Finding Personas in SEO

When you are starting to think of your audience, a helpful trick can be to create an imaginary individual that represents someone who you would like to search for your site. This person can be given a specific name to categorize themself as your searcher and you can start to define their characteristics.

To begin with an example, if someone had a football gear website where they sold used equipment for less, you might want to create a character from the middle-class having children in middle school. We could name this person Dan the Dad. You should assume that Dan works hard for his money and has a boy in JV football who could use some new cleats and shoulder pads. Some of the name brand gear is too expensive, so he is looking for something used and a little worn so if his son decides not to play it is not too much of a financial let down. Dan the Dad is looking for specific gear and would not like to run into soccer or hockey gear, but football gear.

Just by assigning these traits to your persona, it can help you optimize your keywords and how you will go about linking searches to your website. You could look into some long-tailed keywords that may be cheaper to buy such as ‘used football gear for sale’ or ‘secondhand football gear for JV.’ These could help your website to have greater searches because you originally defined your persona so that you could tie keywords to it.

By looking into the pain, which should be things that searchers are trying to solve when looking things up, and their gain, or the things that searchers are trying to get out of searching, it can help to define the way you want to progress with your SEO. If your keywords became too unrelated or irrelevant to your topic such as bringing in soccer or hockey, it would be a waste. But by finding out these two points and defining them, you will be able to cater to your audience and personas.