Defining Your Target Audience for SEO

Who are these people, and what do they want?

[Editor’s Note: Avid SEO junkie and regular contributor to the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog Laura Lippay has written a remarkable---and remarkably detailed---post for the SEOMoz blog on how you can create a thorough audience targeting strategy for SEO. It is the first of eight parts. Laura has graciously allowed us to post an excerpt.]

Doing SEO strategy right takes targeted competitive insight and very specific recommendations, beyond any SEO basics rulebook—and, ideally, a good relationship with the product (site) manager.

The first step in most marketing campaigns, search marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience. Your target audience is a defined set of people to which you are marketing your product.

Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations and, especially, their needs (a.k.a., theirpain points). Check out usability.gov’s description of personas, and how to do task analysis and scenarios for more details, or better yet, read Vanessa Fox’s upcoming book about personas related to search and conversion.

What we want to zero in on for our SEO strategy are those pain points: What do they want? and What are their needs that aren’t being met? Knowing these things will help us better define a content strategy and prioritize content to bring to the forefront.

There are two reasons why we start with audience needs, rather than jumping straight into keyword research:

Content Strategy
You want to provide content and tools that are as relevant and useful as possible to your target audiences. This goes beyond regular SEO practices and into site strategy, although providing relevant, useful content in itself is linkbait.

For example, let’s say I have a health site. I have several types of articles on health, drug information and information on types of diseases and conditions. My angle on the site is that I’m targeting seniors: If I find out that seniors are primarily interested in information on prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, then I know that I want to provide information specifically on those things. This allows me to hone in on that market’s needs and deprioritize or bypass other content.

Targeted Keyword Discovery
Ideally you’ll want to do keyword research based on what the audience wants, not solely on what content the site already has (or plans to have sans audience targeting), which may be limited. I can do keyword research on health conditions and drugs (content I have on my site) and determine what the general population is searching for and optimize my current content. Or I can cast my net wider and look at what my target audience wants first, then do my keyword research.

You may find that there are needs that your site is not meeting. Knowing my senior audience is interested primarily in prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, I can first make sure that I’m providing that content, then further determine the top keywords in these areas and use those terms in relevant and high-visibility areas on my site.

In the rest of the article, Laura offers tips for obtaining market information and suggests tools for developing demographic profiles to build a thorough picture of your target market to develop the most effective keywords. Read the full article here.

— The Team

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29 Comments Add your own

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19. Articles4Business | April 21st, 2010 at 2:24 am

The imoprtant thing in SEO

Targeted Keyword Discovery
Ideally you’ll want to do keyword research based on what the audience wants, not solely on what content the site already has (or plans to have sans audience targeting), which may be limited. I can do keyword research on health conditions and drugs (content I have on my site) and determine what the general population is searching for and optimize my current content. Or I can cast my net wider and look at what my target audience wants first, then do my keyword research.

Thank you so much
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21. Dave | April 21st, 2010 at 8:35 am

SEO stuff really boggles me! But this helped out a little, thanks!
22. Vancouver Search Engine Marketing | April 23rd, 2010 at 8:11 am

I am surprised that nobody mentioned analytics. Lots of people and companies chase keywords without having any knowledge if those keywords preform. item vs buy item vs buy item online are very close to each other but ranking for third keyword versus first keyword is huge. leave popular kewyords alone and go for low hanging fruit first in order to pay them bills. once you get orders in it is easy to optimize and grow because you get orders and data coming in. until then you are hoping whatever keywords you picked will work for you.
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Good Webblog for interessting seo news Thanks Sarah
29. hydroxatone | May 9th, 2010 at 9:40 pm

Thanks, some very good tips here… I think content is king.

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