Buyer personas need to be at the very core of your SEO strategy. After all, your target market is integral to creating a highly optimized SEO strategy. You want to know who they are and what they need from your business to effectively craft the best website user experience.

You want full integration of your buyer’s persona in your marketing mix, see here. Doing this from the onset of crafting your campaign is essential to improving your conversions and the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. Everything is important from creating the best navigation options, to conducting the right keyword research and even the right themes of content to produce. You want to benchmark your current SEO efforts with your core audience to figure out whether or not your improvements are generating real results and converting more prospects into customers. This can give you real data that can influence your decisions. 

Keyword Research

Keyword research has always been the backbone of effective SEO efforts. Your keywords are so important because it’s what you will be used to target visitors. You don’t want any visitors to come to your site. Rather, you want someone highly targeted with the right “intent.” The “intent” is everything because it dictates whether that visitor buys from you or converts.’

The intent of keywords is all about the purpose. You want to think about what a visitor is looking to achieve when they search for a respective keyword, phrase, or search term. You want to be targeting the right keywords that have the right search intent. There are a few different ways to categorize this including: 

– Informational

This is when a visitor is primarily looking to research something. In this case, they would be looking for advice, guides, news, or something else. They are generally going to be adding inquisitive keywords to their search phrases including “how-to,” “why,” and more. 

– Transactional

This is the intent where a user primarily wants to achieve something. In general, it would be an act of sorts. It could be buying something. You can tell if someone is looking to buy something when they add transactional keywords including “cheap,” “affordable,” “buy,” and more. This implies they have made their purchasing decision and they are only looking for the best place to get what they want. 

– Navigational

This is generally when a user knows what they want and they are only looking to get there. For instance, if someone wants to go to the MLB page on ESPN, they may search “ESPN MLB.” They are simply looking for Google or their favorite search engine to guide them there.

It’s very important to thoroughly research keywords within your niche. This is essential to crafting a high-quality SEO content strategy. Not only does it enable you to uncover a range of phrases, long-tail phrases, questions, and answers, but it also helps you figure out their intent with them.

One of the major things you need to consider when doing your research is the volume of the searches. This is how many times the term or phrase is being searched for monthly. While you could be swayed to only target the keywords and phrases that have a lot of volumes, it’s not necessarily the best strategy. These keywords, terms, and phrases are generally the most competitive. Therefore, they are going to be much more difficult to rank for. Instead, you could opt to focus more of your attention on the lower hanging fruit which is the longer tail keywords with fewer competitors. A long-tail keyword would be anything with more than 3 words. Whereas, a short tail keyword refers to anything with 1 or 2 words. In general, the shorter terms will have the most competition because they cover more broad topics. You want to start mixing in both the intent terms with related keywords and phrases and you’ll have a highly optimized strategy in little time.

With SEO, you’ll need to be continually refining your approach. You need to be looking at your keyword research, analyzing your campaigns, and more. Doing this type of research is always worth it because of its importance to the success of your SEO efforts. You want to continually monitor the changes in the space because you’ll always run into them especially if you’re in a dynamic industry.

It’s also important to continually refine things and make adjustments because your audience is going to grow. As your audience evolves, you’ll want to evolve with it. Figure out how to continually match your buyer’s intent with your keyword targeting. 

There are all kinds of different ways you can conduct keyword research. Ideally, you want to use software like Moz. This can be a great option to start with for little investment. They have plenty of advanced guides that you can use to improve the results you get from using the software.