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Creating SEO Strategy Specific To Buyer Personas

SEO is a big part of growing and building a brand online. Whether you’re in need of better lead generation for your service based business, or want internet users to easily find your eCommerce website online, an airtight plan for SEO is a must. In order to create this “airtight”, comprehensive SEO plan, marketers use buyer persona data to create a more concise and effective SEO strategy. 

What Are Buyer Personas?

The best online definition used to describe a buyer persona in layman’s terms can be found on the Hubspot blog. It goes a little something like this, “A buyer persona is ‘a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers’. It’s an archetype – a person, not entirely real, but not entirely fake – made up by trends and patterns you’ve gathered from studying your real customers.”

Why Are Buyer Personas Important?

Personas are useful for businesses of all sizes and at every level of success. They can impact a business’ success in the following areas:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Services & Product development

Buyer persona data (see image above), profiles and stories are based on real, existing customer information. Access to this type of information allows you to have a deep understanding of who your customers are and who are the specific types of people you are trying to attract. Buyer personas are critical for driving quality content creation for both social and SEO purposes, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.

Whether your brand has 1 single buyer persona or 20, the basic work that it takes to incoporate this info into your SEO strategy is the same. Don’t know how? Don’t worry, we got you covered.  Here we have made an extensive list of tips on how you can create an SEO strategy that is specific to your brand’s buyer personas. So let’s check them out!

Basics Of an SEO Strategy

Even the most basic SEO strategies must be built with a few specific elements that you’ll leverage to attract your ideal customer. When your SEO strategy is focused on your ideal customer, it means that you will benefit greatly in the following areas: 

• Keyword Research – Get a better understanding of what your ideal customer would type into search engines to find businesses that offer your types of products or services?
• Copy & Other Content Creation – What should you include in your website paragraph copy, alt text, page titles, schema markup, meta descriptions, offers, blog posts that would be considered helpful and relevant?
• Design & User Experience – Which website imagery, colors, fonts, font-size, navigation menu types and other design elements work best for this group?

Without taking buyer personas into account, your SEO strategy will lose out on the opportunity to benefit fully from these 3 most important elements.

SEO is all about getting found online by customers who know you, while also using your website to attract strangers who will become customers of your business. Utilizing these three elements as the cornetsone of your SEO strategy will allow you to begin to rank better in the search engine results pages for both Google and Bing.

Steps To Create A Successful SEO Strategy

With an effective SEO strategy in place, you are easily able to grow your website traffic. Syncing both, your content marketing efforts and your SEO plans, you can basically target keywords (search queries) that are specific to your business’ personas. This way your content marketing efforts will be inline with all SEO efforts and specifically suited to induce sustainable website traffic.

Here Is How Your New Customers Will Find You

A Quick Scenario – How SEO Works

Imagine a man, Bob, is visiting a new city for the first time. Bob needs a hair cut, so he uses either Google or Bing to search online for barbershops near him. He enters the keyword query “barbershops in Uptown Charlotte NC” into the search bar and what he will see in the search engine results page is a list of barbershop websites and locations that are in the Charlotte area.

Now let’s pretend for a moment that your business is one of those barbershops that have been included in the list of search results at the 7th position on the 1st page.

So which website do you think he will choose?

Well, here’s the answer based on our own analysis while managing client’s accounts, along with some information gathered from both Forbes magazine and Search Engine Watch researchers. 75% of people like Bob (internet users) will not look past the first page of the SERP. 35% of internet users will click on the barbershop that is in the first position on the SERP. 15% of internet users will choose the barbershop in the second position on the first page. 9% will choose the barbershop in the 3rd position on the first page, and then the likelihood of your barbershop’s website being chosen after the 3rd position dwindles further from this point.

This is how SEO works…in a nutshell. The #1 goal is to create an SEO strategy that does two things: (1) places your business’ website in the #1 position in the SERP. (2) Focuses on what it is that your ideal customers are looking for online so that you can tailor your website and all other online content to fit what the customers are searching for in order to make it easy for existing and new customers to find your website rather than your competitors.

Below are steps that will help you create a Basic SEO strategy for your business:

Step 1

First, you’ll need to define your buyer personas; find out what their unique characterisitcs are and categorize them like you see in the Persona profile image above. This persona data will guide your SEO and content marketing efforts to help you decide what it is that you need to focus on creating and how you will implement changes.

Step 2

Be clear about who you are, who you serve and what you do within the text you use for meta descriptions, page titles, page and blog post copy. Provide value on your web pages and blog posts. Make it clear that you are an experienced authoritative though leader who can be trusted to rectify their affairs. Speak to them in a clear language that they understand, if there is industry jargon or slang patterns used by your buyer personas in regards to your products or service, feel free to include this lingo throughout your website as well.

Be sure that all pertinent information about your business and how to contact you is easy to find. This includes team members, product or service offers, hours of operation, contact information, business locations, etc. 

Step 3

Keyword research is a major part of devising an effective SEO strategy. Find and list keywords (search queries) that your buyer personas use when searching for products or services like your online. Integrate these keywords into your content, especially on the home page and all page titles. This increases you pages chances of ranking high up in the SERP for that specific keyword.  

Better page ranking = higher website traffic

Use a combination of long-tail and location-based keywords along with other basic keyword integrations. 

Step 4

Create a industry-related blog for your site if you don’t have one already and start publishing regularly, 2 to 4 times per month.  Publishing new blog content to your website helps keep your website’s fresh and up to date. It is the latest and most accurate information about a subject matter that internet users, including your potential customers, are looking for online. Search engines are also programmed to look for and return to users this type of fresh content as well.

Step 5

Using structured data mark-ups, is extremely important. Also know as Schema, this markup beneficial for many reasons. Schema markup can help you rank faster, and help you hold your position without fluctuation. This type of code will also ensure that the key content of your page (price, location, etc.) is displayed accurately online.

This part of your strategy may take a bit of a learning curve before getting used to. Luck for you though, we’ve listed some free plugins in this Free SEO Tools article on our website. Check it out and feel free to contact us if you are interested in getting some assistance.