How Would Search Engine Optimization Change if Google’s Algorithm Were Public?

As Google continues to battle lawsuits, there’s talk that it may be forced to reveal its algorithm. Could this actually happen? And what would change if it did?

Google May Be Forced to Reveal its Search Algorithm to an SEO, the headline on Search Engine Journal announces. 

For those not in the loop, back in 2012, a company called Foundem filed a suit against the search engine giant. A price comparison search engine, Foundem alleges that it was the victim of anti-competitive practices by Google in 2006. Specifically, it claims that Google intentionally manipulated its search engine results page (SERP) to bury the site. 

The accusation, notes SFGate, was tied to several algorithm changes that penalized sites with large quantities of duplicate content and changed how Google handled URL canonization—known respectively as Gilligan, Jagger, and Big Daddy, per Moz. At first glance, the whole suit may seem cut-and-dry. 

Foundem simply doesn’t want to acknowledge that its business model became irrelevant, which was ultimately the real reason it foundered, claims the International Center for Law & Economics.

The courts clearly disagreed, and the fact that Foundem continued to perform well in other search engines was admittedly suspicious. So it was that the two companies found themselves embroiled in a years-long legal dispute. And here’s where it gets interesting.

Let’s circle back to the Search Engine Journal piece we cited at the beginning. As part of the court proceedings, Google revealed documents detailing its algorithm to the court—confidentially, of course.  In April 2020, Foundem reportedly demanded that the company bring in SEO expert Philipp Kloeckner to interpret them.  

Google’s response, understandably, was that doing so would compromise the integrity of the entire search engine. Foundem responded that it could simply withdraw the documents afterward—seemingly forgetting the extreme competitive advantage Kloeckner would gain as a result of the process. It couldn’t withdraw them either, however—the documents were key to its defense.

And so it was that Google faced an ultimatum. If Google neither withdraws the documents nor consents to provide them to Kloeckner, the judge will simply give them to Kloeckner himself. And that could ultimately lead to the documents being released to the general public. 

We expect one of two things would happen as a result of this.

If we were to be optimistic, this could completely change the face of the web. Armed with a complete understanding of content quality and ranking signals, SEOs and marketers could create better, more relevant content than ever before. It would be a golden age for search.

If we’re being realistic? We’d probably regress to the early days of SEO—a chaotic mess where the SERP is poisoned by black hats and spammers. Not exactly ideal, in other words. 

Either way, we don’t think it’s likely that Google will reveal its algorithm. Far likelier that it will choose to withdraw the documents and eat the fine. That small dent in its revenue would be far smaller than the damage it would incur from its algorithm being made public.

Protecting Against SEO Poisoning

In recent months, a tactic from the earliest days of SEO has re-emerged. Here’s how you can deal with it, as both a website owner and an Internet user.

As the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. 

Unfortunately, that applies to the tactics used by cybercriminals just as much as it applies to legitimate businesses. It’s why distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks have been around for decades. And it’s why ransomware has changed so little over the years.

Sure, we’re seeing more sophisticated distribution tactics, but ultimately modern ransomware works nearly the same as ransomware from a decade ago.

With that in mind, it appears another blast from the past has started to re-emerge. At least a few of you probably remember the early days of search engine optimization (SEO). Back when search engines were akin to a virtual wild west, black hat tactics were the best way to rank. 

What Is SEO Poisoning? 

You likely also recall how many malicious websites rose to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), abusing SEO to serve poisoned results to users, hence the term SEO poisoning. It didn’t take long for Google and other search engines to release algorithm updates that shut down most of the shadier tactics. But just like life, criminals always find a way. 

Today, SEO poisoning takes a different form.

First, criminals create a website and take great pains to make it look as legitimate as possible. From there, they begin ‘trend chasing,’ leveraging their understanding of SEO in an effort to gain a prominent position on the SERP. There’s no limit to the number of keywords a single malicious domain may target in this manner.

Security firm Websense Security Labs estimates that these malicious websites represent as much as a quarter of the first page of search results for trending topics.

Generally, the objective is fraud or identity theft. Hackers will use the poisoned sites to steal the personal details of unsuspecting users. They might also inject ransomware onto a victim’s system, add another node to a botnet, or — if they’re lucky enough to infect a PC belonging to a webmaster — hijack another website to add to their malicious network. 

How Do I Protect Myself From SEO Poisoning? 

As with many types of cyberattacks, a little mindfulness goes a long way.

