SEO is often thought of as a keyword-driven marketing channel, but it’s really about knowing your target audience and making sure your business appears in front of them on the SERPs.
If you fail to understand who your target audience is, you will have a difficult time creating an effective SEO strategy that will drive conversions.
Your business will not grow as you expect if you do not have conversions.
It’s important to carefully define your target audience and communicate this effectively to your team. This will help you earn traffic from the right people, with the right content, at the right point in their purchase journey.
This guide will show you different ways you can figure out who your target audience is for your SEO strategy.
What Is a Target Audience?
Who you want to attract to your website is your target audience. Your target audience are those people who use search engines like Google to find businesses similar to yours. They could be your future customers or clients.
Knowing your target audience is key to understanding who is searching for keywords that could lead them to your website. With this information, you can develop a strategy and put in place the right tactics to ensure you are visible when they are searching.
The most successful SEO strategies are those which have a clear understanding of their target audience. SEO is not about marketing to search engines, it is about marketing to people. Therefore, it is essential to keep your target audience in mind for every aspect of your SEO strategy.
Your Target Audience vs. Buyer Personas
If you mistakenly think that your target audience is the same as your buyer persona, you wouldn’t be the first person to do so. However, these terms actually refer to two different things, so it’s important not to use them interchangeably.
Your target audience is a group of people you have identified who could be interested in your products or services. These are the people who you want to reach out to with your marketing.
A buyer persona is an imaginary person who is the ideal customer for your product. This persona is created based on research about your market and competition, as well as profiles of your current customers.
As our guide to creating a buyer persona suggests:
Describing the business’s potential purchasing audience is not the same as generating a set of insights that can be used by marketing, sales, and product departments to make informed decisions and smarter investments.
Why You Need to Understand Who Your Target Audience Is to Drive SEO Success
Although it may seem that more is always better, this is not the case with SEO. Each new person that comes to your site is another potential chance to secure a conversion, and more brand exposure helps to build your reputation.
If the average visitor has a 20 percent chance of being interested in your product, then you will have 200 potential visitors interested in your product out of 1,000 total visitors.
For every 1000 potential visitors, 500 will be interested in your product. So if you only attract 800 potential visitors, then you will have 400 potential customers. This scenario is more valuable for your brand than the one with less total traffic.
The Power of Understanding Your Target Audience
This is the power of understanding your target audience, and with it comes the ability to drive the right traffic from the right potential customers and clients.
Put simply, audience targeting is a way to make your ads more relevant to the people who see them, which in turn will result in more sales.
An effective SEO strategy is key to putting your business in front of your target audience when they are searching online.
Defining Your Target Audience Makes It Easier to Put Together an Effective SEO Strategy
Defining your target audience means that you’re able to:
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Research your keywords more so you can identify which ones to optimize for.
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. Creating content that is targetted at your audience will improve their experience on your site as they will be more interested in the content they are consuming.
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. Target your advertising to people who are more likely to use your products or services. This will result in more relevant traffic and potential customers.
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with our Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) services Our CRO services can help you increase the percentage of your organic traffic that you convert into sales or leads.
How To Find Your Target Audience?
1. Conduct Market Research
Before you can start your business, you need to understand the market you’ll be operating in. This is done through market research, which can take the form of a SWOT analysis looking at a business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
What question might you be thinking now? “How will SWOT analysis help me find the target audience?”
But, trust me. It will help you for sure!
This type of market research can determine,
i.) Location
ii.) Demographics
iii.) Psychographics
iv.) Market trends
v.) Economic shifts
vi.) Customer’s buying habits
vii.) Persona
viii.) pain points
ix.) Motivations
x.) Competition
It is also important to understand the competition within the industry. By analyzing the competition, you can gain a better understanding of the industry as a whole.
Your competitors are targeting a specific audience, and you need to figure out why.
This is how you will be able to identify your potential customers.
. An additional way to determine your potential customers is to analyze your current customer base.
Yes, you read that right.
What keeps people coming back to your brand? What are their interests? What do they like or dislike? If you want to attract more people like them, find out what it is that answered these questions.
You can find your target audience by asking your existing customers.
2. Utilize Social Insights
If you have a lot of followers on social media, it’s likely that they are interested in the things you sell or the services you offer.
The insights from your social channels can tell you a lot about your audience.
Facebook recommends using their Audience Insights tool to get more information about your page’s followers.
When trying to determine who you should target for your product or service, consider your audience’s demographic profile and look at data from Google Analytics. Additionally, check to see what other pages on Facebook your target audience likes. All of this information will give you a good starting point.
3. Check Your Website Performance
You can find this information in your website’s analytics. checking the performance of your own website can help you determine your target audience. This information can be found in your website analytics.
You can learn what content areas are most popular or least popular with your audience by monitoring how well they perform.
A website acts as your company’s online appearance that your target audience will see first.
To attract more customers, focus on what interests them.
You can also track the activities of the visitors on your website.
