How well do you know your customers and prospects? 

I would expect that most of you who receive and read our newsletter are already making the best use of the web user measurement tools at your disposal. No doubt you will be tirelessly analysing your website visitors' behaviour associated with the various search terms used and feeding this back into your web visitor attraction, acquisition, conversion and retention strategy. Of course, you do all this having already accurately identified who your target audience is.

Just in case you don't do this or you haven't been able to get the level of granularity you'd like due to time constraints and the need to do your day job, here is a little insight into what we would recommend. This is a little bit like the saying “today is the first day of the rest of your life”. If you haven't thought about any of this before, don't worry, you can start now.

Insight

What we have found works extremely well in creating an effective search strategy that attracts the right quality of visitors in the desired quantities, is the creation of “search personas”. Those of you familiar with User Centred Design will be familiar with personas from a usability point of view. Search personas are similar and are profiles of example customers you wish to attract to your website. Persona profiles include demographic information, complimented by behavioural information about Internet usage, sites visited, social media activity as well as offline activity. The outcome is usually a set of personas (around 6 to 10) all with names and photos (Percy is just a suggestion), which cover your target audience and allows you to then create a strategy around them.

Target personas

These are invaluable when creating ad's for Paid Search using the terminology your target personas identify with and are likely to use, creating copy and content for your site, as well as effective link building to associated sites used by your target audience. It doesn't take long to create these personas, and having used them for your revised search strategy, the quality of your traffic will be improved greatly.

If you'd like to find out more, please contact us at Propellernet or contact your Account Manager directly.