How To Find Your Audience: Turning Visitors Into Costumers

When marketers think of SEO, the first thing that comes up is 'keywords.' It is easy to equate success in SEO with having a sound keyword strategy. However, knowing the right words is not enough to drive growth. If you want to get ahead, you need to know your audience. When you do not understand your target market, you will find it challenging to get conversions from your traffic.

Carefully defining your target audience and sharing who they are to your team will set you up for success. With a defined audience, you'll create SEO content for each part of the consumer journey.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The target audience is a company's future customers or clients. They are people you want to attract to your website, ones who might not know your brand yet. They are people searching on Google for solutions that you offer or for businesses just like yours.

Finding your target audience involves knowing and using the keywords that could bring them to click on your website. If you understand your audience, your SEO strategy will bring results; after all, you don't market to algorithms but people. What's more, when you define your target audience, it becomes easier for you to create an SEO strategy. With a well-defined audience, you can have better keyword research since you'll know a little more about the context of your optimization efforts. 

As a result, you'll have more focused content as well. When your target audience feels like you're talking to them through your articles or posts, they will find your website trustworthy. As you deliver more high-quality, relevant content, you'll get traffic from more people who could become customers, which means a greater likelihood of sales conversions.

Tips For Finding Your Target Audience

It can be overwhelming trying to write for a group of people you only know through descriptions. Even if you're in touch with a few customers or clients about your product, it can still be intimidating to plan content; writing online feels like talking into a camera or a microphone sometimes. If you have a clear picture of your target audience, though, you can use it to guide your decisions. Here are things that could help you identify the people who should see your content.

Know Your Current Consumers

Attracting more customers starts with knowing who is already using your products or services. Start with your current audience members to gain insights on who you should prioritize. If you have a sales team, you could consult them about the customers. They can share insights, including helpful information like highest-converting demographics and customers or clients with the highest order value. Your Google Analytics account will also have useful data, especially about what days and hours people usually visit your website.

Use Insights From Social Media

If you maintain a social media page, you likely have an audience already interested in your services or products. Your social channel's insights could give you more information on the type of consumers who might consider your offerings valuable. Platforms like Facebook for Business, for example, are powerful tools for market research. You can get very granular with your target audience's preferences through Facebook for Business and Google Analytics. If you're already on these platforms, it makes sense to look through them for leads on possible strategies.

Run Searches And Analyze Your SERPs

Analyzing your search engine results pages is one of the easiest ways to determine your target audience. When we say "easy," though, it does not mean quick; combing through a SERP for information on your audience can take some time. However, if you do it properly, you'll have a better idea of who you should include in your audience.

To analyze SERPs, you should run searches on your primary keywords. See if there are more transactional or informational results; this could also inform the type of content you write. You might also want to pay attention to themes, the tone of voice of top results, and the products or services your competitors promote. Doing this can open you to other possibilities or target audiences.

Know What Your Competitors Are Doing

Having a thorough understanding of your competitors, their SEO strategy, and who their audience is would help you identify your audience. If you use keyword planning tools, you can look at the keywords you have in common with your industry peers. Their top pages and the keywords they rank for can help you refine your strategy. Perhaps they're targeting phrases that you aren't—is there a way for you to target the same?

Interview Current Customers About Their Experience

You might also want to try a direct approach; speak to a current client or customer about the products or services they use. Speaking to those who have already bought from you is helpful. When you speak to your current clients, they are likely to be candid about what works and what needs improvement in your messaging. They might also offer suggestions on how best to advertise to them, a bonus for your marketing efforts.

Use Google Forms or similar tools to gather responses from customers. You can send this through your email newsletter or your social pages. You can also schedule interviews with high-value clients. After surveying your customers, look for common threads in their responses.

Figure Out What People Don't Know About Your Brand

Asking the right questions will help you learn about your audience and the topics that matter to them. If you have social listening tools, you can tap into networks like Facebook and Twitter to monitor conversations about your brand. Aside from studying complaints or points for improvement, pay attention to questions people ask about you or your industry. Doing this will also help you identify your target audience.

In Conclusion

Succeeding in SEO depends on knowing how your target audience behaves online. Though keywords play a considerable role in any SEO strategy, you should gear all of these towards people in the end. You want your message to resonate with those who will use your service or avail of your offerings. To do this, you need to have to know who they are as consumers.

Team up with Ranked and find the people who will stick with your brand. We create SEO content that retains rankings and acquires high-quality traffic for your business. Get in touch with our team or activate your account today!