Find out what pages your visitors visit the most and what activities they engage in the most. Use this data to identify your target customer.
Cookies can be used on your website to track the activities of visitors.
After you identify your target audience, you will be able to better identify what they want.
4. Use Social Media Analytics
Look at which social media platform the audience is more active on.
I am requesting to use social media analytics because it provides a large amount of insights without charge.
This information is similar to Google analytics, but it will give you the key details you need to identify your target audience.
First, you need to identify your audience, and then determine which platform they use most often.
What gets more engagement from your audience, posting on Instagram or creating a poll on Twitter?
Think about this question when you are looking at social media, and you will get an idea of who your target audience is and where they are most active.
It is important to consider the different audiences of social media platforms when analysing data.
There is a tendency for younger people to be more active on Twitter, while older people are more likely to be active on Facebook.
The analytics of social media platforms can give you insight into the age, gender, and location of the people who are engaging with your content. This information can be useful for tailoring your content to better appeal to your target audience.
Thus, it is easy to locate your target audience through social media analytics.
5. Survey or Interview Your Current Customers
If you want to learn more about your target audience and what content they want to consume, speak with people who have already purchased from you. This will give you insights into how they want to be targeted online.
Surveying and interviewing your current customers can help you understand your target audience in ways that you couldn’t from using a tool. This can give you a competitive advantage.
You can collect responses from your customers using free tools like Google Forms, which you can then send out to the buyer segment of your email newsletter.
Look for trends in the responses to your surveys or interviews to use in your audience data.
6. Know Purchase Path And Pain Points
When you are marketing your product, it is important to understand the journey your potential customers take to make a purchase, as well as any pain points they may experience. Additionally, it is essential to identify your target audience.
You need to understand your audience’s different buying journey.
How do you understand this? One way is to consider a question.
“What does my target audience want to achieve?”
You will need to create a persona of your potential customer in order to answer this question. I have already explained how to do this above.
Persona You will create a persona that addresses his or her problems center around the purchasing cycle.
That is awareness, consideration, and decision.
Once you have understood the purchasing cycle, be sure to pay attention to your audience’s activity.
You can find out what your audience wants and what their pain points are by asking them directly or by looking at online reviews.
Creating a hook point or message specifically for your audience will result in more conversions. Knowing the wants and pain points of your customers will help you create a more effective message.
| CXO Today In order to use data-driven digital marketing to solve your customer’s pain points, you need to first understand what those pain points are. Once you know what your customers are struggling with, you can develop a plan to address those needs. Data can help you determine which marketing strategies are most effective in reaching and addressing your target audience. By using data to drive your marketing decisions, you can ensure that you are providing your customers with the solutions they need.
7. Use Google Analytics
Google analytics provides accurate data about the visitors of your website.
This information helps you understand which channels your audience is coming from and what type of content they are engaging with.
This will also give you data on your audience’s demographics and key information that will help you identify your target audience.
The data will be divided into sections like age, gender, and location, which will help you in analyzing the data.
Google Analytics provides an overview of your website’s traffic and performance.
The tool will not only give you information about your audience, but also about their behavior and conversion rate.
Google analytics will generate a report about your target audience.
8. Create Content For Your Target Audience
Now that you know who your target audience is, you can start creating content for them.
You know your target audience, what they want, and what their pain points are.
Creating content for them is very easy for you.
You need to do some preparation before creating content for your target audience.
If your target audience is students who want to learn digital marketing, then you should consider creating content that is specifically tailored to their needs and interests. This might include creating blog posts or videos that cover topics such as social media marketing, search engine optimization, and creating effective digital marketing campaigns. By creating content that is relevant and engaging for your target audience, you can help them learn the skills they need to succeed in the digital marketing world.
You need to do some research to figure out what your target audience is looking for in digital marketing.
If you want to increase your website traffic, you need to research some keywords and then create content based on those keywords.
. Google keyword planner, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are all tools you can use to do keyword research.
| Foundr This is a step-by-step guide to creating content, from writing to publishing, successfully.
Content Creation For The Different Parts Of The Funnel
Content Creation Funnel: Now, I am going to provide you with an image of the content creation funnel which will eventually lead to more customers. The funnel starts with your audience at the top, and as they go down the funnel, they become more and more engaged with your brand. Eventually, they reach the bottom of the funnel, where they are ready to make a purchase.
You create awareness content to introduce people to topics they might be interested in. This content is educational, teaching people about the topic in an interesting way.
The period during which a customer is experiencing a problem and seeking a solution is referred to as the “interest” stage. This is the stage of the customer journey during which conversions occur.
Decision: This is where the customer makes purchase decisions.
The customer purchases your product to resolve his issue.
You can increase your website’s conversion rates by creating content with this funnel in mind.
There is no doubt that keywords are important in creating a successful SEO strategy. However, if you do not know your audience, you will have difficulty targeting the right people and making sure that your efforts are successful. Knowing your audience is essential to developing a successful SEO strategy.