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Personas before keywords in search marketing

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Personas ahead of keywords and links … oh my

Learn about your audience to generate ROI was the topic of December’s Search Engine Marketing New England event, featuring Michael King, SEO Manager at Publicis Modem.

This SEO pro shares his keen knowledge on the use of searcher personas to connect and transfer user experience to conversion and return on investment.  Michael’s presentation shows how to acquire demographic data on your target audience through researching keywords, extracting data, and other methods of discovery.

Use Michael’s knowledge and tools to get real predictable ROI for search engine marketing.

Past Present & Future of Personas in Search (extended version)

Understand people

  • Think about the needs people are trying to fulfill when they search. Does your content fulfill that need?
  • Use social listening to determine personas of your audience, then define information architecture with keywords
  • Social listening does not taint the opinions of your viewers because they don’t know you’re in the room listening
  • SEOs absolutely need to be involved with the user experience; its what’s going to get things to convert
  • Who the people are comes before keyword research

Keywords

  • Use these to reach out to your intended audience
  • Define keyword opportunities based upon the personas of your audience and inform keyword research
  • Figure out which keywords are worth more to you based on persona and then spend more time on those

Link-building

  • Talk and engage with people like REAL people when link building
  • Personas are the key to scalable link-building
  • Social search becoming more influential so build your networks: rel-me and rel-author
  • Start the link-building relationship on Twitter before you move to email
  • Need an authoritative persona on Twitter before you reach out to potential linkers. Discover who they are via knowem
  • Get involved in conversations, not just spamming: Quickly invite following, go to direct messaging, and then talk links
  • Use followerwonk for link-building opportunities

Tools to measure demographics

Influencers

  • Target audience should be viewed in context, who are their influencers?
  • Reach out to influencers via Twitter

Good content

  • Use Chrome scraper to grab content into Google Docs
  • Offer people value, show them content they might not have known about, post awesome articles
  • Do promotions that encourage your link prospects to tweet and blog to win prizes
  • Use knowledge of who is on your site (visitors logged into Facebook) to give responsive designs based upon personas
  • Your site needs to address what your target really wants

Readers: What percentage of SEOs consider keywords before personas?

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