If you are an eCommerce entrepreneur, digital marketer, or are involved in digital marketing in any way, you must be aware of what SEO is and why it is important. Today, we have brought a new term that you can add to your digital dictionary—HEO. Read below to learn about what HEO is and how it is different from SEO.
Search engine optimization is an important function of an eCommerce organization. It is through optimizing your website for a search engine that you improve your virtual visibility and reach. And this is further important for effective lead generation and conversion. Therefore, SEO determines the success of your online business.
When aiming for a high ranking on search engines, optimizing content marketing is one of the basic steps. After all, Google indexes and positions your website primarily based on its content. If your content is just keywords stuffed blog, you may manage to appeal search engine bot but it won’t appeal to your visitors.
And that’s where HEO enters the equation.
What is HEO?
HEO is an acronym for Human Eye Optimization.
Optimizing for human eye? What does that even mean?
The objective of search engine optimization is to drive traffic to your website. But for generating quality leads and improving your conversion funnel, you need more than that.
HEO signifies such content creation practice that focuses on providing value to the visitors rather than merely satisfying the search engine bots.
Why is HEO important?
Hubspot’s Chief Technology Officer, Dharmesh Shah while speaking at Hubspot Inbound conference gave an interesting meaning for HEO. He referred to it as Human Enjoyment Optimization.
A person lands on your website from SERP when a search engine ranks it as such. How your keywords match with query terms greatly determine the indexing and positioning of your website. The searcher will be able to see the similarity between his/her query terms and your keywords highlighted in the SERP. Then, he or she may think that your website has the content they are looking for.
However, upon opening the link, if the searcher finds that the content is vaguely stuffed with keywords, he or she may get dissatisfied and bounce back to the SERP. Hence, it is important to create content that contains some actual value for your visitors. This is exactly what concerns HEO.
Human eye optimization takes care of your visitors after they have landed on the website. It takes into consideration the experience your visitors have with your content. The primary purpose of HEO is to make sure that your visitors find your content relevant, meaningful, and engaging.
This helps make sure that the visitor further engages with the website. As a result, your dwell time will be improved and your bounce rate will be checked. Moreover, it will help you generate quality leads. So, eventually, your conversion rates will increase.
This is why, HEO is important.
Now, this begs more questions. Is HEO as important as SEO? What is the relationship between HEO and SEO? Let’s find out.
SEO v/s HEO
The webpages in the top results get the most visits—which is a desirable thing for online businesses. Therefore, digital marketers try to optimize their website along with its content for search engines. Driving traffic on one’s website by improving search engine ranking and visibility, in a nutshell, is search engine marketing.
It is believed the greater traffic your website receives, the better your conversion funnel gets. However, this is only a half understanding of the whole thing.
Google’s primary aim is to improve the browsing experience of its users. It gives a higher ranking to those websites/pages that it thinks to provide the best content. However, what determines your website’s search engine ranking has essentially something to do with algorithms and machines. Hence, it can never entirely speak for your content’s quality. It can’t accurately determine how humans find your content.
And (as I have mentioned earlier), if your audience doesn’t enjoy your content, they won’t engage with your website further. Hence, they will naturally not become your buyers.
Therefore, it is crucial to take care of how your human visitors see your content. Human eye optimization is just the concept.
What is more important—SEO or HEO?
SEO drives the traffic on your website. While HEO makes sure that your visitors have a meaningful experience with your website content. Hence, both are important.
Also, SEO and HEO are both interdependent. If you don’t put enough effort into SEO, people will not be able to read your content and your HEO efforts will be useless. On the other hand, if your content is not optimized for human enjoyment, it will increase your bounce rate and decrease your dwell time. As a result, your SEO efforts will be undermined. This is again an undesirable scenario. Therefore, SEO and HEO are both important for an eCommerce organization.
If I say it in the words of Shah, “The way to win at SEO is to focus on HEO.”
Key Takeaway
SEO aims at improving the search engine ranking of your website to increase its inbound traffic. However, it mainly focuses on satisfying the search bot through effective keyword placement. Whereas, HEO ensures that visitors have a great experience with the website’s content. It is what helps make sure that your visitors further engage with your website. Therefore, if you actually want to improve your business’s lead generation and conversion funnel, you can do it with SEO alone. As Shah said, “don’t solve for the search engines but solve for the humans.” Although, it doesn’t mean that keyword placement is unimportant. It is as important as it has been. It’s just you can’t get the most of SEO in absence of HEO.
This article ends here. But don’t worry! We have more for you. Explore our blog to keep reading and stay tuned.
