If you’re already investing your time and money in developing your SEO, hopefully, you didn’t miss the human aspect of the strategies – personas. Analyzing and understanding who your target audience is, helps to make the SEO campaign a lot more effective.
Similarly to SEO itself, user persona creations affect both on-site and off-site environment of a website. Let’s take a look at how it works.
1] The embryo of every persona…
Lays in the results of Google Analytics (GA) Audience Reports.
GA is a great start of creating your team of first personas. All the gathered data helps you understand who possibly is visiting your website and is using the services you offer.
You’ll get to know your visitors both from the geographical, demographical and psychological points of view. Based on that you can plan particular bios of personas.
2] Relevant Content
Putting yourself in your audience’s shoes makes you think similarly to them, imagine their needs and expectations. Thanks to that you’ll be able to create more relevant, target orientated, sensible articles.
As time passes, search engines become more and more cautious and picky. Dark times when all your SEO strategy was building webs of wanted keywords are long gone. Unique, good quality content is on top!
3] Well-chosen Keywords
No, no. I’m not going to contradict myself. The use of keywords just changed. It’s not about thoughtless throwing them all around.
Creating a persona makes you work harder, more creatively on the choice of keywords. It makes you do the research thoroughly. Use SEO tools to see what exactly your visitors are looking for and to compare the rankings of your competitors.
Make sure that the answer is placed in the neighbourhood of the query, or that you built an easy, clear path leading to what was searched.
The less time a person spends on your website in search of the answer, the more positive signal the search engine gets.
4] Internal Links
Internal links embedded in articles (possibly written by personas!) improve user’s navigation through your website. That is unbelievably important from SEO’s point of view for two main reasons.
1) Time spent to find needed information.
The shorter, the better! Every one of us likes to get clear, consistent answers as quick as possible. It makes Google happy when users only spent little time looking for what they need.
Internal linking makes it much easier for your readers to traverse through the forest of information. One-click to teleport them to a relevant subject has a huge impact on how a search engine sees your website.
2) Show Google what’s important for you.
Through internal links, you let search engines know which pages of your site matter for you the most, what in particular you find crucial.
5] Generally speaking
There is a great variety of people visiting your website. It’s impossible to amaze every single visitor of yours. But that’s ok – you want your site to be generally likeable, generally understandable, and so the personas you create – generally relatable.
Breathing life into these fictional little helpers is based on nothing else but generalizations. GA gathers data on your viewers, groups them, sums them up, et voila! – you get a general picture of your audience.
Such generalizations give you a clearer idea of the viewers, but that doesn’t strengthen your connection with possible clients per se. How to build chemistry between you and your audience, then? This question leads us to.
6] Empathy and identification
These factors come directly from your audience. Hence, I mentioned a team of personas back in the article.
Creating one, schizophrenic-like persona that wants to please and be like every single viewer of yours is not very efficient nor credible. A diverse team of personas feels definitely a lot more natural.
The characters represent distinct groups among your visitors. Previously mentioned generalizations give you an excellent base for your creativity and logic thinking. There’s endless room for manoeuvre and playing with the GA results. As long as personas remain consistent and seem authentic.
7] All in All
The process of creation can be a great clue for you what you actually should aim for. The deep understanding of who most of your peepers are helps you publish more accurate content.
Thanks to the detailed analysis both of users’ metrics and searched queries (keywords) navigation through your website to find needed information becomes much easier and quicker.
Certain personas are interested in specified queries. Personas can explain to your audience what exactly they needed at the moment they stumbled upon your website, and how your services helped them reach the answers or find the best solutions for their problems.
The important thing is to remember that creating these specific characters doesn’t drastically increase your organic traffic just like that. The influence of personas, as well as SEO itself, becomes noticeable very slowly and subtly. The huge campaign that SEO is, is composed of seemingly small but really necessary steps.
How about you?
What are your experiences with SEO personas? Maybe you’ve made some mistakes you’d like to share with us? We’re waiting for your stories and questions!
