When explaining SEO, I typically describe it as a mix of marketing, technical expertise, and psychology.

It is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of your product from a marketing perspective, including the problems it solves and how to most effectively communicate with your target audience.

Additionally, you must be able to improve your website’s search performance by creating a foundation.

Now, from a psychological perspective, an SEO can make a difference.

It will be beneficial to your SEO work if you can identify who your ideal website visitor is and what motivates them. This way you will have evidence of the ROI of your efforts.

While SEO may be largely driven by numbers such as keyword ranking and traffic, it is also about understanding the audience. This encompasses both understanding their needs and wants, and then building an SEO campaign that is designed to address those needs. Only by taking this holistic approach will you be able to truly succeed with SEO.

There are many benefits to SEO when it is done correctly and focused on the right audience. When this occurs, traffic to your website will increase, leading to more conversions.

There are several methods that will help you research your audience for SEO purposes. Knowing your audience is key to optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. There are a few things you can do to learn more about your target market: 1. Use keyword research tools to identify popular search terms related to your business. 2. Check out your competition to see what keywords they are targeting. 3. Use Google Analytics to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website. 4. Ask your customers directly what they are looking for when they search for businesses like yours.

The list below shows tools that are integrated into each method to make it easier.

1. Use Keywords To Gather Demographics Data

Targeting relevant keywords is an important part of SEO. The keywords you target should be related to your products or services.

Do some research to find out which words and phrases best represent your brand, then look into the demographics associated with those keywords.

You can use Google Trends to find out demographic information about a location and how a keyword has changed over time.

Google Trends was very useful during the pandemic when people’s online habits were suddenly changing.

One of my clients who publishes recipes came to me with a question regarding the types of recipes people were searching for while they were stuck at home.

It was banana bread.

In the screenshot below, you can see how the trend for “banana bread” skyrocketed when we couldn’t leave our homes.

But, what about the demographic data?

There is another tool I like to use in addition to Google Trends for finding out demographic information, Demographics.io. Demographics.io lets you see demographic data associated with specific keywords.

The data of people who were searching “banana bread” is below.

Tip: How To Apply This Information

The age, gender, and location of your audience can help you fine-tune your SEO strategy.

By looking for local link opportunities in the areas where your target audience is searching, you can gain a better understanding of what they are looking for and how you can help.

By looking at a person’s age and gender, you can figure out what topics, interests, and other words are relevant to them.

2. Identify Who Is Visiting Your Website

This method is similar to painting the target around the arrow.

It is important to understand who your audience is so you can determine if they are the correct people for your website.

The easiest way to receive this information is through Google Analytics.

The Audience section provides information about the age, gender, location, and interests of your audience.

Tip: How To Apply This Information

This data can give you an idea of what your audience is interested in and what topics to recommend as well as what geographic areas to target.

This information might not be relevant to your organization’s target markets.

If you’re not getting the results you want, make sure your keywords and content match up.

3. Analyze Other Brands

To learn more about your target audience, you can look at other brands and competitors, not just your own website.

In order to do a demographic and psychographic analysis, you want to collect as many insights as possible. The following tools can help you with this type of analysis.

Quantcast

Quantcast combines data on things like people’s purchasing habits, their jobs, what devices they use, and other information to create a profile of website users. The example below shows what they found when they looked at Goodreads.com.

Audiense

Audiense.com claims that they can construct an audience using eight different demographics: Demography, Relationships, Behavior (activity), Conversations, IBM Watson Personality Insights, Location, Interests, and Twitter profile.

Audience segments are created by Audiense by looking at the relationships between people (‘who knows who’). For example, if person A follows person B, they’ll be grouped together.

This tool is great because you can get even more specific with your searches.

4. Use Social Insights

Platforms such as social media are one of the most efficient ways to collect data about a target audience.

You can see how many followers and fans your company has on its Facebook page.

Followerwonk allows you to see audience information for your competitors and other brands.

What’s great about this tool is it also provides you with a word cloud to show you what users are talking about:

Tip: How To Apply This Information

The word cloud in Followerwonk can help you: -identify other keywords you might have missed -present content marketing ideas

5. Get Data From Market Research Firms

If you want to learn about the people who use your product, you can read reports from market research firms. These firms often sell or share their reports, so you can get some insights for free. For example, Nielsen has a report on African Americans’ views on representation in marketing. Gartner also provides yearly predictions about marketing trends that customers respond to. If you’re not sure where to find market research companies that fit your audience and industry, Software Testing Help has an overview of the industry and some of its most popular members.

