A better understanding of the people who visit your website and consume the content you produce is vital to a smart SEO strategy. This enables you to focus your time and effort on the most profitable parts of your site instead of producing thin content for people you aren’t sure about and may not visit your website.
For a personal targeted SEO strategy, it pays to develop strong user personas that represent the age, gender, needs, likes, location and habits of your organic audience.
How to create personas
Using analytics data, internal team knowledge of your customers and conversations with real people who you know visit your site or are searching for content they might find on your site, you can draft personas that will represent the people you will design your SEO strategy to attract.
Alongside an illustration of a person – let’s call him Tom – you know engages positively with your site, you will present information about which parts of the site he finds most engaging, what device he most often uses to visit your site, and where there are things on the site that seem to block him or stop him taking positive actions.
Discuss this pool of information with colleagues across your business to start to flesh out your persona further. What does the marketing team know about what attracts Tom? How does the sales team think he is most likely to convert? What does your web development team think about how new integrations may be possible to get Tom to where you want him to go more easily?
Why personas help SEO
According to Search Engine Journal, a persona-based SEO strategy can take a lot of work. You may want to call in the experts to help facilitate the internal development of personas and suppliers, with agencies such as Digitel providing white label SEO services to the digital marketing or web developments agencies your business may already be working with.
Once you have compiled the information about Tom, your typical website user, you can start to plan how content, navigation and on page links can be built to better meet his needs. If you focus on your users, personas can help you to clean up your SEO strategy and hone in on the most profitable keywords for your audience.
Turning personas into a better user experience
Personas are not only useful for choosing keywords. They are also the key to a website that keeps visitors once they arrive. Your site is usually the first impression people have of your brand, whether you sell products, services or both, and it takes about a second for a visitor to decide whether to stay or go elsewhere.
A poor user experience can cut your traffic and damage your reputation, as many people will not return after one bad visit. User centred design means building a site that makes it easy for visitors to do what they came to do. That requires a full understanding of your market, including what your audience wants and what they are trying to achieve.
The most direct way to check is to test your site with people who match your buyer personas. Their feedback will show you which areas need work. Make small changes, keep track of the results and measure the effect of each improvement before moving on to the next.