Language, Art & Culture: SEO Lessons from a Cultural Anthropology Textbook (for Keywords, Content, Images & Page Experience)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
Welcome to another week of Hamsterdam Marketing! 🐹
If you’re new here, this is where we look at general marketing or social sciences topics and relate them back to SEO strategies to broaden our skills as holistic marketers.
To that end, I think anthropology holds particular value for us.
This week, we’ll look at a cultural anthropology textbook to glean insights for:
First, here’s a little context for why I chose this topic.
A few years back, I bought a cultural anthropology textbook on Kindle and kind of forgot about it. 📚
I got reminded of it this week and figured now was a good time to dust it off and see what lessons it may hold.
In this post, we’ll look at the broader implications of cultural anthropology for SEO strategies, with practical lessons.
We’ll be referencing excerpts from “Cultural Anthropology: 12th Edition” by Serena Nanda and Richard L. Warms.
All the quotes you’ll see below are from this book (unless otherwise noted).
The book was published in 2019, so while it references the internet and other technology, it doesn’t speak to how our lives have changed from LLMs.
But that’s ok, because we’re focusing on general themes of language 🗣️, art 🎨, and culture 🌏.
These will align with the SEO topics mentioned earlier — keywords, content, images, and page experience.
Before we get to the SEO lessons, let’s set the stage with a discussion about language, cultural change, and website content (and audiences). 😉
“Language and human culture evolved together,” the authors write.
“The more elaborate the culture of our human ancestors grew, the more complex the system of communication among them had to become. Conversely, increases in the sophistication of communication led to increases in the complexity of culture.”
Let’s revisit that second line: “increases in the sophistication of communication led to increases in the complexity of culture.”
A perfect segue into our first theme …
We’re entering what I consider a “platinum age” of unified scholarship. 🧠
The “platinum age,” it’s a concept I recently mentioned in another blog post, where I discussed the history of how Arabic became a unified language of scholarship.
Essentially, I feel LLMs present similar possibilities again today, except more broadly and consequentially.
This evolution applies to businesses, websites, and their users, and thus it influences how we might approach SEO strategies. (I hope to expand on this topic separately soon!)
I also don’t think everyone has quite grasped yet how much society is on the cusp of dramatic change.
And, in many ways, already has changed.
Yes, good sir. 🙂
Seems a touch dramatic …
(Great movie, though.)
Here’s an example of what I mean, though, from real life:
I was speaking with someone this week who runs a program for mentoring refugee children in the U.S.
Many of these kids are falling behind in school because they don’t speak English yet.
To me, it feels like aspects of that problem can be more immediately solvable.
For example, I told this person, “We can use the ChatGPT mobile app as a translator during tutoring.”
Here’s an example of what I was referring to:
(My wife and I experimented with doing this on the day GPT-4o rolled out, having a conversation in Arabic and English. It was pretty seamless.)
This person replied, “Oh, that sounds fascinating, but they need to learn English.”
Yes, I thought, similarly to how we need to learn math with a smartphone with a calculator app or Siri in our pocket …
Granted, they had a point.
They also had little or no conception of what ChatGPT was.
That will change soon, I imagine.
Yes, we’re with you, good sir.
But really, let’s think about this “platinum age” concept a bit more for a second …
Soon, no matter what language, reading level, or educational background someone has, LLMs will be able to share ideas between us all. 🤝
We’re already there, basically.
It’s now just figuring out the practicalities and fine-tuning (so to speak) of it all.
You say you’re an engineer who speaks Hindi but needs to explain how vector embeddings work to a French pastry chef?
Done.
I didn’t study French, so I’m very curious to know what that says above.
I also feel like seeing it translated as a comic strip. Anyone else?
Done.
Well, as I said, we’re close, but not there yet.
Ok, ok. We hear you, good sir! 😉
But here’s something else about those last examples we just saw, they’re kind of stereotypes.
Stereotypes can stem from feelings of cultural superiority.
It’s called ethnocentrism:
And we all do it, to a degree.
Think about the villains of popular action movies, for example.
Remember Drago, the Soviet opponent in Rocky IV?
Compare that to the opponent in Ip Man 2, a Chinese action franchise:
It flows in all directions.
(It’s also not inherently negative; check out how this Pakistani cricket fan describes Americans, for example, haha.)
The point is, our worldviews are learned and perpetuated through culture.