6. Analyze Your Current Customers’ Data

If you have any of the following sources of customer information, your chances of conducting successful audience research are increased.

• A customer relationship management (CRM) software or similar customer database
• Customer purchase history
• Email list member information
• Product and business reviews

An invoice can tell you how your current customers interact with your business, even something as simple as that.

7. Use Social Listening

This is the process of monitoring social media and the internet for mentions of your brand or keywords related to your industry. Keep an eye on keywords such as:

• Your brand name
• Your competitors’ brand names
• Your original product or service names
• Your industry name

Monitor how people talk about your industry subjects to look for topics and pain points. Is your potential audience asking for something new? What do they praise or put down?

8. Watch Your Best (and Worst) Performing Content

Check your blog posts’ analytics to see which topics and approaches are most popular with your audience. Look at metrics like:

• Click-through rate: Rate of readers who click your blog post’s call to action
• Average time on page: Average time that readers spend on the blog post’s page
• Conversion rate: The number of people who follow your call to action compared to the number of people who view your blog post

If you want to look at these numbers more closely, you can do so using your preferred analytics platform, or by conducting a full content audit.

9. Find What Other Content Your Audience Reads

These are their influencers. Your audience’s brand is just one source of content. What other companies and publications do they count on? These are their influencers. Check what other content your audience reads by looking at:

• Your competitors’ content
• Trending content in your industry
• Content popular with your social media audience and circles
• Industry content trending on BuzzSumo

How Do You Understand Your Intended Audience?

After collecting a large amount of data about your audience, you need to determine what that information says about them. This is known as a target audience analysis.

Review Your Data for Common Themes

Look carefully through your data for patterns in the types of target audiences we covered at the beginning of this blog post, such as:

• Interests
• Age and gender
• Career
• Income
• Pain points and challenges that your product can address
• Lifestyle and hobbies
• Content preferences
• Internet browsing habits
• Buying habits

As you look for things your audience has in common, keep an open mind. Something as small as a favorite website or use of language can clue you in to your customers’ marketing preferences.

Turn Your Data Into Customer Personas

Personas help you keep your target customer in mind as you create marketing plans and customize your messages. Use the data from your marketing research to create marketing personas, fictional profiles that describe your typical customers. Personas will help you keep your target customers in mind as you create marketing plans and customize your messages. A marketing persona includes details like:

• A drawing or photo representing the fictional customer
• Name and job title
• Demographic info like age, gender, income level and education
• Hobbies and interests
• Product-related goals and pain points
• Values and fears surrounding your product
• Favorite content sources

The marketing persona template you downloaded earlier includes room for all of this information.

How Do You Use Your Audience Data in a Marketing Strategy?

You’ve collected data on your target audience. Now it’s time to use it.

Create Marketing Materials That Target Your Customer Personas

Your target audience data and customer personas should inform your marketing from here on out. The info you have on your audience should influence these aspects of your marketing materials:

• Copy: Use language that feels natural to the people reading your copy. For example, if you have a business-to-business product for executives, you’d want to use more formal and sales-focused language, but your typical business-to-customer audience will prefer casual language. When in doubt, talk the way your audience does.
• Topics: Cover topics that fall in your content core — the intersection between your product and your audience’s interests.
• Design: Use design elements that match your audience’s experiences and preferences. If you market to kids and their parents, for example, you might use a lot of primary colors.

Offer Ways to Solve Your Audience’s Problems

The problems your customers face that your product can solve were identified as you researched your audience and put together marketing personas. Try these strategies for writing solution-focused marketing copy:

• Name the problem your customer faces and relate to them
• Highlight your product’s key benefit related to your customers’ top problem
• Give an example of how your product can help your customer
• Show off your differentiator — the one way you can solve your customer’s problem that your competitors can’t

Repurpose Your Content Everywhere Your Audience Goes

If you want your content to reach the widest possible audience, you should Repurpose it for multiple channels. For example, you can turn a blog post into:

• A podcast discussion
• An explainer video
• An email newsletter
• A Twitter thread
• An infographic

Be sure to share your content as part of your social media content strategy.

Do Marketing That Attracts Your Audience

With your target audience information, you can create specially tailored marketing for your audience. Remember to review your target audience to keep your marketing focused.