5 Steps to Building a Search Persona

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5 Steps To Building A Search Persona It’s easy for online B2B marketers to become distracted by the search engines and forget

the real reason they’re doing SEO in the first place: the customer. Customer demand is the

driving force behind search and must be the foundation for your SEO strategy. Whether

you’re an SEO newbie or already running a few SEO campaigns, it’s important to take a

step back and determine what techniques really align with your customers’ needs.

An effective, simple concept every search marketer should leverage is the process of

developing a search persona. Similar to a marketing persona, creating a search persona

helps professional B2B marketers to accurately identify their target customer, to understand

how users are actually searching for their business online and to ultimately, drive higher

conversion. This is not a very time-consuming process, and will have a significant impact

on your marketing efforts behind search and must be the foundation for your SEO strategy.

Understanding the keywords your prospects use and the places they go to find information

is the critical first step in implementing a successful inbound marketing strategy.

1. Know Your Target Audience Identify a target audience that is most likely to turn into customers. Ask yourself: Who’s my perfect buyer? For any businessperson (regardless of SEO), this is something you should be able to answer.

2. Understand Your Audience’s Pain Point(s) & Know How They Search to Solve Them How would your target customer articulate their need for this in terms of keywords? How do they search? Determine the queries that are used by your target audience, are aligned with your business goals, and appear in significant enough volumes.

Target Audience Searcher’s Pain Point

Search Queries Solutions Compelling Call-to-Action

Metrics

Small size company owner in North America looking for a security software for their business


Needs business security software

Business security software, security software for business



Metrics

1. Know Your Audience

2. Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points and How They Solve Them

3. Provide Real Solutions

4. Be Compelling

5. Know Your Data

http://www.optify.net?optify_r=whitepaper&optify_rd=T4B-Guide

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4. Be CompellingOffer a call to action that compels the searcher to dive deeper into your conversion funnel. For example, this might be a discount code, or an online form. Basically, a feature that allows you to keep in contact with a user and offers them an incentive to stay engaged with your website and product or service.

5. Know Your Data Make sure you’re regularly tracking performance metrics that help demonstrate the efficacy of these campaigns.

3. Provide Real Solutions Create great content that’s well optimized for the search engines, but also meets the needs of your target customer and provides calls-to-action that encourage users to further explore and engage with your product or service.







Free trial, purchase now, call for consultation, compare products

Content includes overview, description, review and testimonial, as well as fraud validation





Free trial, purchase now, call for consultation, compare products

Rank, traffic for your target keyword phrase



Metrics



Metrics



Metrics



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ConclusionOne of the most overlooked aspects of this process is to truly try to understand the target searcher’s

agenda. Think of yourself as you search for something. All the pages you bounce off of, because they

aren’t relevant, trustworthy, or are too complex for one reason or another. Search persona only works in

context with business goals, and content that was designed for them. Doing only one thing out of the

overall list above will not bring the desired results. Now that you’ve built your search persona, examine

your website’s content and existing SEO campaigns and make any adjustments necessary to align with

the criteria you’ve identified in this process. Don’t forget to apply the lessons you’ve learned from building

your search persona, to all of the content you are using for your

inbound marketing efforts. Make sure your presentations, videos,

white papers, podcasts and other content posted on third party sites

are keyword optimized and tagged appropriately. Apply the same

discipline to your social marketing efforts and you’ll be well on your

way to building a sustainable inbound marketing engine.

About Optify

Optify delivers an integrated top-of-the-funnel solution for

marketers responsible for fuelling their company’s growth. Optify helps

B2B marketers reach more buyers and generate more demand for

their products or services month-after-month. The Optify Inbound

Marketing Software Suite brings together the enterprise-class SEO and

social marketing tools that marketers need to increase awareness of

their business, influence buyers across social networks, and engage

with prospects at the earliest point of their buyer’s journey.

Optify’s Solution Includes

Inbound Demand: create a sustainable flow of inbound leads into your

marketing funnel with enterprise-class SEO and social marketing.

Sales Enablement: help sales reach prospects and engage with them

early in the sales process with visitor intelligence and prospect alerts.

Tracking & Analytics: get more of the prospects you want with full

insight into what influences your buyers and the path they take to find

and evaluate you during their research process.

Optify offers a fully-featured free trial;

start your free trial now www.optify.net/sign-up

INBOUND DEMAND

Enterprise-class SEO and social marketing to reach more buyers and generate

more leads.

TRACKING & ANALYTICS

Insight into what influences your buyers so you can get more

buyers into your funnel.

SALES ENABLEMENT

Visitor intelligence and prospect alerts help sales

reach prospects while they’re hot.


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5 Steps to Building a Search Persona