It's simple to think of SEO as a keyword-driven marketing channel, but the reality is that if you truly want to spur growth, you must know who your target audience is and how to present your business to them on search engine results pages (SERPs).
It will be difficult to develop a sound strategy that generates traffic that converts if you are unable to clearly understand precisely who your SEO efforts are intended to reach.
And your business won't expand the way you want it to without conversions.
On the other side, a successful strategy is put in place by carefully identifying your target audience and successfully conveying this to your team. When you provide the right audience with the right content at the right point in their purchase journey, you attract traffic.
The importance of understanding your SEO strategy's target audience cannot be overstated. We'll walk you through the many methods you may use to define your audience in this article.
Specifically, we’re going to take a look at:
What Is a Target Audience?
The people you wish to attract to your website are your target audience. People searching for a business like yours on Google (or another search engine) are your target audience. They are your potential clients or customers.
Knowing precisely who is searching for the keywords that might bring them to your website is essential to defining your target audience. Knowing who these people are can help you create a plan and implement the necessary techniques to make sure you are found when they are searching.
The most effective SEO strategies fully understand and include their target audience in all actions. SEO is all about marketing to people; it has nothing to do with marketing to search engines. Your target audience is those people.
Your Target Audience vs. Buyer Personas
You may get away with mistaking buyer personas for your target audience, but these two terms are distinct and shouldn't be used in the same sentence.
A group of people you have discovered who could be interested in your products or services is your target audience. These people are your ideal customers (or purchasing audience).
An abstract representation of this ideal customer is called a buyer persona, and it is built on qualitative and quantitative data from market and competitor research and actual customer profiles.
As our guide to creating a buyer persona suggests:
For the marketing, sales, and product teams to make informed choices and wiser investments, creating a buyer persona involve more than just characterizing the potential customers of the business.
Ahmed Samir Founder of as-educate
Buyer personas go into the particulars of who these people are, including their demographics, hobbies, and purchasing patterns, in more detail than a target audience. This amount of detail in defining a target audience is not deep.
Why Understanding Your Target Audience is Important for SEO Success
You can fall victim to the fallacy that more is always better. When it comes to SEO, more is more because every new visitor to your website represents a potential conversion. Additionally, increased brand exposure aids in reputation building.
Let's assume that the typical visitor has a 20% chance of showing interest in purchasing your product. 200 potential visitors are interested in your offering, and you get 1,000 visitors.
Imagine that a typical visitor to your website has a 50% chance of becoming a customer. If you merely say that you want to draw in 800 visitors, you now have 400 people who could be interested in your product, making the situation with lower potential traffic more advantageous for your brand.
The Power of Understanding Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience gives you the power to attract the right traffic from the right potential customers and clients.
Since audience targeting is all about boosting relevance, any increase in volume has a greater impact on your bottom line.
Furthermore, you may implement a successful SEO strategy to position your business in front of your target market when they do internet searches after you are clear on who your target audience is.
Defining Your Target Audience Makes Creating an Effective SEO Strategy Easier
By defining your target audience, you will be able to:
- Conduct additional targeted keyword research to determine which search terms you should be optimizing for.
- Create content that is exactly matched with your target audience, increasing their experience on your site owing to the relevance of the content they are reading.
- Increase traffic from people who are more likely to become your next client or customer.
- Increase the conversion rate of your organic traffic to sales or leads.
7 Ways to Define Your Target Audience
You can accomplish this in several different ways when it comes to identifying who your target audience is before using this insight to shape your SEO and content strategy.
Here are seven strategies that will work for you:
1. Understand Your Current Customer Demographics
It makes sense to start with your present customers if you want to understand who your SEO strategy should be targeting.
The best place to start is to go have coffee with your sales team and ask them specifically who is buying your products or services. Your sales team probably knows who is buying and who isn't.
They may also be able to provide data from their CRM, such as a breakdown of the opportunity markets with the highest conversion rates or average order value insights.
Don't ignore the information you may get from your own Google Analytics account, however, in addition to this. You may gain a thorough understanding of who your audience is and how they act with the data you already have at your disposal.
Go to the Audience report to learn more about the people who are visiting your website, their demographics, where they are from, and their interests via Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments (where you can check how each audience converts).
2. Utilize Social Insights
There is a very strong chance that the audience you've attracted on social media is interested in the products or services you provide.
Using the insights provided by your social media platforms may be a terrific way to find out more about your audience.
The suggested tool for learning more about the Facebook fans of your page is Facebook Audience Insights.
This is a great place to start to determine the demographics of your target audience, as well as information from Google Analytics and the other Facebook pages that they enjoy.
3. Analyze The SERPs
Although it may seem straightforward, taking the time to analyze the SERPs may help you determine the audience you should be targeting.
Run searches using your primary commercial keywords (the terms connected to money in your business) and examine their position in the results. Make a note of whether the content is transactional or informative so that you can determine the search intent.
Focus in particular on the recurring themes found across content pages, the keywords being optimized for, the products or services being marketed, and the overall tone of voice. This is frequently a red flag for the primary target market.
4. Know Your Competitors Inside Out
Your ability to identify your target market will improve as you learn more about your rivals' SEO strategies and the people they are targeting.
Additionally, you may use the Semrush Organic Research Tool to delve deep into the performance of your rivals.
In particular, pay attention to:
- Top pages
- Competitors
- Ranking keywords
These are all insightful statements that may help you identify your target market and shed light on what has been successful for others in your industry.
5. Survey or Interview Your Current Customers
Go talk to your previous customers if you truly want to figure out who your target audience is, the content they want to consume, and how they want to be targeted online.
Current customer surveys and interviews may shed light on your target audience that you could never learn through a tool, giving you a competitive edge.
To get feedback from your customers, you may use free responses like Google Forms (send this out to the buyer segment of your email newsletter).
Look for patterns in the responses after you have a significant number of completed surveys (or have performed numerous interviews) to include in your audience data.
6. Identify the Questions Being Asked Around Your Core Topics
Asking questions is an effective way to discover more about your audience and the issues that matter most to them and are related to your business.
Because of this, it's advised that you take the time to figure out precisely what it is that your target audience wants to know and is searching for online.
Use the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, type a search term, then set the filter to only display questions to do this.
This insight may be used to ensure that your strategy targets the questions being posed while defining your target audience.
7. Use The Semrush Market Explorer Tool
You may study your market and find out more about your position about competitors with the help of the Semrush Market Explorer Tool and, more particularly, the Market Explorer's Custom Market Report.
However, you should pay attention to the market audience report while choosing your target market.
This may enable you to better target your marketing strategy to the appropriate people by revealing the age, gender, and particular interests of your target audience.
Understanding your target audience and the kind of content they want to read is essential for SEO success.
Keywords are crucial to creating a successful SEO strategy. Even so, you won't be able to concentrate your efforts, feel certain that you're aiming for the right demographic, or increase the likelihood of turning a searcher into a customer if you don't know who your audience is.