  • Be incredibly wary of opening a website you’ve never heard of before, particularly if you’re searching for a trending topic.
  • We also strongly recommend installing an up-to-date antivirus.
  • Use a password manager for both your personal accounts and your business accounts.
  • Keep all your software and systems up to date. 
  • It may be worthwhile to use a VPN or invest in a router that has built-in encryption. 
  • Consider installing an ad blocker and blocking scripts, as ad networks and malicious scripts are two prevalent delivery mechanisms.

If you own or operate a website, the same rules apply — remain vigilant, and put in the necessary work to keep your personal files and your professional data safe. 

Measuring the Return on Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts

Search engine optimization is a must for any business with a web presence. But how do you determine whether or not your efforts are bearing fruit?

As with any business initiative,  it’s crucial that you understand how to quantify the success of your search engine optimization efforts. Not only do you need to show leadership that your budget is generating tangible results, but you also need to calculate SEO’s return on investment for your own purposes. Consistent measurement of ROI can also help you identify weaknesses and shortcomings, and help you determine where your time (and money) should be directed. 

But how exactly do you measure the ROI of SEO? 

Nebulous Returns

From an ROI perspective, the issues with SEO are similar to those with marketing. Namely, while there are certain fixed costs and returns, as a whole, the core goals of SEO are difficult to express in concrete numbers. Concepts like brand awareness and organic visibility are inherently abstract.

With that said, it is possible to at least approximate them. 

SEO Metrics That Measure ROI

The first step in determining ROI is to figure out how much you’re spending on SEO. If you’ve hired a third-party agency, this is relatively easy to calculate. Just look at whatever you’re paying them. 

If you’re managing SEO internally, things get a bit more complicated, and you’ll need to look at a few different factors. 

  • How much time your staff is spending on SEO. This includes developers, designers, marketing specialists, etc. 
  • How much per hour each staff member is paid, on average. 
  • Subscription costs for any tools or platforms you’re using to inform your SEO efforts. 

With those numbers in mind, measure the following key performance indicators (KPIs) from the beginning of your SEO campaign to its end: 

  • Organic traffic. Self-explanatory. Traffic generated from the search engine results page (SERP).
  • Bounce rate. The number of people who visit your site and leave without performing any actions. Can be paired with time on site to identify potential bottlenecks. 
  • Organic impressions. How many people have seen your site on the SERPs. 
  • Organic click-through rate. The number of users who clicked your site on the SERP, measured against total impressions. 
  • Pages per session. How many pages a user views, on average. 
  • Conversions. Here’s where things get a bit complicated, as there are multiple ways you might define conversions. 
    • Sales. 
    • New subscribers. 
    • Sign-ups for mailing lists/asset downloads. 
    • Downloads. 
    • Social shares. 
    • Phone calls. 
    • Demo/proof of concept requests. 

One way to monitor the above is through conversion tracking. Google allows you to define certain actions as conversions, while also assigning a dollar value to each. Although this is typically intended for Google Ads, it can easily be applied to your site. 

Expressing the ROI of SEO

So, in light of the above, you can express the value of your SEO efforts in a few different ways: 

  • Percent increase/decrease. Applies to bounce rate, organic traffic, impressions, clickthrough, etc. 
  • Spend vs. Revenue. Specifically applies to conversions that involve monetary transactions. 
  • Volume. How much more traffic/how many more phone calls you’re receiving now versus when you started. 

What We Can Learn from Epic’s Attempt to Insert Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. in Fortnite

To say that Fortnite’s recent March Through Time was a mess would be putting it lightly. It’s a framework for how to fail at corporate social responsibility.

When developer and publisher Epic Games partnered with TIME Magazine and made the announcement, we thought at first that someone was having a laugh. Certainly, Fortnite is currently one of the most popular arena shooter video games on the market. And it’s true that the younger demographic is disproportionately represented in the title’s player-base. 

But Fortnite is also a game where colorful characters shoot at one another with absurd weapons whilst frantically building gravity-defying structures, competing to be the last one standing. It’s even hosted some virtual events in the past, like concerts.  If your first thought is that this doesn’t sound like the sort of platform one would use for the discussion of serious, sobering topics, that’s because it isn’t. 

The reality is that it is a successful Battle Royale game, nothing more.  

Yet reality didn’t stop Epic Games from proudly announcing at the end of last month that it was bringing the Doctor Martin Luther King Memorial to Fortnite. Community reactions ranged from confused to amused to profoundly dumbstruck. But the one thing everyone appeared to agree on was that this was a bad idea.

