Define Your Target Audience for SEO with These 7 Steps

Everybody knows that SEO is a keyword-driven process but to grow ranking in SERPs it is crucial to understand who your blog or website is catering to. Without understanding who your target audience is, it is very difficult to get conversions out of the current traffic. 

If a business carefully defines its target audience as a part of SEO strategy, growing the business on Google will be faster. 

The ultimate goal of any marketing channel is to help the business grow. Defining the target audience for SEO will be a game-changer for websites and blogs looking to convert the traffic and buy from them. 

In this post, we’ll see a 7-step process to help you lock that target audience and boost the website traffic.   

Let’s start with what is the target audience?  

The target audience is the group of people who are searching for a business like yours on a search engine. These are the people you want to visit your site. They are your potential customers. 

Defining your target audience means to know exactly who is searching for the keywords to develop a successful SEO strategy and put your website in front of them. 

Don’t confuse your target audience with buyer personas. These two are not the same thing. 

The target audience is the people you want to bring to your website who might buy. 

The buyer persona on the other side is the personality of an ideal customer which is created to help the marketing and sales team make insightful decisions. 

What is the need to define a target audience? 

SEO is all about keywords is the old notion. The whole ecosystem has changed with the frequent updates of search engines and the audience becoming more aware. 

The benefits of defining your target audience are many. It doesn’t just help to create a powerful SEO strategy but also increase the relevant traffic on your website. 

Imagine, 1000 visitors are coming to your website in a single day. With a 25% chance of converting, you get 250 potential customers in a day. 

After targeting the right audience, the chances of converting increased to 50%. Now, even with 800 visitors, your potential customers are increased to 400 in a day. 

That is the power of defining your target audience. It increases the percentage of a visitor becoming a customer multifold. 

7 steps to accurately define Target Audience  

There are many ways to define your target audience, we’ll look at the most effective ones. 

1. Understanding Your Current Customer Base 

To know who will be interested in buying your products and services, start with your current customers. Talk to your sales team and ask what is it that makes customers buy from you. 

Try to understand what the major contributing factors for your business are. Which products are the ones they like to buy most, what is the average cost value and more? 

Don’t forget to use Google Analytics to get detailed insights into the buyer’s current demographics and how they are interacting with your business online. 

This also helps to cater to your customers better and to find more people like them. 

2. Drill Down into Your Competition 

While it’s futile to spend too much time analyzing the competition but to know how they are performing better, is an easy pathway to know what the customers are liking and why. 

Do a thorough analysis of your competitor’s website and look for insightful metrics. Focus on the best performing keywords, top-ranked pages, and other competitors. 

Also Read: 12 Instant Ecommerce Hacks to Boost Your Online Store Sales Today

This will help you to understand what might your product is lacking or how to improve the SEO marketing strategy to present in front of your target audience what they want. 

3. Identify the Potential Demographics 

To only cater to the people interested in your business is a bad strategy. Businesses should always be on the lookout for new segments of potential customers. This is true for SEO as well. 

The next way to understand your target audience is to identify what are the potential demographics of people who can be your target audience. 

Now to comprehend what can be potential demographics of audiences can be, use polls, surveys, sample trials on your website and see what the new customers which are interested in. This will help you to figure out whether or not you’re targeting the right demographic and define new ones as well. 

4. Analyze the Current Demographics 

Nobody can tell you what your customers want better than customers. Grab a coffee and call your customers to figure out what are the demographics of your community. Factors like location, age, gender, likes, marital status, income, will help you discover which type of customers will be more interested to engage with your website. 

You can mail Google forms to your customers and ask them to fill a detailed research survey. Through the collected responses identify buying patterns, online behavior and the core reason for the buy. 

5. Psychoanalyze the SERPs 

To accurately define the audience for a successful SEO strategy, the best way is to analyze the SERPs. 

Search for the main keywords for your business website and the buying terms related to it. Check what is the type of content being used – informational or transactional. What are the keywords that the website pages are optimized for, what is the tone of content, what are the products and services ranking, this will help to determine the search intent.  

Such analysis of SERPs tells you what kind of audience is being targeted. 

6. Focus on the Right Questions 

The end goal of identifying the target audience for an SEO strategy is to display your website in front of them. 

This can be easily achieved by discovering the core questions of your target audience about the product and service. What issues they are facing and how can you connect them with your business. 

Google also displays the best answers to audience question searches. You can use one of the many tools available online like SEMRush, answerthepublic.com, and Buzzsumo to find out the most searched questions regarding your business. 

Also Read: 10 mistakes to avoid while hiring IT outsourcing companies

7. Use Social Media Analytics 

Your social media followers are already interested in your products and services. This social media following can be a great place to pinpoint your target audience. 

Use social media analytics to know deep insights into your audience. The recommended tools are Facebook audience insights, SEMRush, and Hootsuite where you can find out who you should be targeting. 

SEO since its inception has transformed into a giant web for marketing. From searching the high-ranking keywords to crafting a funnel, SEO today is more about the right execution at the right time than ever before. 

Understanding your target audience is the key to untangling this web and making your website rank on the first page of SERPs. 

Keep targeting the right audience and be relentless in execution. 

If you need more insights about how to rank your newly build website on Google or how to take your eCommerce business to another level, contact us for outstanding digital marketing and SEO services.