Who Does SEO Target?
It is perhaps one of the most important questions that come up when you start implementing Inbound Marketing in your company.
In this article, we will try to answer that question by explaining "Who SEO targets" and "How do you create your Buyer Persona profiles?"
Any SEO strategy, understood as the actions aimed at optimizing a website's ranking in search engines, does not only have to meet specific goals. To be effective, a second variable must also be taken into account: so-called ideal buyers, who will help define all the elements that make up a marketing campaign.
Without a doubt, it is important to know the ideal buyer profile, since this will help you understand how they will look for a solution to their problems on Google and, therefore, which keywords they will use in that search. Once you know them, it will be much easier to optimize the website in question.
And that's not all: in the case of business-to-business (B2B) companies, a second variable appears that must also be considered in the marketing strategy, and that does not correspond to the ideal buyer: the buyer persona. Let's look at how these two concepts differ:
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Ideal Buyer Profile:
This is a description of the best companies to sell a product or service to. It must specify the size of the company, its geographic location, its main economic activity, and the length of its sales cycle.
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Buyer Persona:
In this case, it refers to the people who work at the company you want to sell a particular product to. In other words, it is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer, built on real data. Therefore, it refers to an individual, not to a type of business organization. For this reason, the buyer persona description has to include their needs (or pain points), their concerns, their motivations, how and where they look for information, what presence they have on social media, etc. In short, it is about anticipating what they would buy, or would not buy, and how. Likewise, it should include a short demographic and statistical description, and it should be given a name, since, even though it is not a real person, it must be believable.
Once these concepts are defined, it is worth highlighting that SEO strategies are aimed at the buyer persona, not at the ideal buyer or company. This comes down to a very simple fact: the one who searches the internet is an individual, not an entity. That is why, if you want to sell a product to an organization, you need to find out whether the purchase will be closed by the head of human resources, the general manager, or another employee. This factor will shape your SEO actions, since the entire marketing strategy will need to be built around this profile.
For all these reasons, defining the Buyer Persona well is essential to launching effective campaigns, because this way the company can target a specific audience and create content tailored to its preferences.
The same is true for business-to-customer (B2C) companies where, for obvious reasons, the focus must also be on the buyer persona, since sales are aimed at an end consumer.
Strategies to Create a Buyer Persona:
When profiling a company's buyer persona, you need to keep in mind the aspects described below:
- Identify the paths through which the ideal customer can reach the company (search engines, social media, etc.), and explore new ways in. Create channels of attraction.
- Come up with semi-fictional characters and define all their characteristics: for example, their age, their personal situation, or their level of education.
- Give the buyer persona a name and an attribute that lets you identify them quickly (for example, “Juan, the boss” or “María from HR”).
- Create content specific to each buyer persona (there may be more than one). To do this, it is advisable to focus on their behavior, considering the reasons or motivations that drive them to solve their problems. On the other hand, and without losing sight of the fact that they must be believable despite being fictional, it is advisable to give them a face with a photograph and, at the same time, build a story around them (instead of a simple profile sheet). By default, the content of the company's website has to be adapted to the preferences and needs of each buyer persona, since each of them has their own priorities and will search using different language. That is why, as far as SEO is concerned, it is essential to optimize the website in question and its content with the keywords and phrases each buyer persona would use to solve their pain points.
Thus, it is clear that defining each buyer persona and carrying out SEO strategies with this in mind helps companies invest their efforts in the potential customers who really matter to them, which will allow them to save costs and time in the long run and, ultimately, improve the efficiency of their marketing strategy.
We hope these tips have been very helpful to you. Don't forget to leave us your comments and questions in the box below this post.
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