From a marketing perspective, you should have an idea and understanding of your product, the problems that it solves, and how best to get the word out to your audience.
From a technical standpoint, you should be able to build a foundation for your site that will improve search engine performance.
Now, from a psychological standpoint - this is where SEO can really make a difference.
If you can learn to not only identify the ideal website visitor, but also determine who they are and what drives them, your SEO work will really pay off. You'll have increased traffic and ROI.
SEO is not just about numbers (keyword ranking positions, number of backlinks, traffic, etc.). It's also about understanding your audience and being able to build an SEO campaign based on the information you get.
When efforts are focused on the right audience, targeted traffic grows, resulting in higher conversions.
There are several methods to help your research as well as analyze your audience for SEO.
1. Study demographic data
Keyword research is one of the main tasks of SEO. Keywords should be targeted and relevant to your products or services, which you probably already know. Once you have an extensive list of phrases, choose the top five that most succinctly represent your brand and research the demographics associated with those words and phrases.
Google Trends will provide you with location-based demographic information and show you how a keyword has changed over time. Google Trends was very useful during the pandemic, when people's online behavior changed frequently and dramatically. s
Using the query "coronavirus" as an example, we can track the peak of the query and we can also see that little interest was seen during periods when new waves of the disease were announced.
What about demographics?
Google Trends provides great location data, however, there are other tools that you can use to get more information. For example, Demographics.io, it links demographic data to keywords.
How to use this information?
Identifying demographic information, including age, gender, and location, can help you in SEO in a number of ways. You can identify local linking areas, topics, interests, and use a more advanced semantic core to promote with your target audience in mind.
2. Identify who visits your site
This method is akin to drawing a target around an arrow. However, it's important to understand who is coming to your site and then determine if it's the right audience.
One of the easiest ways to get this information is through Google Analytics.
Under "Audience," you can view a range of information about your audience, including age, gender, location, and interests, as shown below.
How to use this information?
This data provides insight into your audience and will help you find content topics and target geographic areas, as well as check whether your current strategy fits your target market audience.
In this case, you need to carefully analyze keywords and content to make sure.
3. Analyze your competitors
To gather information about your target audience, you can go beyond your own site and analyze other brands and competitors. You will be looking for demographic and psychographic data; you need to gather as much information as possible. The following tools can help you with this type of analysis.
Quantcast
Quantcast collects together data on customer behavior, occupations, device usage, demographics, domain affinity, and more. Note that the tool is English-language.
Audiense
Audiense builds audiences using eight different criteria that can be combined to create highly targeted audiences:
● Demographics.
● Relationships.
● Behavior (activity).
● Conversations.
● IBM Watson Personality Insights.
● Location.
● Interests and social media profiles.
Audiense then creates audience segments by grouping people based on "who knows who," i.e. how these people are related. They take into account who follows who and cluster them. For example, if person A follows person B, they will be grouped into clusters.
The first screen of the report provides a snapshot of the audience data, as shown below.
What's great about this tool is that you can drill down even more into the information. Just take a look at the available information.
How to use this information?
Similar to the previous method, this data can provide insight into your audience and help you when making recommendations for content topics and target geographic areas. You might also find some great ideas for link building based on your interests.
4. Use social data
Social media is one of the fastest ways to get information about your audience.
You can view follower information directly on your company's social media page, as shown below.
You can also view audience information for competitors and other brands on Followerwonk. This tool is good for you if you have a Twitter account.
This tool is good because it also provides a word cloud showing what users are discussing most often.
How to use this information?
In particular, the word cloud in Followerwonk can help you identify other keywords you may have missed, as well as provide ideas for a content plan.
5. Send out surveys
This method is the easiest on this list. If you want to better understand your audience, send out a survey.
To get enough responses to your surveys, keep them short and to the point. Ask questions about basic demographics, common interests, pain points and needs.
Right now, Google polls are gaining popularity. Study your target audience more thoroughly by preparing 3-4 succinct questions with an opportunity to leave a comment. This way, you'll get useful information and get to know your users better.
How to use this information?
Use the information from the survey to create content, including images and videos, target keywords, etc., and refine the usability of the site.
6. Identify the important issues
As Google increasingly shows answers directly in the SERPs, identifying common user questions becomes more and more important.
In addition, we want to anticipate the long tails of our potential audience's queries to get in front of them at the right time. There are many tools that provide information about common questions, including:
● AlsoAsked.
● AnswerThePublic.
● BuzzSumo.
These tools take data from a variety of sources, so it's worth checking them all.
How to use this information?
Create content using popular questions to attract long tail searches among your audience and increase the chances of a direct response appearing in Yandex and Google organic results.
7. Exploring Secondary Data
Once you know the gender, age, interests, and other characteristics of your audience, you can fill in the gaps with additional research. Look for them to get to know your users even better.
For example, if you've identified your audience as vegetarians, go to Google Scholar and look for published research on that group of people.
How to use this information?
Use additional research to generate new ideas and hypotheses about the target audience, which you can then use in your SEO work.
Conclusion
It is very important that before you start doing SEO tasks, you need to research your audience. It may take time, but it is worth it. This way, you can attract more traffic to your site and increase your ROI on SEO.