And it would, like any other shallow attempt by a business to appear socially responsible, backfire spectacularly. 

“You can’t sell licensed skins for your social Battle Royale Party one minute, then expect it to be a serious place to learn about history the next,” said games journalist Chris Franklin, posting to Twitter shortly after the announcement. “You can’t just place a somber reflection on race and history in America in the middle of your party time Battle Royale any more than you can comfortably hold a wake in a Chuck E. Cheese.” 

To make matters worse, the initial launch of the event was quite poorly managed. Initially, as reported by The Gamer, the developer forgot to remove emotes on the map. Anyone who joined was faced with athletes, superheroes, supervillains, and more dancing and spamming emojis during MLK’s iconic speech. 

Although Epic disabled all other emotes for the event, the “Whiplash” emote was left untouched. Some fans speculated that this was due to a pre-existing agreement with DC Comics, but per CBR, this claim has yet to be verified.  The company further tried to drum up interest in the event by promising a free “DC ’63” spray that players could use as part of the regular game. 

Unsurprisingly, both the Martin Luther King Jr. Center and King’s daughter Bernice King disavowed the event, saying they had no direct involvement in the collaboration. 

Through its collaboration with TIME Magazine, Epic Games doubtless wanted to present itself as socially conscious — to demonstrate that it understands the nuances of race relations. Instead, it came off as cynical, tone-deaf, and disrespectful. 

On the plus side, we can use Epic’s failure to compile a list of how not to run a corporate social responsibility initiative: 

  • Understand the limitations of your platform. Don’t try to shoehorn in social commentary where it has no place being. There’s a time and place for certain conversations.  
  • Know your brand. Epic Games hasn’t exactly had an excellent reputation for the past several years. From trying to present itself as the counter-cultural underdog in its legal battle against Apple to its shady practices with its digital storefront, the brand is not trusted by most of its core audience. 
  • Get buy-in from the right people.  If no one on your marketing team has a personal stake in a particular cause, then find someone who does. Bring in a paid consultant who can help ensure you get things right. 
  • Plan for everything, then plan some more. Especially when dealing with highly-sensitive issues, you cannot afford to put in a middling effort. You must go above and beyond to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. Because if you don’t, it will blow up in your face. 

Not all marketing ideas are winners. Ultimately, March Through Time is one event that, in our opinion, should have been left on the cutting room floor. 

How Frequently Should You Re-Optimize Old Content?

Even evergreen content needs to be refreshed now and then. But how does search engine optimization fit into that? And how can you tell it’s time to revisit?

Evergreen.

It’s a word coveted by every content creator in some way or another. Content that transcends the typical news cycle. Content that perpetually delivers value to your audience.

Content that organically remains high on the search engine results page, even long after publication. 

There’s something that you need to understand about this type of content, however. Publishing an evergreen piece doesn’t mean you can simply fire and forget. Even evergreen content needs to be evaluated and revisited on occasion.

The trick is figuring out when you should do that and when it’s better to simply leave something alone.  

If you have the bandwidth for it, it’s generally advisable to evaluate the performance of each page on your site every six months. Examine historical data, and focus on pages that appear to be struggling, particularly those that were performing well immediately after publication. 

A downturn in traffic or a slipping PageRank indicates that a page is due for reoptimization. This could involve anything from fixing broken links and images to improving page performance. With that said, it’s important to understand that a slight decline in traffic isn’t unusual — given enough time, traffic to older pages will inevitably begin to trend downward. 

 It’s also important to understand that declining performance or traffic may not be a search engine optimization issue but rather a problem with the content itself. 

Your content, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. As a content creator, you need to pay attention to emerging trends in your niche as well as the wider world. Consider, for instance, how much things have changed as a direct result of COVID-19. 

A blog post published prior to the pandemic may well contain outdated information or factual inaccuracies. It’s advisable to always keep an ear to the ground so that you can update old content accordingly. How extensive these changes should be largely depends on the nature of the content. 

In some cases, you might need to completely rewrite or revise an old piece, as it’s no longer relevant or accurate. In other cases, it could be as simple as adding a sentence about quarantine to an article on remote work or mentioning travel restrictions when giving advice on business trips. It’s something you’ll need to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

Beyond the two scenarios described above, the old adage applies — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There’s no need to fiddle with the SEO of a page that’s performing well.  Trying to revise a piece without good reason is not only a waste of time and effort, but could actually end up being an act of self-sabotage. 

