30-Second Summary
- It is vital that we keep our SEO tactics user-focused and ensure we have a clear SEO target audience in our marketing strategies.
- Your target audience is people searching online for businesses like yours – your future customers or clients.
- Defining your target audience involves understanding exactly who is searching for the keywords linked to your website and businesses and why they visit the pages that they do.
- Start by reviewing your current customer demographics, tips and steps for this linked below!
- My top 5 tips for audience targeting: Know Your Current Customer Demographics, Analyse Social Media Insights, Understand Search Intent & The SERPs, Keep Your Competitors Close, What Terms and Questions are Customers Searching?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing SEO as a purely digital, internet-focused, search engine pleasing tool – and yes this is highly important, but we must remember that there is a human on the other end of the search driving each and every search query. This is why, as digital marketers and SEOs, it is vital that we keep our SEO tactics user-focused and ensure we have a clear SEO target audience in our marketing strategies.
As experts in SEO, my team at Absolute Digital Media always incorporate audience targeting into their SEO campaigns because, if you fail to understand who you are targeting, the campaign will become stagnant. Targeting the correct audience will lead to traffic which converts into sales. To create an SEO strategy that brings sales conversions to your business, contact a member of our friendly, expert SEO team today on 0800 088 6000.
What Is an SEO Target Audience?
Simply put, your target audience is people searching online for businesses like yours – your future customers or clients.
To create a successful SEO campaign, your target audience needs to be considered at every stage of the strategy and implementation. Remember, your marketing to people, not to search engines!
Defining your target audience involved understanding exactly who is searching for the keywords linked to your website and businesses and why they visit the pages that they do. Once this is established, you can build a strategy based on tactics linked to your target audience and their search intent to ensure your website is visible when your target audience is searching.
Drive Conversions With A Targeted SEO Strategy
What Is the Difference Between Your Target Audience and Your Buyer Persona?
Although they share similar attributes and values, the terms target audience and buyer persona are two different terms and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Think of your target audience as a broad overview of people interested in your businesses, whereas your buyer persona is a detailed description of your individual ideal customer based on market research, data and existing customer profiles.
Your target audience is a collective of people identified through industry research, customer information and interests who are likely to be interested in your products or services. Your target audience is your ideal purchasing audience and who you should be targeting in your SEO strategy.
How To Improve SEO With Audience Targeting
Defining your SEO target audience will enable you to build an effective SEO strategy that delivers results. By honing in on your target audience you will be able to create a more targeted keyword strategy, optimise your site for their online experience and drive more relevant traffic to your webpage to convert clicks into sales. These are all goals aligned with online business owners across a range of industries – so how do we achieve them?
Audience targeting is focused on increasing your search relevance and usefulness for your ideal audience so that every click and increase in traffic brings value to your website. Plus, when you know exactly who your target audience is, you can put an effective SEO strategy in place to put your business in front of these people online.
Reach Your Target Audience With The SEO Experts
How To Define Your SEO Target Audience
When it comes to defining your SEO target audience, there are a few different methods, but here are my tried and tested steps to understanding your ideal customer audience.
Know Your Current Customer Demographics
Starting close to home is always the best tactic for understanding your ideal audience, you’ve already got a customer base at your disposal to review! Be this digitally or for bricks and mortar businesses, start by reflecting on your current customer demographics.
Bring your SEO and sales team together and discuss who is buying your products or services, ask yourself the following:
- Is our customer base B2B or B2C?
- What is the age range of our customers?
- What is the gender split of our customers?
- Where do our customers come from?
- What locations are our customers in?
From this, you can delve into your business analytics and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to review the breakdown of audiences who convert the strongest, spend the most on your website or become returning customers. These metrics will showcase your strangest audience demographics and indicate who your target audience should be.
Next, head to Google Analytics for a more detailed understanding of who your audience is and how they behave including time spend on your website if they’re repeat customers and where they come from. This information can be found in your Google Analytics Audience Report.
Analyse Social Media Insights
If you have a business social media page and have built up a following, there’s a very strong chance that this social media audience is interested in your businesses and the products or services that you offer.
Social media analytics and insights are an amazing tool to learn more about who your audience is, and the main social media platforms give users free access to their business account analytics information. This information is highly detailed and can be very informative when deciding who your target audience is.
Social media insights will provide shine a light on your followers’ demographics information including age, location, gender and if provided, occupation. You will also be able to monitor other pages your users interact with.
Create A Data Led SEO Strategy
Understand Search Intent & The SERPs
A simple, but highly effective, method of determining your SEO target audience is reviewing the SERPs. This will help determine who the audience you need to be targeting is based on search results and user clicks.
Reviewing which search terms link to your main keywords and how they rank will help demonstrate your audience’s search intent and indicate what your competitors are targeting.
Search for specific keywords linked to your target audience and see what appears, pay attention to the type of content, if it is informational or transactional and how these keywords are being optimised.
Keep Your Competitors Close
Keep your friends close and your competitors closer – the more you know about your competitors the better; this includes who they’re targeting with their SEO strategy.
Handy tools, such as Semrush and Ahrefs can help you delve into your competitor’s website and the key elements they’re targeting as this will inform who their target audience is. Pay particular attention to their ranking keywords, top pages, and other competitors. This will help you to targeting a similar audience to your competitors – making their customers yours.
What Terms and Questions are Customers Searching?
When identifying your target audience, you want to ensure your strategy targets the terms and questions your target audience are searching, not only will this help put your website in front of your ideal customers, but you will also be able to glean more information about your target audience based on what they search.
For example, what questions are linked to your website or key search terms can help define what your target audiences are asking and you can build this into your content strategy to capture your audience. Use Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to find questions linked to search terms to build a wider understanding of your audience’s search habits.
For more information on how to target your ideal audience through SEO or to build your own bespoke SEO strategy, contact the Absolute Digital Media team now on 0800 088 600.
