Putting things in the right perspective has always been a strategic move whenever one needs to optimize efforts and maximize results. As a business owner, this is essential when targeting a specific audience that’s part of your customer base. This will give you an idea who your potential customers will be, along with their age group, and their interests, among others.

Bottom line, the more you know about your market, the better you can tailor your marketing efforts to suit their needs. So, what you need is different profiles of  to represent your preferred audience. This is essential in your SEO efforts to market your brand, particularly in keyword research and targeting queries relevant to what potential buyers would most likely search for.

Understanding a buyer’s goals, needs, and limits are all essential in creating targeted content for your SEO and social media marketing efforts. Here are the ways to use these different buyer personas for SEO.

Look for the Right Pieces of Information

The first and most important step you have to take is to create the right buyer personas needed for your SEO efforts. Around two to four is generally a reasonable amount to have, with one primary persona set for a specific user group that keeps popping up in your research. Identifying particular buyer segments should be your priority when applying them in making strategic decisions.

To give you a rundown of the bits of information you need to use as part of your personas, here’s a nifty list:

• Person: name or nickname, gender, age, location, education, occupation, income levels, buying habits, race, interests, lifestyle, hobbies, and a photo
• Environment: time and location when accessing your website including the devices they are using
• Tasks: the tasks they are trying to complete through your website
• Motivation: their desired outcome

Once you’ve created the ideal personas, it’s always a good idea to have them documented so they can easily be shared and used for reference. To make things a little easier, we’ve created an eBook that’ll help you research, identify, and build effective buyer personas for your marketing campaigns.

Personas for Keyword Research

As we all know by now, keyword research is one of the most important elements of SEO, and it involves the use of tools to help find terms that people use during the search process. It’s also important to track essential information like search demand and keyword competition. Through this process, we select the most relevant and potentially the most rewarding words or phrases to target for your site. Generally, it goes something like this:

• Brainstorming

During the early stages of your keyword research, you first need to think of broad ideas of what users may possibly search within your niche. This will help you come up with seed terms that you can use in your keyword research tools to generate more search terms.

• Collecting Data

There’s a lot of data you’ll need to collect to extract the right keywords that generate quality traffic for your SEO efforts. You will need to utilize a number of methods to achieve this, such as using keyword tools, exporting your own keywords from Google Analytics, and combining the data before checking if you’re getting traffic from any of your terms.

• Filtering and Sorting

This is where you cut out keywords that are low in terms of search volume, too competitive, or not relevant enough. This is important because you don’t want to be wasting resources on keywords that don’t drive revenue. You may also look for themes by which you can categorize your keywords.

• Implementation

You can now execute the final stage of the process by implementing the new keywords through the SEO on-page elements. You should also add them to the page title and meta description among others, and you might even consider rewriting the page’s content to make it relevant to your target search terms.

You can use your personas in three stages of the whole process. They will first come into play when you brainstorm for seed terms since they reflect the needs and intentions of the various potential users of your website.

1. For example, if your business provides telecommunications services, your techie persona might be more interested in searching for ‘iPhone XS specifications,’ for example, while your socialite persona might be more into finding out how many free minutes they can get or which social apps are free to use on a specific plan. In which case, they could be going for ‘<your brand name> unlimited calls’ or ‘free Facebook app.’

2. After generating your seed terms, your personas will be needed once more when making decisions on your target keywords. When creating your final list, you should take into consideration whether they reflect your user personas accurately. This will also prompt you to look back at your seed terms and determine if your final terms express the same intention.

3. Finally, your personas may also be applied in the implementation stage of your keyword research process by setting the tone and direction of the content on your landing page. If you’re targeting your techie persona, make sure you answer their queries by showcasing the technical specs of your smartphone bundle and provide a definite next step.

Personas for Linkbuilding

Your primary strategy in white hat linkbuilding is to create and promote content that has a huge chance of being shared by your target audience. This is also where your personas can be a useful tool in your linkbuilding strategy.

• Linkbaiting

Personas can be used as part of a link bait strategy by identifying blogs that fit those you’ve created. For your techie persona, for example, is likely to be a reader of tech or gadget blogs and may even have their own blog. What the techie is interested in reading/writing about can set the standard for the type of content that you’re trying to create.

Keep a specific persona in mind and always consider their interests and goals when outreaching for link bait. You may also be able to leverage those factors in an attempt to build a relationship with your customers.

• Guest Posting

Referring to your buyer personas is an excellent approach in coming up with guest post topics to write about. They are your means to know what kind of websites your potential customers might to visit and what sort of content they might want to read. Keep in mind that guest posts with well-thought out and relevant titles catered to a relevant audience have a higher chance of being published on third-party websites.

More Accurate Personas Means Better SEO Targeting

Collecting information for the creation of buyer personas can help your company understand common attributes found in your customers and your target audience. This allows you to understand their concerns and buying habits better.

Armed with the right data, you’ll know what they want and when they want it, making it easier to achieve profitable results from your marketing campaigns. It’s all a matter of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and helping them find what they are looking for.

Any other ways you’ve used buyer personas to support your SEO strategy? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!