This article is about using Microsoft Clarity to understand your website’s users better and then update content accordingly for SEO goals — what I call making content more “helpful.”
Before we get to the main content of this post, though, I want to share a few details with you for context.
This was one of my website’s earliest blog posts, originally published on March 7th, 2021.
At that time, I was about 5 or 6 years into my SEO career and still working at agencies.
My focus wasn’t really on building a personal website, but rather experimenting on a few techniques that I could take back to clients for their strategies.
That’s still much the same philosophy I have today — I call part of my website an “SEO playground” — but as an independent consultant today, I have more freedom to create content.
Blogging has become a bigger focus for me, and I try to work on new content weekly.
It’s in a section of my blog called Hamsterdam Marketing, which is itself a spin-off project of my main Hamsterdam page for weekly SEO news recaps.
Part of my blogging efforts is also to update existing content, making sure the information is current. I’m also constantly finding new ways to improve the helpfulness of my content (what I define as a time-to-value ratio).
However, this “SEO Anthropology” article has a special place in my heart for being one of the original blog posts on my website. It was also related to one of my first times publishing SEO content on another platform (in this case, 2021 SEO trends for Rank Ranger).
I’ve updated this post a few times already, and to be honest, I see a lot of ways I could improve the writing, formatting, and expand on information.
That said, I’d prefer to preserve many of the original qualities of this post for nostalgic reasons. So while I like to think my blogging abilities have improved since publishing this, I’d still like to present it how it largely was back in 2021.
Please enjoy the article. 🙂
“SOCRATES: It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it should be a matter of taking into one’s eyes that which is up there outside the cave, in the light of the sun.“
What I call “SEO anthropology” refers to using screen recordings of real website users from Microsoft Clarity to understand how your content satisfies their needs.
This is designed to find opportunities to improve your content by making it more helpful and people-first, which results in better engagement, user satisfaction, and alignment with their search intent — in other words, better SEO performance.
Since watching screen recordings is almost like doing participant observation in anthropology, that’s how “SEO anthropology” got its name.
If you’re interested in creating content for your users that can also earn visibility along their buyer’s journeys in organic search results by aligning with the criteria of today’s search engine ranking systems, then SEO anthropology is for you!
I won’t blame you if you’re not familiar with the term “SEO anthropology,” as it’s not exactly a common phrase, yet. 😉
I bet you are familiar with terms like “helpful content” and “page experience,” though.
These describe the types of content that Google Search’s systems, in particular, and other search engines or AI answer engines, generally, want to surface today.
Although we’re living in a post-HCU world, Google’s helpful content system (which is now incorporated into its core ranking systems, as of March 2024), demonstrated how the search engine seeks to reward what Google calls “helpful, reliable, and people-first content.” This means the content is likely based on real expertise or experience and was created firstly to satisfy a particular audience’s search intent better than what’s currently available.
The opposite is search engine-first content (also known as SEO spam), which is created firstly with SEO goals in mind first, rather than a user’s needs.
Page experience is an element of helpful content and a great user experience overall, and it can refer to elements like Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, mobile friendliness, and how easily users can locate a page’s main content.
If you’re stuffing in keywords or other unnecessary text in an effort to make your content seem more relevant to search engines for ranking purposes, that gets in the way of your users, and that’s the type of search engine-first content that makes it harder to navigate to the main content, get good value in exchange for time spent, and thus diminishes the page experience
That’s why SEO anthropology matters for SEO in 2024 and beyond.
Watching Microsoft Clarity screen recordings of how users interact with your website’s content and page layout can help you understand which parts are most relevant or helpful and which aren’t.
This insight can help you create more helpful, people-first content with a better page experience, because you’re literally seeing the page through a user’s eyes.
Granted, every user is different, but watching enough screen recordings can lead to spotting patterns.
Identifying areas of opportunity for improvement (like content that gets glossed over or friction points in formatting) or recognizing what’s successful (like content that tends to remain in a user’s viewport) can lead to insights that inform content strategy or UX adjustments for better engagement, conversions, and likely SEO metrics (given the content’s relevance to their search query and satisfaction of their intent).
