to social media sites, which differs from the B2C approach some critical ways.

 

B2B Social Media Style

Typically, when we think about Facebook or Twitter – or especially Instagram and TikTok – we think of young people, short attentions spans, humor (memes and gifs), and cultivated lifestyle images.

When we think about corporations using social media platforms to build their brands, we think of B2C companies. Wendy’s trolling McDonald’s. Steak-umm trolling everybody. It seems like the way to stay relevant on social media is to be cool, edgy, and casual.

And, in some ways, it is. The way to capture attention in the attention economy is to excite people. The language of the attention economy is informal. It’s great for advertising.

B2B brands can do some of that. But they’re not trying to reach a consumer audience. They’re trying to appeal to people in their professional lives, and – unless it’s LinkedIn – there’s this idea that if people are on social media sites at work, they’re probably wasting the company’s time.

But actually, social media platforms – not just LinkedIn – can be excellent for B2B selling.

 

Here’s Why

There’s this image of social platforms as places where you need to be glitzy and flashy to stand out. Which doesn’t jibe with the image of B2B brands as professional and competent and unglamorous.

But Facebook was originally conceived as a way for people to meet other people. The concept was to connect people, to facilitate relationships.

And business-to-business marketing is all about relationships.

If your company caters to other businesses, you surely already have established channels for facilitating information-flow and relationships between employees within your company and employees within the companies you’re selling to.

But social media sites – again, not just LinkedIn – can connect you with people you might not otherwise be connected to – people who hold important roles inside companies you’re not currently selling to. Yet.

 

How Employee Advocacy Fits In

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter can allow potential buyers to establish connections with employees inside your company (who might work in product development, sales, environmental impact, design, etc.), who can give them the kind of information they need to move along the buying process.

But for that to happen, you need to allow those employees a little more license to use social media on your behalf. Perhaps not to post viral cat videos. But to interact with new buyers whom they can bring into your audience. This means allowing your workers to share information about your products and services, and about their own roles in your company, in order to facilitate the buying journey.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy at first. Just tacit acknowledgement on your behalf that part of the role of your engineers, truckers, managers, safety techs, and even forklift operators actually might require them to get on social media.

You can give them a few guidelines to start out. If you’re looking for advice, scroll back through our archives and see what we’ve written on the topic.

 

Employee Empowerment

Go back and read what we wrote about decentralized content marketing.

The B2B buying process is already a little decentralized. Information doesn’t just flow through a tightly controlled funnel, but passes between employees at all levels of your company and employees at all levels of the companies you sell to, making employee advocacy all the more of a good fit.

If you’re ready to fully embrace what social media promised – building connections – go ahead and empower your employees to go out onto social media during the workday, so that they can build rapport with the audience who buys from you.

Let them post original content, reach out to potential new buyers, connect more directly with people in your audience.

We think you’ll see dividends with this approach, because we think social media is perfect for B2B employee advocacy.