You heard them say it: keywords are one of the building blocks of SEO. While this is very true, many people (including digital marketers) fail to give emphasis on the fact that the SEO process does not start with on choosing a keyword, but with identifying a target audience.

An effective SEO strategy, in reality, must start with determining the campaign’s target audience. Once the audience is defined, it will be a lot easier to perform other key tasks such as:

  • Performing targeted keywords search to find out the right set of words and phrases to optimize for
  • Creating different types of content suitable with the unique needs and behavior of the audience
  • Designing an appropriate user experience (UX)
  • Targeting  online users who are more likely to become to customer
  • Converting traffic into leads and leads into sales

The biggest question now is: how do you define your target audience? Here is a simple guide to help you with the entire process:

Know your current customers

Start by knowing who your current customers are. Who is buying your product or service? Where are they from? How old are they? The best way to figure out the answers is by talking to your sales team for they have better understanding of your customers’ demographics.

Look into which group among your audience converts the most and has higher order frequency. This should help you understand where to focus your marketing efforts on and how to effectively boost your reach to your target audience.

Digital marketing agency in the Philippines also suggests looking into your own Google Analytics account. Data presented by your analytics should give you an idea of the identity of your audience as well as their behaviors of online users, site visitors, and buyers.

Know what they prefer and have to say

digital marketing agency philippines

Another smart step is asking your current customers about their preferences in terms of content and how you can reach to them online. This can be done through short surveys and interviews. There are many tools out there that you can use such as Google Forms. These tools make it easier to collect and analyze responses, as well as check for patterns and trends on the data.

Depending on the nature and scope of your survey or interview questions, the responses can be a source of insights on who should be targeting with your SEO strategy.

Look into social cues

social media seo

Followers from your social media accounts are most likely the people who are interested in your product or service. If you want to learn more about them, there is no need to check out their profiles one by one. Tools like Facebook Audience Insights are a convenient way to learn more about the followers of your page. When you have an idea of their demographic profile and what other pages they like on social media platforms, it is easier to determine the kind of audience you must be targeting.

Learn from your competitors

seo competitors

You can learn a lot of things when you observe your competitors. In fact, it could even be the key to beating them. When determining your target audience, it helps to see whom your competitors are focusing their marketing efforts. The good news is there are tools you can use to analyze their online performance and identify their top pages and ranking keywords.

What works for your main competitors could possibly work for your brand as well. And there is really nothing wrong with applying what you have learned from them so you can succeed in targeting the right audience.

In summary

It is important to define your target audience and this truth goes beyond SEO and digital marketing. Any business, big or small, must realize who they should be focusing so they get the maximum returns from their marketing efforts. Otherwise, they could be just wasting their resources.

In a nutshell, identifying the target audience for your SEO strategy can be done by looking into who exactly are performing searches that could bring them to your website. By knowing that group of people, it is much easier to devise a solid online strategy. And this strategy must center on how to ensure maximum visibility whenever these people perform an online search.

Again, a successful SEO strategy does not always begin with identifying keywords, but sometimes with defining a specific audience to focus on. If you come to think of it, doing SEO does not mean centering your marketing efforts on the search engines. You are still marketing to people; real people with certain preferences, needs, and behavior. And to achieve online success, you have to start by understanding who they really are.