Keywords: Finding Your Target Audience

One of the biggest questions you’ll need to answer when you’re developing your SEO content strategy is ‘who is my target audience?’. Without understanding your target audience, your content building, keywords and optimisations won’t deliver the results you were hoping for.

There are three key questions you need to clarify:

Who is my target customer?

Beyond just “families with children” or “men in their 30s-50s”, how else can you define your target audience? What are their needs and desires? What problem are they looking to solve, and what are their obstacles to solving it? Where would they look for information, and what level of understanding do they have of their issue?

What are they searching for?

This is also called “user intent” or “search intent” – what are they actually wanting to find when they type that combination of keywords into the search bar? What words would they use to describe your product/service or the problem it solves?

How can I serve them?

What relevant content can your business produce that will add value to your audience’s experience? What questions do they have about their problem? What other ways would they realistically use your product? How can their lives be improved by the insight you can provide?

Keywords

One way to reach your target audience is with the use of keywords. Keywords will help you create web pages where your target audience can easily find exactly what they are looking for. When Google was young, the algorithm wasn’t so smart. To rank at the top, you just had to use your keywords as many times as you could. Now, keyword stuffing will get you penalised. Instead, it’s all about the way you use your keywords and the quality of your keyword-integrated content.

How to select the right keywords:

1. Relevance to your business: your chosen keywords must be relevant to your business, location, product or service.
2. Relevance to your customer: your target audience will search for keywords that are relevant to their needs and/ or location.
3. Traffic volume: not all keywords are high traffic (meaning they get a lot of searches each month). You’ll want a mix of high traffic and low traffic (meaning rarely searched, but much more specific).
4. Competition: how difficult will it be to rank for these keywords? High competition means multiple other businesses or websites are using these, and it can be tough to gain traction if they’ve got a strong SEO strategy. A mix of high and low-competition keywords can help.

How to use your keywords well:

1. Use keywords in your H1 (main headline) and H2 (subheading). These are given more weight by Google’s algorithm and can help your page be found by the right people.
2. Meta information is a great opportunity for keyword placement: use them in your page titles, URL, and meta description.
3. Don’t overstuff keywords into your text or you’ll be reported as spam and penalised by Google.
4. Use keywords within your first paragraph, and then sporadically or in variations throughout the rest of your copy.
5. Use alt-text on images and captions on videos. This is also great for accessibility for vision-impaired visitors to your site.

For further help with your SEO strategy, get in touch with us today.