Customer empathy in SEO is required

The most underrated characteristic for anyone in SEO isn't technical prowess or keyword mastery—it's customer empathy

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for SEO and content strategy. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.

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The most underrated characteristic for SEO professionals isn't technical prowess or keyword mastery—it's customer empathy. This trait becomes even more vital when building product-led SEO strategies. Let's explore why.

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Customer empathy is not the ability to state that your SEO is user-centric; it is the ability to understand and share your target audience's feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Knowing thoughts and feelings goes far deeper than just doing keyword research and SEO audits to develop a strategy.

Why it matters

All search engines have become incredibly adept at understanding user intent. Just think about the ability to parse words, images, and long-form prompts into queries that users didn’t even type. AI doesn’t have empathy, but it can determine intent. By developing customer empathy, someone building an SEO strategy can better anticipate and address the real needs and the intent behind search queries rather than just matching keywords.

As an aside, this is why Reddit wins so many search queries. Their content is perfectly aligned with precisely what the user needs to know based on their query.

Empathy allows you to create content that genuinely resonates with your audience. Instead of churning out articles to hit keyword densities, you're producing resources that solve problems and add value to your readers' lives. To many, the SEO answer to every issue is a long-form article, while the better SEO solution might often be a video, image, or something else.

The how of empathy

Understanding customers also impacts design and layouts. Knowing what customers need on a website should dictate their experience. Whether they need case studies, image portfolios, video courses, or glossaries is all driven by customer empathy rather than a generic SEO effort.

Users know when the SEO meter is turned up and overdoing SEO not only doesn’t help your case with the audience, it hurts it. When you do precisely what your customer empathy tells you the user wants, you build authority as a credible and desirable resource for the problems you hope to solve.

When you consistently demonstrate that you understand and care about your audience's needs, you build trust. This improves direct engagement and leads to more links and, more importantly, positive word of mouth.

When customer empathy drives an SEO strategy, a site is less prone to algorithm impacts (they can still happen) because search engines desire to be that perfect resource to provide users exactly what they want. If your strategy is focused on empathy, your goals are the same as those of search engines, and you will be more resilient to algorithm updates that adjust to customer experiences.

Empathy is even more critical with product-led SEO

If you haven’t read my book, do so, but in a nutshell, I advocate for building SEO efforts around the user’s experience. You can have a product without customer empathy but won’t have product-led SEO.

The essential differentiation between good product-led SEO and not-so-great is product market fit. The audience has to want and use what you are offering. You can accidentally build a product with market fit, but if you want any chance at successfully intentionally creating a product with market fit, you need customer empathy to understand the user’s problems and develop a strategy to solve them.

With deep customer understanding, you can identify the exact language and terms your potential users use to search for solutions. This goes beyond traditional keyword research to uncover the nuanced ways people express their needs. It doesn’t matter what a tool tells you that a user is using if you know from your customer empathy work that they are using something else.

Some in SEO call these zero-volume keywords, which is a misnomer. There’s clearly volume for them; it's just that a tool didn’t pick up that volume because someone had not created a reason for the users to search for those queries.

Product-led SEO often involves creating content that showcases your product's features and benefits. Customer empathy ensures this content addresses real user needs and pain points, making it more likely to rank well and convert visitors.

Since SEO isn’t about driving clicks for fun, customer empathy will also dictate how you monetize and benefit from the search volume. Understanding your customers' mindset at each stage of this journey allows you to optimize content and CTAs effectively across every step.

Developing Customer Empathy for SEO

Go beyond demographic data. Use surveys and interviews to understand your audience's motivations, fears, and aspirations. The surveys and interviews don’t have to be that formal. In many cases, hearing the same anecdote will give you enough ideas to build off.

You can also gather data directly from the search results. Look deeper into search queries. What questions are people asking? What problems are they trying to solve? Use tools like Google's "People Also Ask" and related searches to gain insights.

Social media will also have many resources about users' problems and how you can solve them. Reddit might dominate search results unfairly, but we can at least acknowledge that it has a lot of helpful information for users. Go to the subreddits where your users hang out and learn from them.

You can ask AI the same questions you might ask in an interview, but try to validate whatever you learn from AI using other sources.

One of my favorite places to learn about users is from customer support data. Suppose you are fortunate enough to work in an environment with access to honest user feedback. In that case, this will be a treasure trove of helpful information about your users' problems with and without your solutions.

Lastly and most importantly, try to be your customer. You may not be the same age, gender, or anything similar to your customers, but try to walk a mile in their shoes. If you were them, what would you want? Buy your own products, navigate your site, and try to get support with issues from your support team. You may miss some insights that a real user might share, but you will inevitably find friction points you can solve in your SEO acquisition journey.

Implementing

• With a deep understanding of your customers, you can transform your SEO strategy:

• Keyword Strategy: Move beyond high-volume keywords to include long-tail phrases that match specific user intents and stages of the customer journey.

• Content Creation: Develop content that directly addresses user pain points and questions, providing genuine value beyond just ranking for keywords.

• User Experience: Design your website navigation and structure based on how your users think and search for information.

• Link Building: Create valuable resources that others naturally want to link to them based on your understanding of what your audience (and others in your industry) truly need.

Empathy is the Future of SEO

As your competitors gravitate towards using even more technology to separate them from your users, you can get ahead of them by going in the opposite direction and adding human emotion back into your SEO efforts.

The SEO leaders who will thrive in the future digital marketing landscape see beyond the data and metrics to the real people behind the searches. By cultivating and leveraging customer empathy, they'll not only improve their SEO results but also contribute more meaningfully to your users lives. .

As we move further into an era of personalized, intent-driven search, remember: the most powerful SEO tool isn't a software suite or analytics platform—it's your ability to understand, empathize with, and serve your customers.

Your empathy is more powerful than AI.

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