Search engine optimization “how to” series: Audience

Sep 8, 2014

This is the first in a 7 part series written to give beginners a number of search engine optimization “how to” tips for SEO success. We hope they can apply what we share to their current or in-development websites.

Do you think you know your audience?

Understanding your audience, who’s looking at your website, who’s consuming your content, who’s trying to learn more about what your product does can be a challenging and time consuming process. In fact many organizations just skip this step and jump right into keyword identification and resourcing.

Please don’t do that! Skipping this step can be a costly mistake in terms of budget and time. Ensuring that your audience is identified and understood will add loads of life and effectiveness to your overall campaign, be it big or small. Additionally, it’s a worthwhile process for any company, organization, or individual to go through to make sure their customers are getting what they’re actually looking for when they visit your website.

Your target audience is usually defined by a set of characteristics such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Industry
• Geographic Area
• Interests
• Income Level

That list is a small sample of potential identifiers but you get the point. We’re looking at characteristics, properties, locations, cultures, languages, etc… that can help us know our audience and in turn, deliver content they want to see, read, and will ultimately find useful.

persona development for search engine optimization how toDeveloping a persona

While there are many ways companies define their audience, we prefer the method of developing a persona, also known as a buyer persona.

This persona is a “real life” example of a specific member of your target audience. The persona document helps you to understand who your audience is, what their needs are, and what drives them to look for your organizations product or service. Many companies will have more then 1 persona and will tailor their content for those audiences.

For more information on developing a persona, see our blog entry here, “What’s a Buyer Persona and why do you need it?”.

Consider this our first search engine optimization “how to” plea… Create a persona! It will add clarity and direction to all marketing processes your company undertakes.

Knowing your audience will help you to understand what content they’re looking for and the keywords they are more likely to use to find it.

Additionally, knowing your audience members will allow you to customize your writing for what a group of users interests and needs are. It will allow you to make sure the information you provide will best resonate with their concerns and curiosities rather then just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Knowing your audience will produce appropriate keywords and targeted content, two of the key ingredients to search engine ranking success.

Ready for the next step? Here is our 2nd part in this series: Search Engine Optimization “How to” Series: Keywords & Research.

Has this blog been helpful? Are you at the next step? You may want to begin implementing good SEO tactics and procedures but you feel lost. Well, fear not, we’ve written a great eBook that covers the basics of SEO. It’s free and quick reading and will help you understand the most important elements to any successful SEO strategy.