Ultimately, just use your best judgment, and you should be fine. 

5 Alternatives Marketers Can Use Instead of Facebook

Facebook has long been a necessary evil. But now, it may be time for marketers to drop Facebook for good. Here are a few places you can go instead.

Facebook has been going the way of MySpace for a while now. 

We might as well get that out in the open now. For most of us, marketing on the social network is viewed, at best, as a necessary evil. With any luck, it may not be necessary for much longer.

It’s no secret that Facebook has been in trouble lately, nor the reasons. An unreliable community standards algorithm that unevenly and often unjustly doles out punishment. A suite of business tools that could charitably be described as cumbersome. Advertising policies that seemingly apply to some, but not others. 

All tied together by a complete and utter lack of any meaningful user support — it’s almost ironic that, as reported by Bloomberg, the social network released a suite of new customer service tools in June. 

That’s not even getting into the ongoing case involving whistleblower Frances Haugen, who, per CNN, has released tens of thousands of internal documents. In addition to providing demonstrable proof of the harm the company causes, Haugen’s leaked documentation also revealed that Facebook is bleeding younger users at an alarming rate — and that’s when they create an account at all. According to The Verge, there’s also the matter of the recent outage that showed just how poorly-managed the company really is, with its engineers requiring angle grinders to gain access to the server room.  

Taken together, the above makes three things abundantly clear. 

  • Facebook is an unreliable platform for advertising and marketing. 
  • Advertisers looking to target Gen Z aren’t going to find their audience on Facebook. 
  • The atmosphere cultivated by Facebook’s algorithms is no longer conducive to a positive customer experience. 

It’s time to diversify. Although Facebook’s size means it’s a bad idea to abandon it entirely just yet, the writing on the wall is clear. The world’s largest social network is rapidly going the way of MySpace — intelligent advertisers must prepare now. 

With that in mind, here are five compelling alternatives to advertising on Facebook. 

Streaming Media

Unsurprisingly, streaming platforms like Twitch, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video enjoyed enormous success during the pandemic. Although not all streaming services support paid advertising, a well-placed ad on the right streaming service could be immensely valuable. Just be sure you keep things short, simple, and direct. 

Snapchat & TikTok

According to marketing research from analyst YPulse, visual social platforms have rapidly overtaken Facebook in popularity amongst users aged 13-25. TikTok is among the fastest-growing of these, with YouTube and Snapchat close behind. If your goal is to engage with the younger demographic, these are the places you need to be. 

Google

The world’s largest search engine is an advertising powerhouse. Between Google My Business, Google Ads, and YouTube, Google’s properties represent arguably one of the most compelling alternatives to Facebook. Their reach is unmatched, and if you know what you’re doing, they can be every bit as valuable as Facebook. 

Reddit

Reddit styles itself the front page of the Internet for a reason. It’s an excellent place to promote your brand with an incredibly engaged and active community and a subreddit for nearly every interest you can imagine. Just make sure you aren’t going for too hard a sell. 

It’s Time to Diversify

Amidst all the scandals and the growing awareness of how exhausting Facebook can be, the social network is fading slowly into obscurity. And although it isn’t likely to die off anytime soon, that doesn’t mean it will remain dominant. It’s worth remembering, after all, that MySpace still exists too.   

3 Things to Know About SEO for Nonprofits

Effective search engine optimization is just as important for nonprofits as for other sectors. Here’s some advice to help you master it for yours.

Your cause is admirable. Whether through personal investment or a simple desire to help, you want to change the world for the better. To succeed, however, you’re going to need more than good intentions. You need to understand how to get the word out about your cause — how to draw in prospective donors and differentiate yourself from competing nonprofits in your sector. 

Search engine optimization is absolutely crucial in that regard. 

“People who care about a social issue or cause are very likely to use search engines to find relevant information about it,” reads a blog post by strategic design firm Forum One. “Having your site listed within the top results can increase visibility and drive in relevant, high-quality traffic.  Together, with the right content and calls-to-action on your web pages, search engine optimization (SEO)  is one of the best ways to spread your mission’s story.” 

Right. We’ve established the importance of SEO to your nonprofit. But how exactly can you implement it in a way that furthers your cause? 

Let’s talk about that — here are three things you need to know about SEO in the nonprofit sector. 

Content is King

In the early days of SEO, tactics such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming were a legitimate means of traffic generation. These days, they won’t get you anywhere. On the contrary, they’re far likelier to get your site hit with massive penalties. 