The more you can keep users on your site and prevent them from needing to return to search results to view other sources, the more attractive your content will be for search engines, especially over the long term. Other quality websites also like to link to helpful content for the benefit of their users, which can help your traffic referrals and authority, as well.
With Clarity’s screen recordings, rather than speculating as to whether your content is relevant or helpful (like based on keyword rankings, entity detection, other on-page elements like headings and links, or looking at engagement metrics in GA4), we can see firsthand how your content is viewed through a user’s eyes — SEO anthropology.
As my 11x content framework article (and Googlers) have explained, putting yourself in the shoes of a user has advantages for creating more helpful content, largely because it puts the emphasis on a user’s needs rather than SEO tactics designed to appear relevant.
At scale, this aligns with a holistic approach to SEO, which can result in better results for business goals.
So now that you know what SEO anthropology is and why it matters for SEO today, let’s get more into the details.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this article is how I created it in 2021, with some updates since. I’ve left it largely as-is to preserve for posterity. If you have questions or want the latest information, feel free to contact me for visit Hamsterdam.
I’m also in the process of gathering user recordings to add to this article, along with a video summary. Stay tuned!
Updated introduction
This post was originally written in March of 2021. At the time, I was only just discovering the potential of Microsoft Clarity, particularly its user recordings as a way to assess whether page content sections were useful or not, based on how long a user kept the content in their viewport or scrolled past it.
In other words …
We as SEOs may think a section of text is useful (i.e., relevant) because maybe it contains relevant keywords, answers a question we saw in People also ask, or is included in other top-ranking results for the query.
But, does a user agree? And how can we know?
That’s where I found Clarity helpful.
To me, this type of research for SEO purposes reminded me of participant observation and ethnography, terms I’d learned in college as an anthropology major. So, I called this article “SEO anthropology.”
At the time, there was no mention of “SEO” and “anthropology” or “ethnography” together in search results, at least that I could find in a digital marketing context.
Here’s an original excerpt from the 2021 version of this article:
Ever since I committed to SEO as a career, I’ve often consumed articles on the subject as I find them. I owe a lot to the knowledge sharing of people in this industry. One genre of articles I’m always keeping an eye out for is SEO topics that “humanize” the search experience, putting the focus on the user first.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the words “SEO anthropology” or “SEO ethnography” used, at least in a marketing context. Admittedly, I only searched “Everywhere.” 😉
Me searching “Everywhere” in Ahrefs Content Explorer for “SEO ethnography” articles, but not finding many relevant domains.
(*Update: The first mention of “SEO” in relation to anthropology that I’ve found online was in 2010 by Lisa Myers.)
So, I’m going to start using these phrases more often, especially in this blog, if only to help connect them to some of the tactics with which I think they should be affiliated. 🙂
You’ll notice a lot of the domains in that 2021 Ahrefs screenshot were academic websites. So was the reference to “SEO anthropology” or “SEO ethnography” on Google at the time.
Except it wasn’t SEO, but rather Seo, a person’s last name — in this case, a surname of several esteemed anthropologists.
Anyway, I know I said in the 2021 article version that I’d write more about “SEO anthropology” and “SEO ethnography,” but to be honest, I kind of lost enthusiasm for the ideas early on, thinking they were a tad obscure. I also stopped publishing so much on my personal website.
But then about six months ago, I got the writing bug again and picked back up creating content for my website. Since then, I’ve been focusing on more blogs and case studies, and particularly weekly recap articles of social media posts related to SEO that I call Hamsterdam.
In one of those Hamsterdam recaps from October 2023, I included this post on X from John Mueller in the humor section:
Finally, something good for the reputation of Seo.
That’s when it hit me, and I remembered the whole “SEO” vs. “Seo” scenario for anthropology.
So, I returned to Google Search and looked it up once more, and guess what … it looks like these ideas are catching a little bit in a digital marketing context!
Let’s start with “SEO ethnography” as a query since that’s the more obscure one. (Except, nowadays I’d write it [seo ethnography] because, well, I’m fancy.)
Oh looky there, it’s this article you’re reading now! (Of course, that’s the original 2021 version, so who knows what’ll happen after I push this update live lol.)
But we also see another digital marketing agency writing about anthropology and SEO below it, while the third and fourth People also ask questions frame ethnography in a marketing or consumer context.
Exciting stuff!
