SEO is often mistaken for just being a keyword-driven marketing technique, but the reality is it’s much more than that. If you are an online business looking to drive organic traffic, you need to know who your target audience is and how to put your business in front of them.
If you fail to identify and understand who you are targeting in your SEO campaign, you will struggle to put together a strong SEO plan to drive traffic that converts. Without conversions, your business won’t grow.
By defining and understanding the target audience, businesses can:
- Understand what their target audience is looking for
- Find out what their problems are (and offer relevant solutions)
- Know where they are located
Armed with these key details, businesses can change or improve their SEO strategy to generate more revenue.
A] What is a target audience?
The most successful SEO strategies are based on understanding the audience inside-out and putting them at the forefront of every action. In terms of SEO, a target audience is defined as your current or potential clients/consumers, who are using search engines like Google to look/search for a specific enterprise (similar to your business).
For example, if you are a digital marketing service provider in London, then a person searching for digital marketing services in London may land on your website if your website ranks at the top of the search result. These are your ideal customers or clients.
Once you define your target audience, you can create an SEO strategy that can help you improve your brand’s visibility on search engines. This would ensure that when your target audience is searching for a product/service you provide, they will land on your website.
B] Identifying your target audience’s personas
To define the target audience and drive them to your website, it is important to understand who specifically is searching for your products or services. These individuals would be interested in purchasing your products or hiring you for a service.
Remember to be as specific as possible while defining the right target audience. To help you out, here are the most common variables to define your target market (audience).
- Age
- Gender
- Geography
- Purchasing power
- Interests
- Consumption habits
C] Steps to define your target audience
Here are the most effective approaches businesses can use to define their target audience.
1. Understanding the current customer demographics
If you, as a business, want to understand who your SEO strategy should be targeting, it is important to start with the current customers.
The most effective starting point is to connect with your sales team and question them on who is buying your products or services. They will be able to share insights from their CRM as well as break down the audience report based on who converts the strongest or who holds the highest average order value.
Do not overlook the insights gained from Google Analytics. The data from Google Analytics can provide you with a detailed understanding of who the right audience is and how they behave.
2. Utilising social insights
Utilising the social channels’ insights is an excellent way to understand more about your target audience. If you have followers on social media for your business account, there is a good chance that this audience is interested in the products or services you offer.
Facebook’s Audience Insights is the most recommended tool to dive deeper into the page’s followers. Understanding your audience’s demographic profile is also a great starting point to determine who you should be targeting.
3. Knowing your competitors
The more a business is aware of its competitors, the better it can determine the target audience. For competitor analysis, there are several tools available such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and SpyFu. With these tools, businesses can:
- Understand competitor’s site performance and usability
- Learn about their keyword usage and backlink profile
- Know about their top-performing pages
- Discover their PPC campaigns
- Learn about their content marketing ideation and strategy
- Analyse their social presence and social engagement
These powerful insights will also help you to continuously improve your SEO strategy.
4. Analysing the SERPs
Spending time analysing the SERPs can also assist businesses to determine their target audience.
Businesses should run searches around the primary commercial keywords or the terms related to the business. It is important to note down whether the content for these keywords is transactional or informational, which will help you determine the search intent.
It is also vital to pay attention to common themes followed throughout the search pages as well as the keywords that are optimised for the promoted products or services.
5. Interviewing the current customers
If businesses really want to figure out who their target audience is, the content they wish to consume, and how they desire to be targeted online, it is important to speak and understand the viewpoint of those who have already bought or are currently buying their products/services.
Surveying and interviewing existing consumers can shine a light on the target audience that a business can never uncover from any research tool. Interviewing/surveying can also help in gaining a competitive business advantage.
Businesses can employ free tools like Google Forms to collect feedback/responses from their customers. Once a sufficient number of surveys are completed, the collected data can be utilised to look for any particular trend amongst the received responses. This can help you improve your existing digital marketing strategies for better results.
6. Identifying the queries asked by the core subjects
Questions are a powerful medium to learn more about who the audience is and the topics they truly care about. It also helps to establish a relationship between the audience and the business.
It is recommended that businesses take the time to analyse what exactly their target audience wants and is searching for. This will help businesses to deliver them to their customers promptly, thereby improving brand credibility and increasing their revenue.
For this, businesses can employ tools such as AnswerThePublic, which is a search engine listening tool that provides questions that people are asking/searching for around your target keyword.
When defining the right target audience, businesses can then utilise these insights to ensure their strategy targets those questions that are being asked frequently. It is also an excellent tool for content marketing and can help you create relevant and engaging content that drives more traffic.
Conclusion
While there is no denying that keywords play a massive role in developing a successful SEO strategy, without understanding the audience, businesses are likely to struggle to get targeted leads.
The success of SEO comes from understanding who your target audience is and why they should engage with you.
Having a clear grasp of the target audience can help you strategize an actionable plan that can be implemented across all marketing platforms. With the right strategy, businesses can rank their targeted pages better and usetheir blogs to attract more organic traffic and drive long-term value.
Make use of the advice in this guide to define your target audience. This will help you come up with a winning SEO plan that will help accelerate your business growth. If you need expert help for audience research or SEO, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
As an SEO agency in Surrey, we can help you not only define your audience but can also help devise an SEO strategy that works!