Just like our language:
“The human instinct is to learn the language of the group into which the individual is socialized. There is no biological basis for learning one language over another …
Although it has a clear biological basis, speech must be learned as part of a speech community, a group of people who share a set of norms and rules for the use of language …
Thus, although the actual process of learning to produce grammatical speech is largely a function of biology, learning to be a member of a speech community is clearly a function of culture.”
But how do language and culture relate back to SEO strategies?
Let’s dig into the practical lessons from cultural anthropology a bit more.
First, we’ll set the stage by recalling this line from earlier:
“Increases in the sophistication of communication led to increases in the complexity of culture.”
In our first Hamsterdam Marketing post, we talked about personas, and the risks of stereotypes that can emerge from creating them with limited data.
We see above how those can be represented. Ethnocentrism is a topic to be mindful of, and that’s why I called it out. (The opposite is cultural relativism.)
However, I chose that example about vector embeddings from earlier for another reason, as well.
Dense vector representations (like word, sentence, or document embeddings) get us at the idea of focusing on semantics (the meaning of words) rather than keywords in our SEO content.
Semantics is part of the structure of every language.
“The structure of any language consists of four subsystems: phonology (a system of sounds), morphology (a system for creating words from sounds), syntax (a system of rules for combining words into meaningful sentences), and semantics (a system that relates words to meaning).”
Syntax and semantics are both important to natural language processing (NLP), and thus for search engines and AI chatbots.
As two researchers, Dr. Krishna Karoo and Mr. Meghraj Jogi, explain in an NLP paper for the International Journal of Research Publication and Reviews:
“At the core of NLP lie two fundamental processes: syntactic analysis and semantic analysis. These processes are the key to unraveling the intricate web of language structure and meaning.”
– Syntactic and Semantic Analysis in Natural Language Processing: Unveiling the Underlying Mechanisms
Specifically to Google Search, we can recall Pandu Nayak’s examples of how BERT models improved search results based on better language understanding from a 2019 blog post in The Keyword:
I’ve written about how “SEO content” has evolved and what possibilities this post-HCU era (as I call it) invites for content creativity.
On the topic of language more broadly, though, we can see why syntax and semantics matter for conveying the meaning of web (or social) content to users and search engines like Google or chatbots like Gemini, and how the latter can interpret content meaning with greater nuance, given dense embeddings from attention in transformer-based models.
Furthermore, we can use language and culture in word choice (keyword selection) in our SEO strategies.
Here are some themes from the textbook to set this topic off:
“We have been describing the structure of language. However, language is much more than its structure. …
Words are signs … broken into two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word itself. The signified is the thing, action, or quality to which the word refers. …
Signifiers have both denotative and connotative meanings. The denotative meaning is the rose itself–simply a flower. But in our culture … It has other complex cultural meanings associated with it, including love, passion, and many other things. … connotative meanings are deeply cultural, often multilayered, and vary enormously from place to place and time to time.”
While keywords may not play all the same roles they did in SEO years ago (and we also have more avenues for content topic research, I’d argue), they still provide insight into what users are searching for online and how SEO strategies can facilitate those goals on behalf of business objectives.
Keyword research might influence site architectures, page topics, or vocabulary choices, for example.
I brought up the example of vocabulary choices in a recent Hamsterdam news recap for the word “ecommerce,” and how its spelling with no hyphen has a higher U.S. search volume:
In that case, using one or the other might not matter to a user, as there’s no connotative difference.
How about an example like “solicitor” and “lawyer,” though? 🧑💼
“Solicitor” might sound different to say in the U.S.:
Whereas the opposite might be true in the U.K.:
Basing word choices on the audience’s cultural understanding of language (whether it’s at an international or a sub-cultural level) can be the difference between targeting keywords or creating truly helpful, people-first content — the difference between basic and more advanced SEO strategies.
But beyond word choice, culture and language can apply to brand voice, too.
Google has a patent for author vectors, for example, which describes embeddings that capture an author’s writing style.
More generally, having a distinctive voice as an author or a brand is a component of a holistic marketing strategy.
This is especially true in an age of AI-generated content. 🤖
It’s not that AI-generated content isn’t good, necessarily; it’s that it lacks soul. 🫶
A reader’s cultural knowledge can pick up on that.
“Everyone speaks with an accent. That is, they speak their language with a particular set of phonemes. … In addition to marking group membership, our speech and our writing contain mannerisms that are ours alone. We may favor certain words or combinations of words. We may even use particular forms of punctuation.”