What about the query [seo anthropology], which is likely a bit more competitive?
There’s that digital marketing agency again, this time on top, plus an article about applying anthropology to SEO myths.
That’s all pretty cool. But I’m hoping the concept of “SEO anthropology” catches on a bit more in an ethnographic context because I think it represents a big part of the future of SEO. (In fact, that was my prediction in a 2021 SEO trends article on Rank Ranger.)
Helpful content: the reason why SEO anthropology in an ethnographic context is more important now than ever
At the core of using Microsoft Clarity to do ethnographic research for SEO is studying how users look at content on a webpage to determine which sections are important and which aren’t.
After the September 2023 Helpful Content Update on Google, that concept seems to have taken on new significance.
In 2023, Google’s Search Central team made an update to their page experience documentation, adding “How easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages?”
In my weekly recaps, I’ve also covered a lot of social media posts from SEOs like Marie Haynes on X who’ve analyzed sites impacted by the helpful content system.
Looking at some sites impacted by the HCU and this one is a good example of how a site can have decent content, but not the most helpful content for a searcher.
In many instances, the conclusion includes whether the content is there for users (people-first content, as Google calls it) or for search engines.
In her Creating Helpful Content Workbook, Marie Haynes also refers to “De-wordifying” content “if you feel you have pages with loads of words that searchers need to read through in order to get their question answered.”
What’s one way to know if you need to “de-wordify” your content, perhaps preemptively before taking a shilacking in the rankings after a helpful content update, of course? I’d vote for doing ethnographic research using SEO anthropology.
Below is the original article from March 2021, with a few changes to make it flow better after this new 2023 introduction, as well as updated references, like changing Twitter to X.
Should I have left the 2021 article alone and not included this introduction? Did I just put a bunch of content on top of this article that no one is going to read?
As of 12/18/23, things are looking good on that front:
I’ll update this article again by incorporating Clarity data on how people have used it lately, so we can do some ethnographic research, as well. (That’s very meta).
Cheers! 🙂
Original 2021 article version, with slight updates made in 2023:
Introducing SEO anthropology and ethnographic research
I often run into a paradoxical situation as an SEO: for most intents and purposes, I’m not the typical user of the sites I optimize.
Given how much time I spend on a website I’m working on, I can often traverse it with familiarity, navigating to pages several clicks deep or completing multi-button forms. I’ll also put up with grief: if the content is slow to load, I’ll wait; if a page has a pop-up, I’ll spend 30 seconds looking for the X to close it.
Of course, I’ll note quality issues like complex site architecture, cumbersome CTAs, high LCP time, intrusive interstitials, and other impediments to a user’s experience in a site audit, yet still, I’m calling out what I think will improve organic search rankings or user satisfaction, but I’m not always seeing what the site visitor does.
I also have an SEO’s eye for certain details that a typical user might find, well, irrelevant. For instance, I can be pleased or perturbed by how many subfolders a URL has, or I’ll notice whether the slug includes the full page title, is shortened without prepositions, or has parameters. How often non-SEOs incorporate their first impressions of URLs into their opinion of a website, I’m not sure. Beyond observing the domain name itself, I’d guess not often. (Didn’t Chrome even want to hide URL paths?)
While I don’t have a marketing degree, I do have one related to anthropology. One thing I learned as a research assistant for a cultural anthropologist in Montana is the value of ethnographic research. Turns out, a lot of businesses already know this!
“Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researchers, who ask specific, highly practical questions, anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a nondirected way. Our goal is to see people’s behavior on their terms, not ours. While this observational method may appear inefficient, it enlightens us about the context in which customers would use a new product and the meaning that product might hold in their lives.”
– Ken Anderson, anthropologist at Intel Research
Prior to checking the SERPs again in October 2023, after publishing this article for the first time in 2021, I hadn’t ever seen the words “SEO anthropology” or “SEO ethnography” used in a digital marketing context.
It was only later that I found a mention from 2010 by Lisa Myers.
I’ve looked into user studies after reading the work of Glenn Gabe, and I was familiar a little with HotJar. Both seem like valuable ways to conduct ethnographic research for SEO.
Another solution I’ve found for doing “SEO ethnography” uses a free tool called Microsoft Clarity.
