Why Market Research Is Vital For SEO

Why Market Research Is Vital For SEO

HOME → Web

→ Learn How To Buy & Sell Bitcoins

By    

Source: Flickr

Your target audience – your customer – the buyer – the person who will hand over their hard-earned dollars to you. Who are they? Market research is an essential ingredient to running a successful website and can impact your SEO efforts.

A target audience profile is a detailed assessment of your visitors characteristics, attitudes and behaviors. This information can be broken down into two main categories: demographics and psychographics.

• Demographics describes who your visitor is, including their age, gender, occupation, location, marital status, income, education level, and nationality.
   
• Psychographics describes why your visitors act the way they do. For example, you might determine that you have price-sensitive customers who choose the least expensive option. Another example is of trend-conscious customers who prefer the newest, most fashionable option. Likewise, the early adopter is someone who is open to choosing new, unproven options.

Market Research

By doing market research and profiling the people you expect to visit your website or buy the product you are selling, it’s important to understand exactly how to effectively communicate the products features, benefits and availability.

Once you know your audience, you can tailor blog posts and page titles for better click-through rates.

When you profile your audience correctly, you can save time and money by minimizing missteps stemming from inconsistent knowledge about the customer base.

Target Audience Profiling

Source

Who is your target audience? What type of person are they? What is the purpose of their search? You may need to create multiple profiles to cover different types of demographics.

In the market research world, visitors can usually be segregated into two categories: decision-makers and influencers.

It is usually the decision-maker that will purchase your product and mostly isn’t interested in telling the world about it. Meanwhile, the influencer may share and discuss your product with their inner circle by clicking on your sharing buttons (go ahead, influencers – like and tweet this post!).

The decision-maker see’s what the influencer is enjoying and ultimately clicks through to your site to read a post or make a purchase based on the inherent recommendation from the influencer.

Let’s say, for example, we’ve decided to target the keyword phrase “homemade dog food recipes”. Who is searching for this and why?

This is all a bit of guesswork so we’ll make some bullet points to make it clearer.

WHO

• More females than males.
• 35 – 60 years old.
• Occupation: Stay-at-home.
• Status: Married.
• Income level: below average to average.
• Education level: K12 (High School, no University).

WHY are people searching for “homemade dog food recipes”?

• To save money
• They enjoy cooking.
• They don’t trust big brands.

Regardless of how much information you gather, it’s usually not enough. You almost always have to make some assumptions and estimates based on your experience. It’s just part of the SEO process.

In this example, I estimated the average age of females searching for “homemade dog food recipes” to be 35 – 60 years old. I’m guessing the younger crowd may be more focused on socializing, education or full-time work rather than cooking.

I am guessing they are staying at home where they have time to cook while their partner goes out to work, ie a married couple.

Don’t rush your market research and customer profiling process. The information you gather will be the foundation for many significant decisions, so it’s worth doing well the first time.

Once we have an idea of who the customer is, we can tailor our website design, graphics, colors, imagery, the copy (all the text on the page including page titles and meta tags) and how best to present offers that encourage visitors to purchase the product or just visit your website.

Targeting the right keywords in your backlinking strategy is also a vital component to market research. I use Market Samurai to analyze SEO competition and find untapped keywords.

When the targeted visitor lands on your site, they will feel like they’re in the right place and you have “captured” them.

Disclaimer: Links to 3rd party sites included within this article denoted with /go/ in the URL may result in commission being earned if you decide to make a purchase.

Tags:  Search engine optimizationseotarget audiencetarget audience profile

↑ Top

Hey! Want to subscribe? Its free!close