If you’re like many businesses today, you may be searching for the right SEO services to enhance your business. Unfortunately, it can be tough to find the right team to help. SEO is a crowded market these days, and ensuring you connect with a team that will actually build your business can be complex. What you may not realise, though, is that before you can even begin searching for the right SEO team to meet your needs, you need to develop a solid buyer persona.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
If you’re not already familiar with this term, you may be familiar with its synonym – ideal customer. Essentially, a buyer persona is just an idea of the type of person who is most likely to buy from your company. Using the data sources you have at your fingertips, you simply begin building a profile of that perfect customer, then you can begin using optimisation to better reach out to them.
Why Does Buyer Persona Matter in SEO?
Not sure how creating that persona can actually help with optimisation? There are a number of reasons it can be useful, but there are three that will absolutely help change your mind.
- Buyer Persona Defines Intent: The buyer’s journey is a fairly complex process, and understanding where a buyer might be when they reach out to you can help you develop and nurture your leads differently. Developing a solid persona may mean strategically crafting your online marketing plan to reach the right people at the right time so you can better see their intent and how to move them from one section of the customer journey to the next.
- Buyer Persona Changes Word Choice: One key part of SEO is brainstorming your seed terms to come up with the right keywords, and different potential buyers will shift the keywords a bit. For example, if you offer app development services for businesses, those in the financial industry might use very different terms than those in the wellness industry. Understanding those you wish to reach is essential to determining exactly what your keywords should be.
- Buyer Persona Builds Better Links: Linking is a powerful optimisation strategy you simply can’t afford to overlook, and personas are the perfect way to make sure you’re getting the right links. After all, the basic goal here is to create links within sites that you think your target audience might enjoy, and if you know who belongs in that target audience, you’re more likely to end up with the perfect links.
Moving Forward
Convinced you need to know more about buyer persona before you book SEO services to help optimise your site? Building that persona doesn’t have to be as complex as you think. You can certainly begin by checking your current analytics for data about who is interacting with your company. Understanding age, education level, gender, and geographical location can all be incredibly helpful. Beyond that, though, you have several other options to help build out your profiles. You may want to consider talking to your employees. They’re likely the ones who are dealing with customers on a day-to-day basis and, thus, know them best. A simple survey should help you gather information from them. You may also want to send a survey to your current customer base. If you include an incentive, like a discount or something similar, you’re likely to get a solid response. If you have a bit more time and money to invest in the process, though, one-on-one interviews with focus groups can be an excellent data source for your personas.
After you’ve gathered the data, it will likely be helpful to group your customers to see what they have in common. For example, while one service you provide might be great for new parents, another service you offer could be aimed specifically at parents of kids in primary grades. You’ll create a buyer persona for each distinct group you find from your data.
The final step in the process is to find or create a template that helps better define your persona so you can share it with marketing teams, like those behind your new SEO services. This persona will help you change everything about your strategy, and it may provide more targeted results.