4 Ways To Improve Your SEO Strategy With User Personas

Last updated on February 24th, 2022 by Rahul Kumar Singh

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important facets today of digital marketing. Because of the many new changes that are consistently coming up with technology, this also means strategies are constantly evolving, to adapt with new trends. One of these changes now in place is what’s known as user persona.

When speaking about digital marketing, user persona refers to the fictional characters, mostly used by marketers taking a user-centric approach, with the initial purpose of representing the different types of users or visitors on their website. This is a very useful strategy in streamlining your marketing campaigns. For starters, user personas enable you to find, with higher accuracy, the keywords, target audience, and the right content your audience is after.

To give you a good start, here are four ways on how you can improve your SEO strategy by using user personas:

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research refers to the process of using tools to find the evergreen terms your customers are searching for in search engines when they make searches. They are the words that have high demand and usage. They also bring a highly competitive value.

When you do sound keyword research, you can come up with the right words to incorporate into your website, so you can make it rank higher in search engine results. When your website makes it to the top landing pages, that’s when you know your business has been successful in its SEO strategies.

Keyword research is directly related to a user persona, simply because you can come up with better and more refined keyword research when you factor in the data you get from your user persona. To achieve this, your keyword research process should abide by the following steps:

• Brainstorming: This refers to the earliest stage, where your team gathers as much information as they can have regarding the user personas. 
• Filtering or sorting: If you have high volumes of user persona data gathered from your brainstorming and research process, you ought to know that not all of them are going to be useful. Hence the need to filter and sort through the information. 

It’ll make your SEO strategies more streamlined when they aren’t all over the place. Rather, you’re focused only on user persona information that you know to be effective for your business and the niche your business is in.

• Implementation: Unfortunately, the keyword research will be useless if it ends there: research. To ensure all your researched keywords are effective, now comes the time for you to implement it on your website. 

From the steps above, you can come up with user persona and data-driven decisions as to which keywords rank the best for your website. These steps can also be better achieved with the help of project management tools and other software, one of the many from easyagile.com.

2. Draft The Right Persona For Your SEO Efforts

Because your intent is to use user personas for your SEO efforts, this means you have to draft the right persona which you feel resonates with the needs of your SEO efforts. Otherwise, no matter what specific strategy is employed, it’ll still be ineffective, especially if there’s a mismatch.

In this pursuit, there are two major classifications you have to tackle: digital persona creation and non-digital persona creation. Here’s a brief discussion on both:

• Digital persona creation: When you understand what the digital persona is of your website or your business, you’ll get insights on valuable information along the lines of age, customer buying journey, customer behavior, customer website preferences, gender, and other demographics.
• Non-digital persona creation: Your digital persona creation above gives you insights on what your customers are doing online. Now, it’s time for you to go beyond your customer’s online presence through their computers and mobile phones. You will now consider the user persona of your customers in real life, purchasing from your brick-and-mortar establishments. These would encompass your non-digital persona.

3. Survey Your Past Customers

Surveying your past customers is an extra bonus step that’ll help ensure your SEO strategies stay effective. The best way to do this is by sending out questions to your past customers through email outreach, or through subscription forms.

In the email outreach or surveys, you’ll want to gather information like the following:

• Their general opinion and experience, whether or not your website is navigable and has good quality content
• Their demographics like age, gender, spending capacity
• Their preferred means of communication, like mobile messaging or email messaging

Surveying your past customers is very helpful in fine-tuning your SEO strategies, using the right user personas. There are many valuable reasons why you should do so. These include:

• It gives you an idea as to their level of customer satisfaction, such that if the satisfaction level comes out low, you can make the necessary changes to foster customer loyalty
• It gives you valuable feedback on possible changes or tweaks that’ll have to be done on your products, to improve its functionality and design
• It gives you a strong benchmark for development, so you can see if there are alterations needed to be made. And if any changes in your operations and products were received well by your customers

4. Link Building

User personas are also useful when it comes to link-building strategies. Remember that your main goal for link building is to create better content and to connect with more websites which enables you to think about content your target audience would very much like to share.

Here are some areas wherein user personas can prove to be insightful for link building:

• User personas for creating link bait: You can begin by using the information you now have as regards user personas to identify the blogs you can link to, and which fits the niche of your business and the demographic group of your users. Otherwise, you may have been linking to authority sites, but these authority sites won’t be received well by your audience. This is true if the said websites don’t resonate with the needs of your target audience.
• User personas for proper guest posting: On the reverse of creating link bait is guest posting. Now it’s you who reaches out to other websites to guest-post on their site. The principle is the same with creating link bait. The information you have about your user persona can ensure your guest postings on websites will hit the sweet spot of your target audience.

Also, read – Blog Commenting Sites

Conclusion

The SEO strategies you apply in your business are bound to change regularly. If, despite the changes you’ve previously applied, you still find your SEO strategies to be inadequate, then perhaps using user personas is the missing piece to finally complete it. 

Digital marketing strategies are shaping the way businesses are marketing their products and services. It’s up to your business to keep up with the new and effective strategies, particularly ones relating to user personas. The tips above can help you improve greatly.