How To Define Your Target Audience for SEO
Having a good grasp of your target audience for SEO is crucial. If you understand your target audience, you know what they are looking for.
The better you understand your target audience, the more you will be able to focus your ads and reach the audience who are most likely to convert into customers.
1.
What Is a Target Audience?
First and foremost, you need to know what a target audience is when you talk about SEO. Your target audience is individuals you intend to attract to your website or web page.
Regarding SEO, your target audience is potential customers using search engines to find businesses like yours.
When you talk about SEO, your customers visiting your website are the target audiences. These are the people who want to visit your website.
They are the exact person with a problem your product can solve. The more engagement you have with this set of audiences, the more benefits you will have in the future in terms of brand affinity.
How To Define Your Target Audience
In order to define your target audience and direct them to your website, you will need to know what they are looking for. You need to identify why specifically they are searching for your product or service. You also need to identify the types of searches they are using.
You might think of it as basic keyword research for SEO. But understanding your target audience goes beyond that.
As you know more about the audience – this will inform your entire SEO strategy. You will have better ideas about how you structure landing pages. It means the way you present the content on the website.
Remember that the most vital SEO strategies are the ones that are rooted in understanding your target audience. Once you know your target audience, you can plan the right strategy.
Why You Need To Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in SEO. In simple terms, it can drive your SEO success. An SEO company Dubai can provide a strategy for the same. If you have a clear picture of your target audience, it will allow you to:
1 You can carry out accurate keyword research to find the hyper-relevant search terms your audience is searching. And then optimize them.
2 One can Increase and drive relevant traffic from potential clients and customers.
3 After identifying your audience, you can generate relevant content for them to consume, which will also improve their user experience.
4 it can help convert a higher fraction of your organic traffic into leads or sales.
2.
Differences Between Target Market and Target Audience
Target market and target audience are quite similar terms when discussing SEO. They are overlapping terms. However, they have key differences – mostly related to the practical implications. But each of these terms is related to your business in some way.
In simple marketing terms – casting a wide net is the best way to catch more fish.
Both target audience and target market go hand in hand. A target market will impact all decisions a small business makes.
Note that all services and products are developed to meet the needs and desires of the target market. Packaging, labels, and pricing decisions are all made to appeal to the target market. In addition, the sales processes are also structured around the target markets’ shopping preferences.
On the other hand, a target audience only impacts decisions related to a specific marketing message. For this reason, target markets are usually composed of the end user of a service or product. In contrast, target audiences may or may not be.
The Power of Targeting
You will agree that the most successful fishermen know what type of fish they plan to catch in the future. The design with this specific size of fish in mind.
These fishermen also know precisely where to find these fish. They also know when to deploy their nets to catch them strategically.
This is why targeted advertisements for your audience are twice as effective as non-targeted ads. So you should identify clearly defined target markets and audiences that work like magnifying glasses focusing on the sun’s rays.
3.
Tools To Help You Identify Your Target Audience
When trying to identify your target audience today, there are a number of tools that can make the process a lot easier. These tools can also save a lot of time. Tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush are quite popular.
Every one of these target audience identifying tools will help you effectively understand who your customers are. You can also figure out your audience’s potential buying habits and the types of purchases they make.
These SEO tools will help identify your target audience.
Google Analytics
When looking to identify your target audience, a tool that you might often overlook despite its popularity is Google Analytics.
When you are looking to identify audience insights, GA can help you discover:
1 User behavior which includes frequency of visits, new vs. returning, engagement, and more.
2 Demographics like age and gender.
3 Geo like language and location
4 Device – mobile, tablet, and desktop.
5 Acquisitions – Google organic, Google PPC, direct, Google CPC etc.
6 Interests
7 User flow
8 Behavior
SEMrush
SEMrush – an all in one suite that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, keyword research, content, and social media. The SEMrush Market Explorer Tool allows you to gain insights on your target audience. The tool can help you analyze your market and where you fit in it compared to your competitors.
It can help you gain insights on your target audience specifically on:
1 Growth in the market
2 Traffic trends
3 Share of visits
4 Traffic generation strategy
5 Domain vs Market: Growth by sources
6 Geo Distribution
7 Market Traffic
4.
Understanding Your Current Customers
With a clearly defined target market, every detail of a product or service can be perfectly tailored to their needs and desires. It will result in incredibly satisfied customers and overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Once you have a well-defined target audience, every detail of your marketing campaign can be perfectly tailored. Tailored to appeal to their emotions, interests, and world views.
When you start to identify who you should be targeting for your SEO strategy – your first point of reference should always be your current customers. Remember that they are the most valuable of the lot as they are already with you.
The easiest way of doing this is by taking a look at the audience data within your CRM. The data will often include demographics, purchases, customer journeys, and preferences. They can be an easy win when determining the types of people you should be targeting.
Another great way to tap into your current clients and customers is to speak to your sales team. Your sales team will generally have a huge amount of insight into your customers. It may include conversion rates, demographics, and order details.
By combining the data from your CRM and the insights gained from your sales team – it should give you a starting point to determine the right personas. Thus helping you to target the correct keywords.
Who Is Visiting Your Website
Another way to determine the types of your customers to target – is to look at the traffic currently visiting your website. You can achieve this by using Google Analytics.
By looking into the info gathered within the ‘Audience’ tab you can easily gain insights such as interests, demographics, geo data, and much more.
This data is beneficial and can give you insights into your target audience. Thus helping to determine the types of content to focus on as well as any geographical locations you should be looking to target.
This user data may also suggest that your content strategy and your audience are not currently aligned. In such a scenario, you may want to change your current content strategy in order to match the insights gained from your website.
This is then when you need tools such as Facebook insights to provide data to back up your decision-making and strategy planning process.
5.
Ways To Define Your Target Audience
You should know how to create marketing messages that can truly resonate with your target audience. Then you can achieve higher conversion rates and build a more robust and attractive brand.
With a well-defined target audience, you can perfectly tailor every detail of your marketing campaign to appeal to their wants, interests, and emotions.
Different ways to attract your target audience:
1. Keyword Research
This might sound like an obvious and simple step – but it is often overlooked. Searching for your target keywords will give you a real flavor for what type of content works well in the SERPs.
It is important to note that you should take different keywords that you want to rank for. For example, transactional keywords lead to product pages, and mid-level keywords might lead to category pages. You may also target long tail searches that are serviced with blog content.
You should take note of the types of pages that rank. One should take note of the amount of copy on them and what that copy is saying. Note that paying attention to softer aspects like the tone of voice will play a significant role in aligning with your audience.
2. Narrowing Your Focus
To truly understand your audience – you need to understand what makes them tick. It means you must do thorough research to deduce what makes them visit your web page.
3. Know Your Competitors
If you research properly, you can better understand what is working for your competitors. The better you can understand your target audience, the easier it is for you.
This is the time to use tools that analyze the market, such as SEMrush. This is a great tool to find what is working for your competitors.
Start by entering your domain into the organic research tool. From here, you can quickly look at the position mapping of your website against the competition. It will allow you to see whose strategy is working well and gaining the most organic traffic for your website.
Conclusion
You need to understand that a clear grasp of your target audience is fundamental to a good SEO strategy. It has benefits and affects all of your marketing communications.
If you get it right, you can rank your main landing pages better if you utilize the articles and blogs to drive more organic traffic and drive long-term customer value.
If you truly align yourself with your audience, these users can become spokespeople for your business in the long run. These audiences can engage and share content through their social media. Therefore understand your audience better and start reaping the rewards.