There is one core principle that matters most when looking to drive SEO results. It’s simple yet highly challenging. Marketers that get this right drive higher conversion rates and strong movement through their sales funnel.
The core principle is this: SEO strategies must be in sync with the desires and needs of your targeted personas.
SEO success depends on your website content matching persona needs. You must have well-defined marketing personas and know the user intent of the keywords used to find your website in Google in order to drive leads and sales from SEO efforts.
Why Personas Are Key to SEO Success
A marketing persona is a biographical sketch of your targeted customer. It includes a description of their key demographics, psychographics and geographics. It also identifies the type of digital content they want to read, the pages they are likely to visit on your website and the keywords they use in Google. Personas are the customers you are attempting to reach in your digital marketing efforts. Think of them this way, they are people very similar to your best customers and the type of customers you want to attract from SEO.
Few marketers assign a persona to keyword themes and research. Even fewer do a great job of understanding the persona’s intent in their keyword search terms. Identifying these areas in your personas will guide your keyword research, long-tail search term ideas, content topics, new pages for your website and more.
Live inside the head of your persona and use this knowledge to optimize your SEO results.
Keyword Intent and SEO Results
Google has tons of content on keyword intent and what it means. This takes a different angle when you consider keyword intent by personas. While it’s fine to follow Google’s guidelines, I encourage you to determine your unique keyword intent for your unique personas. The best marketers on the planet understand keyword intent because they understand their buyers.
Here are a few examples of keyword user intent you can use to better craft your SEO strategy:
Brand Name Intent – These people are looking for your company and is the starting point for all SEO. Users must be able to find your website when they search for your company name in Google. Make your domain name an exact match to your company name, put your company name in your homepage title tag and cover all technical SEO. Make sure your website is found when people search on the various brand name keywords in Google.
B2B (Business-to-Business) – It is fundamental to knowing if the searcher is representing a business looking to find another business. This is the starting point for user intent in search.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer) – Consumers search differently than businesses and each of your keyword groups should be classified as B2B or B2C. This is also often referred to as D2C or direct-to-consumer.
Local Intent – As search gets more competitive, local intent becomes more important than ever. Just as you need to be found for your company name, you should also be found by people in your local marketplace. Local SEO strategies are a must have for all business websites.
Research Intent – Many people use Google for research and have little to no intent to buy. It’s important you know these terms, especially if you plan to run Google Ads or other digital ads. People not knowing these research intern terms has resulted in billions of dollars for Google’s ad program and is probably the single most wasteful advertising in history.
Smart marketers know researcher intent and don’t pay Google for clicks and expect a conversion or sale. This can be valuable organic traffic for people at the top of the funnel and to grow organic search results.
Knowing research intent also helps determine new content topics for your website. What better way to meet the needs of online researchers than by providing content they want to read when searching in Google. Stay ahead of your competitors and watch keyword trends so you can get relevant content on your website early and in response to new trends in search.
Purchase Intent – These are people ready to buy and the holy grail of search. You want these folks on your website and you must have content ready for them along with intuitive call-to-actions (CTAs) that move them towards a purchase. It’s best if the keywords they use take them to a website landing page that matches their intent to buy and the keywords used in search.
Keywords with SEO Intent – These are keywords used to improve your Google Authority Score, which is Google’s ranking system for ranking in search. These keywords have a mix of user intent, but are usually research terms that grow overall traffic to the website.
Referral or Re-Seller Intent – These are keywords used by people likely to refer others to your company or become distributors or resellers of your products or services.
What other keyword intent options can you discover and uncover?
The sky’s the limit when you start measuring keyword intent for each of your key marketing personas. Do these things to see improvements in your SEO results and higher quality traffic coming to your website.
Reach out for a free consultation with an Intuitive Websites’ SEO specialist.
