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How do you analyze your audience for SEO? With SEO, you don’t tell your audience what you want to say. Instead, you tell your clients what they want or need to hear. Understanding your audience will direct your core business and should therefore be a priority. Ranking for SEO is also a necessity. Putting these two aspects together leads to even better-targeted content.
What to Look at When You Analyze an Audience for SEO
Customers are usually in different categories and identifying them and what they need will help you target them appropriately and adequately. Some clients already know what they’re looking for. Others may be researching to find out what would work. Some may have already decided what they want but are making comparisons as to their best source.
Each of these categories will be looking for different kinds of content and, therefore, different variations of keywords. Understand this, and you can roll out a winning content strategy.
Where do you begin your search?
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
1. Social Listening
Social media sites are a great place to collect information about clients. Look further than where your brand is mentioned. Anything similar to what you’re doing is relevant to this exercise.
Try and read not just the content but the mood too. What do people think of your products? Do they feel the same about your competitors and the industry in general?
You can find out how they prefer to receive their products or services in such setups. By studying social media interactions, you can discover your customers’ expectations since people tend to be brutally honest on social media.
Social media platforms also have analytics tabs that show you different aspects of your clients.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the better-known analytics tools. It’ll give you information on your site visitors, including demographics, location, and which pages they frequent on your website, among other things.
The most frequented pages contain what your audience is looking for and will tell you what topic to cover next. Demographic information will guide how you frame your content, so it appeals to your audience.
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
3. Look at Your Competition
Anyone offering similar products or services most likely has similar clients. While this isn’t always true, putting your competitors under a microscope could reveal lots about your clients.
Look at their audience and how it compares to yours. Do you have the same target audience? Maybe your clients aren’t responding as enthusiastically as you’d like. Is it a problem with your marketing campaigns for a particular demographic, or maybe you’re just targeting the wrong group?
Even if you’re targeting different demographics, find out how they handle their clientele. You could learn a thing or two from them if they are posting great results. You can then adapt it to your clients.
4. Conduct Surveys and Interviews with Your Customers
Who better to tell you about your clients than your clients themselves? Surveys can be dreary and unappealing; thus, many people avoid them or abandon them midway. Keep it short and sweet.
Ask basic details about their demographics and gradually probe them about their interests, needs, and pain points. You can gather useful nuggets from this simple procedure. Use it to get insights on content and which keywords to target.
Photo by Pixabay
5. Conduct Keyword Research
SEO is majorly about how you play around with keywords in your content. The best way to choose the right keywords is by conducting keyword research.
Think about what keywords your audience may search for. Using an SEO tool such as SEMrush, you can expand this list with related keywords. The tool will give you matching phrases, the estimated monthly search volume, and related topics.
Long-tail queries may open even more doors. Creating content around common questions will bring these long-tail searches to your doorstep, maybe even as a direct answer. The related terms and keyword variations will give clues about your customers’ needs.
By default, the keywords you focus on should be relevant to your products or services.
6. Look for Secondary Data
You have all the basic information, but you can refine it further by conducting some research. Pick an important aspect of your audience and read further on it. If your audience is Gen X, look for published material about them on Google Scholar. Look at it as an inside view in your bid to analyze your audience for SEO. You’re essentially creating a sketch of their thought process.
Giving attention to the audience as a separate entity from the content opens up more avenues to improve content further. The tips above will help you plug holes and fill gaps you may not have noticed in your initial content strategy.
This is better than creating new content from scratch since it’s similar to working from the inside out.
Photo by Liza Summer
Analyzing a Buyer’s Journey
Now you know who your audience is and what they’re looking for. Your job is to make sure to arrest and interest them regardless of whether they’re conducting research, considering their options, or are already set on making a purchase.
You can turn every potential customer into a purchasing customer with appropriate keywords and content according to demographics, including videos and images. When you analyze your audience for SEO, you have an opportunity to cover more ground than you did during the initial baseline research. Sometimes, the only way to reach a higher level with your clients is to study them diligently.
Final Word
With insights from the methods above, you may be surprised about what slipped through your fingers when starting. You can use the information to consolidate content, revamp old posts to target better, remove unnecessary content, and optimize what already works.
Studying your audience is your new task. Find out as much as possible about them and create killer content to meet their needs in ways they never knew possible.
Happy learning!
