Search engine optimization is a great tool and marketing strategy that places your site in front of people that are ready and willing to buy from you. Through organic search results, you can improve the quantity and quality of the people you send to your website. But before this tool can work for you, you need to understand who your target audience is so that you are able to develop a good strategy that drives traffic and increases conversion.
The target audience, simply put, are your future customers. They are people searching for what you offer on Google and other search engines, and people you would want to attract to your website. Understanding your target audience is understanding who is searching for what you have to offer and what keywords they are using to find it.
How to Define your Target Audience
1. Analyze current customer demographics:
Understanding who your target audience is starting from your existing customers. Defining who your present customers are would paint a better picture of the kind of people should be focusing on. If you have a CRM tool like Salesforce, it would be easy to define your audiences and buyers’ journey based on the strongest conversions or highest order value.
2. Social Media Insight
If you have social media pages and you have built a following on each of the channels, there is a good chance your audiences are coming from your social media channels. Social media analytics gives you a deeper understanding of who is interested in what you offer and who you should be targeting.
3. Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis not only gives you an insight into who you should be targeting but also on how to improve your strategy. The more you understand your competitors’ strategy, the more likely you would be to remain a few steps ahead of them.
4. Send Out Surveys and Conduct Interviews
Customer surveys are a good way to get feedback about your business. The feedback you get will tell you who is more interested in your products and why. And by comparing recurring trends, you can turn pain points into targetable keywords research. You will get information that you wouldn’t generate from tools
Four Major Strategies to Drive Traffic
Once you have properly defined your target audience, it becomes easy to confidently focus your SEO efforts on the right people with the right keywords. Here are few strategies that would help you drive traffic from your target audience.
1. Audit your website pages: What an SEO audit does is identifying why your pages are not getting enough traffic or the desired amount of traffic. With an SEO, you know your website’s overall performance and can create goals and implement tactics to reach your desired goals while working with the content you have on the website.
2. Understand what your audience wants: a big bulk of understanding your audience needs is narrowing down on frequently asked questions through social media platforms, google analytics, visitor comments, or personalized surveys. This feedback guides you to what kind of content you can post in other to draw like minds to your company. Focusing on your audience’s pain points gives your content more relevant, that way your cont6ent can be shared across multiple platforms and growing your audience in the process.
3. Improve search engine ranking: There are many ranking factors Google uses but the major way to improve your ranking is enhancing user experience throughout your site. Poor-quality sites are less likely to get high ranks by Google. When your website looks confusing, outdated, or slow, your audience would bounce out. One way you can enhance your ranking through SEO is by optimizing readability. Post quality content in shorter paragraphs, bullet points, and engaging images. Don’t forget a captivating call to action that tells your readers what to do next.
4. Make use of high-quality internal links and backlinks: Links are very important for search engine optimization. If your post has quick links to other pages that provide more information, chances are your pages would be shared frequently. But also, be careful about the kind of links you share on your website because slow and dead links can hurt your site.
Final Thoughts…
The world of SEO is still evolving, and more businesses are adapting to the process. But understanding your niche inside out with insights to your target audiences and targeted keywords can give you a competitive boost. SEO techniques are not the easiest strategy to implement, but with constant practice and dedication, you would see the result in your click-through rates.
