One of the first lessons of good SEO is to learn to think with the minds (and words) of those doing the internet searches. And that can differ greatly from audience to audience. While women tend to search and gather more information about a given topic online, using more words to define what they're looking for in longer sentences, opening many new search tabs, men are four times more likely to explore search results that are lower down on the screen, worse positioned, reports QuarityQuest. They open, on average, three times more pages than women and spend more time searching.
Knowing how to present your site taking into account the search path of both men and women is an important exercise to ensure that organic searches arrive exactly where your product is. What we see, however, is that this more refined work does not always occur, relegating the female audience to the background, despite their digital consumption growing in importance. According to a Statista research, in Brazil, women already represent 49.9% of the digital audience in smartphones (the main internet access device in the country). In the case of desktops, they hold 49% of accesses.
It happens that, to think like a woman, the ideal is... to be a woman. The problem is that a good part of the professionals dedicated to SEO are still mostly men. A recent survey (State of SEO 2020) indicates that their presence among the teams dedicated to strengthening the organic search of websites are mostly male. Of the 652 SEOs who participated in the study, 191 identified themselves as women (29.3%) and 446 identified themselves as men (68.4%). This difference is accentuated in Latin America: 83.3% of respondents presented themselves as male and only 16.7% as female.
The under-representation of women in SEO teams is such a serious issue that it merited Search Engine Journal 's tips for them to earn their rightful place in the SEO industry, balancing the industry. In fact, these tips apply to everyone, of any gender. Check it out:
- Keep your track record of success based on measurable data at hand
- Be confident in yourself and fight the "impostor syndrome
- Communicate and disseminate your skills clearly
- Review annually the prices paid for your services
- Keep building your skills and networking
- When negotiating, prove your professional growth through data: keep track of successful projects and results achieved
- Focus on the arguments about the value you bring to customers
- Don't be afraid to negotiate a bit more to get the right price, or to give up work that isn't worth it
- Know how much you want to earn and know how to ask the right questions
- Project for yourself your ideal professional trajectory and conquer it step by step until you get there
For our part, here's a tip: the more pluralistic your SEO team's outlook is, the greater the chances of you better capturing the nuances of specific segment searches, including the important female audience. It's worth thinking about it and refining your site and landing pages for an audience that represents about half of all internet searches.