Clarity is a behavior analytics tool that can be quickly set up on a website via Bing Webmaster Tools and a tracking script added to the <head> section of every page that should collect data.
For the rest of this post, I’ll focus on how to use Microsoft Clarity for ethnographic research of website users, as well as some of my discoveries.
Welcome to the world of SEO anthropology. To reference the opening quote from Socrates, here we come, out of the cave and into the light!
What is Microsoft Clarity?
I’m a fan of David Simon’s series The Wire, so to me, Clarity feels a bit like being Lester Freeman.
More helpfully, here’s a summary by Microsoft:
“Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use analytics product built to help website managers improve their website experiences by better understanding site visitor behavior. . . . Clarity shows you which parts of your website get the most and least engagement and it provides an invaluable interface for debugging. . . . Clarity provides you with the tools to make informed decisions about changes to your website using real evidence, and it allows you to do so in a way that helps to respect your users’ privacy and data security.”
Below, I’ll describe some of the ways I’ve been using the insights from Clarity to reformat web content or try to simplify the conversion path of a website user. I’ll also try to add more examples and details regularly after I publish this post.
Using Clarity on my website to uncover its potential
I first learned about Clarity on Search Engine Journal in October 2020, but it wasn’t until February 2021 that I added it to this website after seeing highlights shared on X (then Twitter).
Admittedly, this website didn’t get a lot of traffic at the time, but even with a few sessions of data in my Clarity dashboard, I could envision how having these analytics freely available could be a game-changer for larger, budget-constrained websites.
I found the Clarity Dashboard great for seeing a snapshot of the average site user’s experience. It offers metrics like pages per session, engagement time, and the number of specific actions labeled by Clarity, such as Rage Clicks or Dead Clicks.
The heat maps were also interesting, especially around links or buttons.
But what most intrigued me were the session recordings.
The Clarity UX has since been updated. Here is how a session recording may look as of October 2023:
A cultural anthropologist doing ethnography tries not to involve themselves with the people they’re studying. They want to observe “in a nondirected way.”
User session recordings in Clarity offer an SEO the ability to evaluate site quality through a user’s perspective as a type of ethnographic research.
Using Clarity on a business website to optimize the FAQ page
The FAQs page of a business website can bolster that business’s credibility and highlight its services and expertise by answering common questions for prospective or returning customers.
A common evolution for an FAQs page may be the following: (1) the page begins with a list of questions the business owner knows are commonly asked by customers or the SEO identifies through keyword research or analysis of SERP features like People Also Ask (PAA); (2) over time, the FAQs page expands as the site owner or SEO adds new questions and answers; (3) lastly the page gets reorganized to accommodate the new questions for a better user experience.
In the case of this business website, we were on step 3: additional questions had been regularly added to the bottom of the list, which had grown to nearly 40 questions in total.
Our question was, is the bottom where new questions belong, or should they be repositioned based on their relevance and importance to the user or their relation to other questions on the page?
Clarity helped us answer it.
Using recordings of user sessions, we documented the order of questions that individual users engaged with on the page. We determined these orders of questions by looking at whether the question accordion was expanded by the user to reveal the answer, and whether the user hovered over the answer text long enough to suggest it was being read.
We also took into consideration which other pages (specifically service pages) were included in the user’s journey through the site. This helped us classify the FAQs orders as being associated with users who may be interested in particular services offered by the business.
We created a recommended list of questions that were likely read by users who also viewed the business’s priority services, as well as grouped FAQs that were commonly reviewed together and in the appropriate order. Lastly, we proposed to reorganize the FAQs on the page to put the questions we thought were most applicable to our targeted users higher on the page so they could access the information more easily.
The objective was to lower the bounce rate and increase the satisfaction of target users. (I was fortunate to share more details about this project and Clarity in general in this post on 2021 SEO trends on RankRanger.com.)
Next steps – stay tuned!
Now that I’ve finally gotten around to updating this article, which I think is especially relevant after the introduction of Google’s helpful content system (which is now part of the core ranking systems), I hope to use Clarity to investigate how the changes made impact the user experience.
I also learned that you can use Copilot to get AI-driven insights into Clarity data.
Have you tried out Copilot insights on recordings and heatmaps to help save you time?
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