There’s a lot more that can be said on this topic, especially related to dynamics of social classes and stigmatization — ever hear someone call speech “proper” or not?
But the general takeaway for our SEO content is not only that we should account for syntactic and semantic word meanings and relevant word choices for audiences, but we should also remember “the voice” of a brand or author can have cultural significance.
This can extend to slight imperfections, or let’s call them “quirks,” as well.
Back when I was a grant writer (in my pre-marketing days), a reviewer once told me they’d toss out any application that had spelling errors.
“If you can’t spellcheck, how can we trust you to spend our money?” they said.
Well, I’d argue the person writing the grant probably isn’t making the spending decisions …
But more broadly in a marketing context, to err is human.
One thing about ChatGPT, it doesn’t misspell words.
I’m not saying we should have bad grammar intentionally. 😅 If you’re a finance company talking about a mortgage or something in a YMYL category, that wouldn’t be a good look.
However, if you’re a dog trainer, or even a pediatrician or a lawyer, and your grammar isn’t completely correct, or you have a typo or two, that could signal the humanity of your words.
Maybe the reader holds it against you, or maybe they trust your content as having the integrity of your genuine voice.
Syntax, semantics, word choice and style, they can all convey cultural importance to your audience.
All I’m saying is strategize accordingly. 😎
Lastly, beyond language, art also matters in a cultural context.
“Although artistic expression is universal, creative expression in different cultures attaches to different aspects of culture and has different meanings. … The arts are a means of using symbols to interpret the world. Art expresses the basic themes, values, and perceptions of reality in ways that are culturally meaningful.”
In the realm of SEO, we may not be painting or writing poetry, but we do make artistic judgments, like about the elements of website pages.
Perhaps the most notable examples are website images and other visual media.
Have you ever published a page or blog post that required a featured image, so you went to a stock image library or, more likely these days, a generative AI tool to get one.
Maybe you chose an image because the description or your prompt contained relevant keywords. Maybe you selected the image with considerations for representation. Maybe it was just the first image available.
You may have seen meaning in that image.
What’s important to remember is that your audience may not see it the same way.
“Because artistic performances and products emerge from widely shared cultural themes, the arts can heighten the feeling of belonging to a particular group by generating intense emotions. Thus, art forms are not only mirrors of culture but also heighten cultural and social integration by displaying and confirming the values that members of a society hold in common.”
I’ve seen cases where stock imagery was added to pages to break up text, with no consideration for how it impacted the user’s experience or perceptions of the content beyond that.
Not only do words on the page matter, but the visuals associated with them do, as well.
It all contributes meaning.
When images, videos, and other visual elements fit a page’s context, add value to the experience, or evoke helpful emotions or associations, that can be a powerful component of an advanced SEO strategy.
Art also applies to page experience, or layouts themselves.
After all, what good is creating helpful content with information gain if no visitor sticks around long enough to enjoy it. 🤔
In an SEO context, page experience can refer to Core Web Vitals, mobile friendliness, or making the main content of a page easily findable, as per Google’s documentation.
What I’m speaking of here, though, are broader choices around details like paragraph length, font, text size, bullet points, headings, pull quotes, bolding, italics, highlights, etc.
These all contribute to a user’s experience and may have implicit significance.
“Symbols also have the ability to condense meaning. People may take a single symbol and make it stand for an entire constellation of ideas and emotions.“
Just ask different generations how they feel about certain emojis. 😉
Or we can recall this example from a Mad Men episode (paraphrasing here):
- Where are you going?
- Where are you going?
- Where are you going?
Same words; three distinct meanings.
Let’s get to a few quick takeaways.
We’ve discussed how cultural anthropology can teach us advanced ways to approach practical and holistic aspects of SEO strategies for keywords, content, images, and page experience.
In short, cultural knowledge can be the difference between doing “SEO strategy” and “SEO strategy“:
Or putting it another way …
It’s the difference between knowing who we expect an audience to be:
And who they really are:
See you next time!
Thanks for reading this Hamsterdam Marketing lesson around cultural anthropology and SEO strategies!
In truth, this covered a fraction of the notes I jotted down from the textbook, so I might expand this later or do some follow-up posts.
Feel free to comment with your thoughts (or contact me about them) or check out related posts below.
Until next time, enjoy the vibes:
Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂
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