Imagine an actor reciting a text from Shakespeare: will he be more successful in front of a million kindergarten children or a hundred adults who love classical theater? Finding the right audience is key to getting applause and not booing. This metaphor summarizes why target audiences and buyer personas are important in an insurance SEO strategy. But there is much more to know.
Seen from non-expert eyes a strategy SEO may seem like just a technical matter that takes place mainly in the maze of the code of a web page and in which humans are simply fish falling into a digital net thrown into the SERP.
The role of the target audience, on the other hand, enters the scene already in the design phase and must be the beacon to follow throughout the process that leads to the creation of an effective optimization plan for the set objectives.
Understanding who the people you want to attract to the website are is essential for good results.
Let’s go see what the target audience is, how it differs from buyer personas. They are based on market research, real data on existing customers, and some assumptions based on … and what weight does it have in search engine optimization.
The Topic Of This Post
- 1 Difference between the target audience and buyer personas
- 2 Why is the target audience important for SEO?
- 3 Keyword, buyer personas, buyer journey
- 4 Create a digital marketing strategy without knowing the buyer personas
Differences between the target audience and buyer personas
In the infinite set of users who surf the net, the target audience of a strategy is that subset that includes all those who are interested in what is proposed through a website or other communication tools and who, therefore, could become customers. a company selling products/services or subjects inclined to make conversions on an online magazine, for example.
Knowing the audience you want to involve allows you to direct optimization activities and, more generally, to digital marketing.
Buyer personas are not a distant concept from the one just described, but there are small nuances to be known to draw up an excellent strategic plan.
If we take into consideration the target audience as we have described it, the buyer personas are the identikits of the members of this group that is created thanks to the collection of information regarding personal data, gender, interests, profession, purchasing habits, and many others. factors released by users while browsing.
It can be said that identifying buyer personas is like putting the target audience under the magnifying glass to discover all the details that can help in the complex process of optimizing a website.
Why is the target audience important for SEO?
What was said in the previous paragraph is not enough to understand how important the knowledge of the target audience or buyer personas is when building a digital project that needs to find a prominent place on Google or other search engines (example: Baidu in China).
Perfectly understanding who is the target a strategy is aiming for allows you to carry out targeted, very concrete operations that push the business towards growth.
Knowing the target audience of your SEO strategy leads to having a site, e-commerce, a blog.
- An excellent user experience, because it was designed for the characteristics of its typical user;
- An effective organization of categories, product pages, contents;
- A tone of voice similar to that of those who want to attract on the optimized pages;
- Texts, images, videos created and optimized to capture the attention of potential customers;
- A network of internal links is designed to guide the user towards the conversion.
If we focus on buyer personas, each of these activities becomes even more effective.
Creating a website that is comfortable from every point of view for users who we know are interested in the topics covered or the products on sale greatly increases the chance that they will convert.
Keyword, buyer personas, buyer journey
Keyword research, as is known, is the basis of SEO, but for some time it is no longer enough to insert keywords in a text to see the page of your site rank among the top results of the search engine.
Today it is important to understand the search intent behind a group of keywords and, consequently, the analysis of target users who ask Google questions becomes important.
The same keyword can be used in the query
For example, the same user who is looking for information on the net regarding “parquet”, my first search for general information and then may need specific data to install a particular type of wooden flooring.
Knowing the buyer persona and his / her buyer journey, it is possible to create content that meets the different needs that the user manifests through searches and guides him from the awareness phase to the consideration phase and, finally, to the decision.
Thanks to the creation of targeted content and the optimization of the pages on which they are published, it is possible to intercept quality traffic that will pass from one web page of the site to the other by descending into the funnel.
Create a digital marketing strategy without knowing the buyer personas
Each digital marketing plan should be based on precise objectives and the study of a specific target of users, otherwise, each activity could be cumbersome and ineffective.
Using the same plan to optimize different sites, ignoring buyer personas and project specifications, is not a viable path, because online competition is growing day by day and increasingly refined strategies are needed to ensure satisfactory returns on investments.
In short, not knowing the features of the potential customer with whom you want to establish a relationship means having a huge audience in front of you and distributing millions of brochures. Brochures are promotional documents, mainly used to present a company, organization, products, or services and … to find only a dozen interested people and, perhaps, conclude a single sale.
Ok, the unknown user has become a customer, but in the face of too much effort to be satisfied.
This also applies to SEO, you can no longer apply clichés thinking of arriving first in the SERP thanks to some keywords inserted in written content without thinking about the target audience or, better, the buyer personas.
