Why are customer personas important for SEO?

Ellie Wilson | 26th January 2023 | Organic

Customer personas, also known as user or buyer personas, are vital for understanding exactly who uses your product or service. Whilst these personas are useful for every aspect of marketing, they hold a particular importance when it comes to SEO.

What is a customer persona?

Customer personas are semi-fictional characters that are used to represent the different types of customers who use your product or service. Personas help to give you a better understanding of how to connect and engage with your target audience. 

By taking the time to create customer personas, you’ll learn valuable information about your audience. This includes both demographic data and more intricate details such as their interests, current frustrations and what solutions they are looking for.

How to identify customer personas

Before you start using them for SEO benefits, you’ll need to identify your customer personas. To create the most accurate personas, you’ll have to dig deep into all your available resources and teams. 

A few practical ways to gain customer insights include:

  • Using Google Analytics to identify trends in demographic reports
  • Scanning social media analytics for key user data
  • Speaking to the sales, marketing and customer support teams 
  • Using forms to gain key information about your customers
  • Using surveys to uncover key trends about your customers

How can customer personas be used for SEO?

Customer personas should play an important role within your SEO efforts. From discovering the keywords your audience uses to how they interact with your website, using personas is a great way to ensure the right people are finding your business.

So how exactly can customer personas be used for SEO purposes? 

To undertake more targeted keyword research

Targeting the right keywords is of course vital for reaching your target audience and improving visibility. With the use of a customer persona, you can have a greater understanding of the type of queries that users might search for.

How might the needs of your customer personas differ? Would some customers be concerned with the price? Would others be more interested in specific benefits your product or service can provide? Are you working in a competitive niche where your customers might be looking for product/service comparisons? 

Keeping your personas in mind throughout the keyword research process will help ensure that your site is visible for the keywords your target audience uses. And once the keyword research is complete, you can use this to create effective landing pages that directly target a specific persona — ultimately giving you more chance of a conversion.

To carry out customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s journey. This process helps you to discover all touchpoints, uncover any pain points and stop any potential customers from slipping through the gaps.

Customer journey mapping naturally goes hand in hand with customer personas, since it’s all about understanding how each user finds your business, engages with your website and makes a decision to convert. The more you understand about your customer demographics, the easier it’ll be to map out their journey.

Do some of your customer personas find your business through social media? Do some use a computer to convert whilst others use a mobile? Do users tend to drop off at a certain point within their journey and could the use of personas help you to solve this? 

To produce content that converts 

“Content is king” — we all know the saying by now. But if you want to create content that truly engages and connects with your target audience, then you’ll need to keep your personas at the forefront of your mind.

Tailoring your content to your audience helps to make sure it’s both relevant and able to convert. What questions would each of your personas want to be answered? Or what solutions to their current problems would they like to read about? 

It’s also necessary to think about how your customers consume content. For example, would they prefer short form blog posts, infographics, videos or detailed reports? It’s even worth thinking about the words your audience uses and how they speak. Reading content that feels tailored to the user is a great way to make people feel your business is the right one for them.

Service page content should also be created with the same thoughts in mind. What exactly would your customers need to read to encourage them to convert? Are they looking for plenty of social proof and statistics? Or are they looking for persuasive details that’ll make them choose your business over a competitor? 

To improve website design and user experience

If people find it difficult to use your website, they’re less likely to convert. Researching customer personas will give you much more insight into the type of user experience you’re offering to your target audience. 

For example, maybe you have a persona of someone who is 60 years old, only accesses the internet on a desktop computer and always looks through reviews before converting. With this persona in mind, you’d need a website that functions well on a desktop, is easy to navigate and has plenty of visible reviews.

On the other hand, you might have a persona of someone who is 25 years old, busy with work and social activities and mostly uses their mobile to convert. To give this persona a good user experience, you’d need a website that performs well on mobile and offers a quick, easy way to convert.

Conclusion 

To conclude, customer personas can really contribute to your SEO strategy in a number of ways. Understanding which type of people engage with your business is the best way to ensure that you’re tailoring your product or service to the right audience. 

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