Although I know I will probably have to sell my kidney on eBay for a good pair of Nike kicks –and I have never bought Nike – but guess what? I love Nike now. I haven’t stopped talking about the ad because it told me and so many like me to just own our emotions – positive, negative, all of them. So next time I go shopping for sportswear you know which brand is going to pop in my head as a first option? Nike (have zero doubts about that!).
And it’s just not the brands that are leaning more and more towards emotions, search engines like Google have started leaning towards the qualitative along with the quantitative. Until a couple of years of ago, the highest ranking search result on Google as soon as you typed in the keyword ‘cat’ (for example) would look like this:
Cat cat cat. Grey cat. White Cat. Just Cat. Buy smart cats from cat shop and if cat dies bury in nearest cat cemetery where they bury cats. Smelly cat, smelly cat, what are they feeding you cat?
However, gone are the days when domain owners could just throw up a bunch of keywords on their web pages and get their #1 spot on page one on Google without much effort. With software like RankBrain, Google has handed back the power to the user by upping the ante of EQ in the modern world.
RankBrain is a cog in Google’s core algorithm which uses machine learning to determine the most relevant results to search engine queries. With Pre-RankBrain, Google uses its basic algorithm to determine which results to show for a given query. Post-RankBrain, the query now goes through a much more comprehensive and smarter interpretation model that applies possible factors such as the location of the searcher, user persona and keywords of the query to determine the searcher’s true intent. By discerning this intent, Google can deliver more relevant results.
Thanks to RankBrain, a product of Google’s more intent-focused revised algorithm, several questions (such as How much time did the user spend on the page? Did the user find what they were looking for or did they go ‘pogo-sticking’ to another page? How user friendly is this domain?) are asked before a page can rank on Search Engine Research Pages (mainly Google) and get organic ranking.
How does all of this tie in with my earlier argument about emotional advertising?
Businesses now (even the ones dealing with the most quantitative subject matter - for example banks) understand that the magic is in the emotions and user experience. Even domain owners online have to create content that tugs at readers’ heartstrings or Google will send them to the timeout corner. It’s not about who comes to you anymore, it’s about who keeps coming back again and again and spends quality time with your content. If giants like Google have revised algorithms to add more qualitative factors to improve user experience, we know we are going somewhere with EQ. Content can get you attention but connection will get you loyalty, leads and eventually sales. Thanks to RankBrain, web pages that catch user attention and keep them ‘crawling’ on their domain, are organically moved to the top of the page.
So it’s not just keywords anymore. It is about which webpage provides the best solution to the query with the keyword (i.e. the page that gives the best user experience so that they no longer have the need to go anywhere else looking for answers). The good news at the end of all this is that consumers now have more power than ever! To manoeuvre search results, to pick and choose from a plethora of brands throwing emotions at them, to basically just be in the driving seat! Rev up the engines and let’s go!
Taniya Hasan is a content marketer.