How Mozlow's SEO Hierarchy of Needs Works and Why It Is Important for Your SEO Strategy

Following on from our recent SEO blog How to Create an SEO Strategy to Help You Rank Higher in 2023 let’s look into Moslow's SEO Hierarchy of Needs and explore how using it will help improve your SEO efforts. 

Created by Moz founder Rand Fishkin, the pyramid (inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) uses the model as a simple framework to explain how SEO works. 

But before we get into Mozlow’s SEO Hierarchy of Needs, let's first explore what are Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs key points. 

Simply Psychology says

“Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.” 

The theory of human needs is based on the ascending order of psychological needs. On the bottom of the pyramid are the basic physiological needs humans need to survive – food, air, water, shelter, etc…. 

Maslow’s theory works off the premise that you cannot achieve the self-actualisation needs at the very top of the pyramid, such as education, skills, caring for others, etc…, without ensuring those fundamental needs at the bottom are met first. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs states that a person can only move up the pyramid to the higher-level needs when the needs on the lower tiers of the pyramid are adequately met. 

Mozlow’s SEO Hierarchy of Needs takes a similar approach to SEO. 

So let’s look at each of these needs to better understand how to develop an SEO strategy that will be successful. We’ll start with the SEO needs at the very bottom of the funnel and progress upwards to the needs at the very top.

Crawl accessibility

Your site’s crawlability is hugely important for SEO. Bots need to be able to crawl your website to understand what each page is about and index it. An indexed website, or page, means your site will be more visible to search engines and this helps improve your ranking on Google. 

Compelling content 

Content that is informative, useful to the user and of value to searchers will have greater SEO value and improve your SEO ranking. It will also attract users to link to your content and the more quality backlinks your content acquires the more Google will deem your content as valuable and important to users. 

Keyword optimised 

Ensuring your content is keyword-optimised will make it visible to both searchers and search engines. And there are several keyword tools you can use to find appropriate keywords to embed into your content including Moz Keyword Explorerand Neil Patel.  It’s worth remembering that keyword-optimised content will be easier for searchers and search engines to find.

Great user experience 

In the website world, nothing is more important than a good user experience. A fast-loading website that is easy to navigate and technically strong will help keep visitors on your website for longer periods and make them want to return. 

Shareworthy content 

The more people you have sharing your content the more relevant your brand will be in the marketplace. Sharing content can lead to higher traffic on your website but the key is to create content that users will be excited by or find useful and informative. Videos are one of the most easily shareable content formats and will help boost your rankings. 

Title, URL & Description 

Google wants to understand what your page is about. Therefore the title tag, URL and meta description should be specific to what your content topic is about. Getting these right will increase your search visibility and help your webpage appear in search results. 

Snippet/schema markup 

Rich snippets are important if you want to stand out in the SERPs. Appearing in search results, rich snippets show the title tag, meta description and URL and some will include additional data such as star ratings. To get rich snippet data Google uses Structured Markup (like Schema) and which is a code search engines use to understand the content on your pages. 

SEO is a long-term strategy 

So there you go! A special pyramid, devoid of ancient Egyptian mummies, but definitely fascinating from an SEO perspective. By taking inspiration from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs connecting those key elements humans need to survive to the key elements that will make your SEO efforts successful, Rand Fishkin developed an easy-to-follow SEO framework that will help advance your SEO efforts. 

But SEO takes time to get results, and if the keywords you are targeting are the same as your competitors, it could take even longer to rank, so be patient, continue with your SEO best practices, and keep progressing, working your way from the very bottom to the very top of that pyramid. 😉