Your Audience and Building Personas

Persona Development

Creating a representation of your ideal target user

Why is it Important to SEO?

• Buyer persona helps to identify user’s needs and how they search
• Create content around topics they want
• Important in keyword research

Where To Start?

• Existing customers or users
• Have bought your product or used your services, already
• Use existing tools
• Reaching out to users directly

Existing Tools: Google Analytics

• Demographics
• Interests based on other websites they visit
• What search engine they use
• What device they use
• What pages are the most popular
• Click maps of where users click the most within a page
• What pages they tend to exit your site on, and more

Existing Tools: Google Search Console/Google Webmaster Console

• Mainly gives site performance stats

Existing Tools: Survey Existing Users

• In-app messages
• Emailing past customers
• Request for a newsletter

Existing Tools: Ask your Support and Sales Teams

• As they regularly deal with customers and potential buyers
• What questions are they asked about?

Persona

• User profile
• Average age
• Income
• Type of job
• Photo or likeness

Marketing to Your Persona

Two Core Persona Types

• Potential Buyers
• Existing Customers

Potential Buyers

• Not aware of your product or services yet
• Searching for solutions to a problem
• Create content to solve their issues

Existing Customers

• Currently, shop or use your service
• What do they like best? Improvements?
• Create content to engage and retain them

Using Keywords to Mine Data

• Help define your user and build out your persona
• Discover potential search queries you can match to content topics

Getting to Know Your Audience

Google Trends

• Presents geographic data which helps us target Keywords
• Helpful for content that may generate lots of social shares
• Gives topic ideas for site content

Demographic Data

• Provides topic and keyword ideas
• Provides additional insight & helps to better optimize sites
• Demographics data is not 100% reliable
• Websites providing such data:
  • Alexa
  • quantcast
  • Google Analytics

Alexa

• Shows top keyword traffic for a site
• Audience insights help create user centered content

SimilarWeb

• Shows potential topics users might be interested in
• Shows traffic sources giving you ideas of where to promote content

Social Media Demographics

• Followerwonk helps analyze Twitter info
• Data is reliable as it is taken from Twitter (as reliable as Twitter :-)
• Twitter profiles/info can be fake
• Followerwonk cannot always identify follower gender

Creating Your Ideal Buyers Persona

Buyer Personas

• Fictional characters representing specific users of a website
• Personas help build user-centered sites & incorporate correct keywords naturally
• Create multiple personas to appeal to a variety of buyers

Couple of questions about our buyers

• Persona’s Age
  • Age could impact keyword choices due to lexicon differences
• Persona’s Location
  • Persona’s location Important in case of regional vocabulary differences
• Persona’s Gender
  • Buyer’s gender can influence vocabulary
  • Gender plays a larger role in than just their vocabulary
  • Sites might need a persona for both genders
• An image of a person brings your persona to life
• Add lots of details, since it will guide your site optimization
• Add additional information for your reference if applicable
  • for example: Is it a B2B or B2C persona?