SEO

Are You Targeting The Right Customers With Your SEO?

SEO is a rapidly changing field, withnew innovationspotentially changing how we view the field. This can range from your keywords being changed to match voice recognition tech for searching, to new trends for websites like online chats being something that you have to incorporate. However, there are certain basic principles that still hold true, no matter what. One of these main principles is targeting. To borrow an analogy, a massive net sounds like a great way to catch the most fish, but if it’s too big, you risk having the fish swim through the holes in the net. Targeting handles this issue.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

In a perfect world, you would be selling a universal product or service that everyone needed and wanted. However, this product doesn’t exist. For example, even for needs that we all have, like those for food and shelter, different people are going to have different tastes and desires. For example, when looking for a place to eat, a college student is going to likely be looking somewhere different compared to a family of four.

To help with this issue, many people create abuyer personabefore planning out their advertising and SEO methods (this will be important later). A buyer persona is basically putting a face to your ideal customer. Many companies go all out, creating a name, age, and even little backstories. Whether or not you don’t plan on going to this extent, the key is including all the possible information that may impact what a customer buys when they are looking for products in your niche. Here are some potential things that may factor into your buying persona:

  1. The marketing segment or segments that they are included in.
  2. Background informationabout them. You can get creative here. Depending on what you are marketing, hobbies, education, professional interests, and qualifications may all factor in.
  3. Demographic information. This includes where your ideal customer lives, what their gender and age are, as well as how much money they make. Remember, a luxury item requires a different approach than a bargain one.
  4. Identifying information. This can include things like the type of social media they use and whether they are an influencer versus a follower. You may need to decide exactly what this is to determine what platforms you look for and what your language should be.
  5. The type of issues that this customer may be dealing with. Remember, every purchase stems from a problem, and ideally, you should be able to communicate how you fix this problem right away.
  6. What are common things that this type of customer may be dealing with that could serve as an obstacle to their purchase? Getting ahead of this lets you address those concerns in your marketing.

For example, let’s say that you’re looking to marketengagement rings. In this case, your market is pretty well-defined: couples, often younger couples (though this may vary due to changes in demographics and younger generations tending to put off marriage compared to those before them). But what kind of couple would this be? Are you thinking about the well-off couple who will spare no expense? If so, you want to emphasize the opulence. If you are targeting couples with less money, you still want to show off the quality, but you may want to make it sound like they are getting a great deal on that quality.

Putting It Into Action

Now, how does this factor into SEO? Well, like anything else, SEO is a form of marketing, just indirectly. When your potential customer wants to find something that solves their problem, they type in a set of words or a question in a search engine. These are the keywords you want to implant inside your site to make sure thatsearch enginesplace you as high as possible on that ranking. Of course, you need to have the right keywords first. This is where your buyer persona comes in handy. You should already have an idea of what your ideal customer should be, and you can adjust accordingly.

While the technicalities of SEO will always be shifting, it’s important to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the basic principles of it: putting you in front of the customers who are more likely to invest in your service or product.

If you have any questions, please ask below!