What would a caveman think if they encountered your website?
Assuming he got over the idea of a magical box that can be made to project different images with a few clicks of something called a keyboard, would he be attracted to your website? Or would it make him want to smash the box to make the disturbing image go away?
It may seem like a hypothetical question, but that’s only partly true.
Of course cavemen aren’t time traveling to the 21st century (that I know of,) but you might be surprised at how little our brains have developed since our caveman days.
While on a conscious level, we know that a picture of a roaring tiger does not pose a threat, on a subconscious level our brains are freaking out.
This is part of what can make designing your website and crafting your content so tricky. Not only do you have to anticipate how the design of your website, your word choice, and formatting is making people feel when they see your website, but they often won’t be able to articulate why they don’t like your website. They just know they don’t want to stick around.
An example of this is a friend of mine who uses red in her logo and throughout her website because it’s part of her branding, and even part of the name of her business. She got some feedback from someone who didn’t like seeing that color on my friend’s website, but couldn’t articulate why.
As this book explains, red is a difficult color to use as a primary branding color because it can incite negative emotions like rage, anger, and danger.
On the other hand, bright colors like red can also prompt website visitors to take action. For example, when it comes to choosing a color for your call-to-action buttons a study done by Hubspot found “the red button outperformed the green button by 21%.”
While I know a fair amount about “power words” and how to use language to motivate website visitors to take certain actions, I knew very little about the psychology of color before reading this book.
But this book covers so much more than power words and color psychology, and while I can’t tell you everything the book covers, I do want to go over the highlights.
What Is This Book?
I want to start by detailing what this book is and why I want to talk about it here. The full title is, The Psychology of a Website: Mastering Cognitive Biases, Conversion Triggers and Modern SEO to Achieve Mass Results. The author is Matthew Capala who has had a lot of success running his own SEO agency. His focus has been on driving traffic to his big-name clients’ websites and helping to convert those leads.
One thing to note is that Capala’s experience is primarily in the ecommerce space. That industry tends to have a shorter buyer journey than professional services, which means you don’t have to work as hard as professional service providers to earn the trust of your prospects in order to turn them into clients.
It also means his focus has been on getting people to buy directly off a website, whereas with professional service provides, the end goal of our website’s is usually to get people to fill out a form or pick up the phone and call us.
That said, most of the information provided in this book is equally applicable to ecommerce websites and professional service websites.
Table of Contents
Building Trust
Earning people’s trust isn’t always easy, and it can be especially difficult if you work in certain industries, such as banking or financial planning.
This book covers a lot of the things age-old tactics we’ve all seen on websites to convince us the company is trustworthy, including:
The Bandwagon Effect
If you’ve ever been shopping online, you’ve seen a banner telling you how many people have bought a product. The goal of this tactic is two-fold. First, it positions the product as one that is popular. If lots of other people are buying it, then it must be worth buying. Second, it provides a feeling of scarcity. If this product is flying off the shelves, you’d better act now to secure yours.
Social Proof
Strategically placed user-generated content (UGC) can provide proof to your website visitors that, yes, real people are buying and using and loving your product. Testimonials are another great way to achieve this, but UGC has the upper hand here because some people write their own testimonials and attach them to a false name and a stock photo. If you can provide a glowing review of your company that was created by someone else, that can do more to convince a lead to become a client than anything you could say.
Earning Google’s Trust
Something that often gets overlooked in discussions of earning the trust of our website visitors is the fact that we have to earn Google’s trust in order to convince the algorithm to help us get in front of the people who are looking for us.
Google is getting better and better at identifying the kind of content its users are looking for, which means you have to jump through Google’s hoops before you can worry about what people see on your website.
One quick note about this book: The copyright is for 2021, and while, for the most part, the content in this book is evergreen, there is a section in which he talks about about Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness.) But Google recently added another E to that acronym, which stands for “experience.” That means you need content on your website that demonstrates the experience you have that makes you an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field.
Capala did this himself throughout the book by providing anecdotes of big-name clients he worked with and the awesome results he and his agency were able to get for them, using some of the strategies described in this book.
Content Marketing
Capala has a whole section of this book titled “The Magic of Content Marketing,” so you know he won me over as soon as I saw that.
But he didn’t stop at talking about what an important role content plays in SEO (very important.) He also talked about the importance of crafting your content into a compelling story.
This is less for SEO and more for the people who are actually visiting your site and reading your content. You need to give them a reason to keep reading, and nothing does that better than a good story.
Numbers and data are relatively new to us humans, but stories are as old as language itself. Maybe even older. So if you want people to remember the important information you’re giving them, find a way to put it in a story. We are primed, not only to engage with stories, but to remember them. You can give us all the facts and numbers and statistics and most of it will go in one ear and out the other.
But tell us a good story, and that will embed itself in our brains long enough for us to make a decision about whether or not to buy from you.
SEO Tips
My one quibble about this book is that he does believe in the importance of domain authority. I do not because Google has said that domain authority is not a thing. It was invented by Moz to sell a tool they created. For more on that, you can check out this article I wrote a couple years ago.
However, Capala made it up to me in the next section by talking about the importance of backlinks, as well as how to get backlinks to your website. It is by no means a full breakdown of all the ways you can convince other high-quality websites to provide a link to your website (for that, you can watch this video), but it’s a great primer.
Overcoming Objections
Then Capala went on to talk about how to use your website to overcome objections visitors might have to buying your product, as well as leveraging FOMO (fear of missing out) and how getting small commitments from your audience can make it easier for them to say “yes” to the next thing you ask of them, all the way up to buying from you. That can (and should) be worked into the funnel you build for your prospects.
I definitely recommend this book. It’s an excellent introduction to the world of SEO and content marketing, and it’s written in a way that is very easy to read and understand. It is by no means a full account of everything you need to know about creating, designing, and optimizing your website, but it’s an excellent first (or even second) start. You can get your own copy here.
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