Engaging your website users with content and website mascots

Lateley we’ve been investing quite a bit of time into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in order to create leads. Why? Well, it seems to be more effective and it’s definitely cheaper than buying real estate in a mag.

Have you ever been to the airport news stand and to kill time you pick up a mag just because the picture looked cool? Perhaps it was the super duper car on the cover, or maybe it was that knock out from the opposite sex with little clothing. In any case what the magazine did was engage the emotional part of your brain (from what I gather its the hypothalamus that regulates this stuff) and it got you to read some of it, and if the content was good enough, you may have even bought the thing.

Here’s the mascot from Mail Chimp:

Search engines however aren’t very emotional, don’t think we’re there yet. Search engines (a.k.a. Google, personally I’m not so interested in organic placement with Bing) love text and lots of it. Keywords, linked sites, references, fresh content. They even like keywords that are bold and underlined. They also like videos, images, and other types of content, as long as they are tagged correctly. Apparently they even measure how frequently you update your site, look at your URLs and who knows what else. So in order for you to position your website on the first page of Google’s results it’s important to update your website content frequently and consistently with relevant and fresh content. You also need to try to have other heavily trafficked sites link to yours.

Here’s a mascot from Silver Back:

But, search engines don’t really care about how cute your website mascot is. But humans do! Once you find what you are looking for, its nice to see a site that engages your emotions, for better or for worse. But I bet if you did run into a site with a memorable website mascot and then ran into another site without one, you would remember the funny Buddha or soothing Silverback instead of site overloaded with content.

Once the user engages your site emotionally, it’s much easier to engage the user and set calls to action, such as registrations, free trials, downloads and perhaps even purchases.

It’s something that’s worked for us, hopefully it will work for you as well!