Google doesn’t care if a page is an exact match for a particular keyword or keyphrase. What it cares about is if that page matches both the phrase and the intent behind it. See, while keywords and the like are still important, content is what truly matters. 

So with that in mind, compelling content is and will always remain your best bet and bringing in donations and generating buzz. Craft content that meshes with what your audience wants to see, and you might be surprised at the impact it has. Examples include: 

  • Newsletters and posts that update donors about the progress of your initiatives
  • Information about your cause
  • Guidelines for how people can contribute if they don’t have money to donate
  • Educational resources around your cause

Local SEO Is a Powerful Tool

Unless you’re a major, international nonprofit, there’s a good chance that the vast majority of your donors are going to be from your city or region. For that reason, it’s imperative that you master local SEO. The good news is that this isn’t especially difficult.

You just need to make sure you’ve seen to the following:  

  • Create a Google My Business page for your charity with as much information as possible. 
  • Make sure you have Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) information on every single page of your site. It should be extremely easy for prospective donors to get in touch with you. 
  • Optimize your content with city or region-specific keywords and references. 

There’s No Substitute for Knowing Your Audience

Who are your donors? Why do they support your cause? What can you do to inspire them to donate? 

These are the three most important questions for any nonprofit to answer. Knowledge of your audience is the foundation of all marketing, from SEO to content creation to social outreach. You can craft the perfect narrative to get your donors on board and keep them invested if you understand what motivates them. 

Making The Right Choices

You want to change the world for the better. The first step is getting the word out about your cause. SEO is the best way to do that.

And now, you have some basic knowledge to get you started in that regard. 

What Can You Do if Google Displays The Wrong Title on the SERP?

We’ve received a sobering reminder that no matter what we do, our search engine optimization efforts are ultimately at Google’s mercy. At least that’s the message the search engine giant sent in August. Midway through the month, SEO experts noticed some massive changes to how titles were generated on the search engine results page, as reported by Search Engine Journal.

Rather than pulling SERP headlines from a page’s title tag, Google instead began replacing them with everything from H1 tags to anchor text from internal links. Per Search Engine Land, it didn’t take long for the company to confirm that yes, it had indeed changed how SERP titles were generated. It claimed that its algorithms now generate titles that describe what a page is actually about — regardless of the query or title tag.

There’s just one problem. Evidence suggests that, at least in this case, those algorithms aren’t exactly working as intended. Some of the changes seem, to put it bluntly, absolutely nonsensical — one expert noted an instance where they replaced a page’s title text with copy from a completely different page.  

At first glance, this seems like a huge problem. After all, what’s the point of planning out metadata like title tags if Google is simply going to ignore it? As is often the case, however, there’s a bit more going on here than one might at first assume.

First and foremost is the fact that, according to Google, 80% of results will still use your title tag on the SERP. This means that instances where Google uses a different or ‘wrong’ tag will be relatively rare. Google further lists a few specific cases in which it will replace the title tag:

  • It’s too long
  • It’s stuffed with keywords
  • It’s boilerplate, containing generic copy or lacking keywords

“A focus on good HTML title tags remains valid,” the company maintains. “Our main advice…to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used.” 

Further, as noted by SEO expert Brodie Clark, most scenarios in which Google replaces a page’s title tags actually end up being beneficial.  For the most part, the changes end up being an improvement, providing “a better preview of the content to come.” And in the rare cases where they end up being detrimental, a site owner’s best bet is to take a step back and re-evaluate.

And more importantly, to double-check that their existing HTML titles follow SEO best practices.  

5 Excellent Tips To Help You Do SEO on a Budget

Search engine optimization needn’t break the bank. If you know what you’re doing, it can be done without spending a cent. Here are some tips to help you do so.

Search engine optimization (SEO) need not break the bank — and anyone who tries to tell you it does is in all likelihood trying to sell you something. While it’s certainly true that there’s no shortage of premium SEO tools available, they mostly just cut down on a lot of work you’d otherwise need to do manually. And while there are certainly SEO firms that can do an excellent job of managing your website, you don’t strictly need them in order to succeed. 

It’s entirely possible to take care of all the SEO on your website while barely spending a cent — here are some tips to help you do exactly that. 

Leverage Your Own Expertise With a Blog

Here’s a question for you — what are you good at? What skills do you possess that the layperson lacks? What might you be able to teach others if you took the opportunity to share your expertise? 

Whatever your business or industry, you’re bound to know something you can share with your audience. Something they might be interested in learning. Translating that into a thought leadership blog could be a valuable means of bringing in new traffic, particularly if you’re keyed into the kinds of questions your audience is asking. 

Use Any of a Number of Free SEO Tools

Just because there’s such a wealth of premium tools available on the web, that doesn’t mean you’re completely adrift if you don’t use them. There are actually quite a few free tools that can help you achieve most of what you could with a paid subscription if used in tandem with one another. Some examples include: 

Draw in Traffic With User-Generated Content

Depending on your industry, you might actually be able to create some buzz on social media through your audience itself. Not only will this show other people that you have an audience engaged enough to actively work with your brand, but it also shows that your brand is trustworthy and open to conversation. Plus, if a contest or campaign on social media goes viral, you’re looking at a massive influx of traffic. 

Pay Attention to Local SEO

Local SEO is unique in that it doesn’t actually require much in the way of expenditure. All you really need to do is fill out your Google My Business page. Once that’s done, simply ensure you have your business’s name, address, and phone number on each page of your website, and keep an eye on local reviews. 

Manually Take Care of Internal SEO

For most smaller websites, internal/technical SEO isn’t terribly difficult to manage. Particularly if you’re using a content management system like WordPress, you’ll have access to multiple plugins that allow you to take care of everything from website performance to mobile friendliness to your sitemap. And if you’re uncertain where to start, tutorials like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO can be a great help.  

Exploring the Link Between Marketing and Psychology

What do marketing and psychology have to do with one another? A great deal more than you might expect. In many ways, they’re two sides of the same coin.

Ask anyone who works in marketing why they decided to pursue that particular career path, and you’ll receive a multitude of answers. 

Some people will maintain that they enjoy the opportunity to flex their creativity; they enjoy the fact that they essentially are paid to create art. Others enjoy the mercurial nature of the profession, the fact that no two days are exactly the same. Still, more love how fast-paced the industry tends to be and that it allows them to blaze from one deadline to the next (often procrastinating until the last minute all the while). 

But one of the most common answers is that marketing involves people. 

Figuring out how an audience thinks and what they want. Determining the best way to build a relationship between a brand and its customers. Crafting compelling messaging that fascinates people enough to convert. 

In other words, getting inside each consumer’s mind and figuring out how they think, how they feel, what they’re interested in, and ultimately, what makes them tick. There’s something exciting about that. And something is satisfying about finishing a project and watching as it successfully creates engagement. 

The connection between marketing and psychology is about more than satisfaction, though. Learning more about how people think goes a long way towards being better at your job. The deeper your understanding of the human mind, the more effective your marketing will become. 

As it stands, there are already multiple psychological principles underlying the profession — you probably even encounter several of them in your day-to-day without realizing it: 

  • Priming. Exposure to one stimulus influences how you react to another. This comes into play with everything from a brand’s language to the colors/layout of its website. 
  • Social proof. The idea is that people make decisions based on the actions of others. Social shares, reviews, and word-of-mouth marketing are all examples of social proof in play. 
  • Reciprocity. When someone gives you a gift or does a good deed, you feel compelled to return the favor.  Most commonly comes into play with free gifts/offers. 
  • Loss aversion. Simply put, when given a choice between loss and gain, people will choose to gain. In marketing, this might involve selling subscription services or free trials. 
  • Anchoring bias. The first piece of information someone sees will influence how they evaluate further information. This is why most stores display the original price of a product next to the sale price. 
  • Verbatim effect. People are likely to remember the gist of what they’ve been told rather than the exact wording. 
  • Scarcity. People are likely to make a snap decision on a purchase if what they’re buying is of limited quantity. They’re also likely to rank a scarcer product more highly. 
  • Decoy effect. When a customer is choosing between two options, the introduction of a third, less compelling option will make them likelier to choose a more expensive option. 
  • Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Essentially, this refers to selective attention. When you see or hear about a particular product, you’re likely to start noticing it in advertisements and the like.
  • Clustering. The tendency of people to group similar words and concepts together in their short-term memory. 

What we’ve listed above is just a small sampling. There are other concepts at play, as well. But that should be enough to give you an idea of how much interplay there is between the two disciplines. And with that, we’ll leave off with a bit of advice on how you can amp up your knowledge of psychology to become a better marketing professional. Here’s the good news. Especially in the wake of COVID, there are a ton of free educational resources available online to help you learn more about the human mind — we recommend EdX in particular.