Let's discuss persona development. In this lesson, we'll go over persona development. We'll discuss what a marketing persona is and how SEO can contribute to making an effective marketing persona. Not only that, we'll discuss how marketing personas can help your SEO strategy. Let's start out by discussing what a persona is. Persona development is a common marketing tactic that involves creating a representation of your ideal target user. This is the type of user that you want to attract to your website and ultimately complete a goal. This goal could be making a purchase, submitting a form, or some other need that your business has. When it comes to SEO, it's really helpful to have a buyer persona in place so you can better understand the users needs and how they searched the web. This will allow you to develop content around topics that match their intent. Persona's play a major part in your initial keyword research and content strategy. Without knowing more about your user, you have no idea what they are searching for, how they are searching, and what words and phrases they are likely to use. Now, when you're starting out the initial process of building your marketing persona, the best place to start is from your existing customers or users. These are people who have bought your product or service already. You ideally want more people like them this isn't an option if you're building a brand new product or service or website. We'll go into methods of discovering more about those users in a little bit. How can you gain information about these users? Well, there's many ways to acquire information about your current users needs and behaviors and that will help you when you build out an ideal persona for targeting more users like them. These involve existing tools you have, as well as reaching out to users directly. Now, let's discuss some existing tools you may have to help with this. Getting an idea of an existing users behavior through tools like Google Analytics, for example, will help you determine what current users find useful or maybe what information they're missing in your existing product or service. Using Google Analytics, you can tune into things like the demographics of your audience, what interests they have, what other websites they tend to visit the most, what devices they're likely to use. For example, do they normally search by desktop or by phone, in which phone, that can provide a lot of insight into who your target user is. You can also see things like what pages which have content, or basically which content on your site is the most popular. That'll give you insight into what users find the most compelling on your website and may want more of. You can look at click maps of where they click the most within a page. You can see what pages they tend to exit your site on and much more. Basically, Google Analytics provides a wealth of initial data for you to look at and determine more about your users. Another existing tool you can use is Google Search Console. Google Search Console, which was formally renamed from Google Webmaster Tools, you may hear it called by both is another free tool that Google gives you to provide insight into your users and your website. Keep in mind, Google Search Console mainly gives you insights about your website performance. While Google Analytics let you drill more into user behavior. However, there is an area of Google Search Console that lets you see p search terms which your website has both appeared in and users have clicked on. This will help you determine search queries that get a lot of impressions, but no clicks, or vice versa. In the future,Google may do more to combine these two tools. Depending on when you're watching this, a lot of these features may be part of a single tool experience, probably in Google Analytics. One of the best ways to build a persona is to survey your existing users. There are many ways you can do this depending on the type of business you have. If you own a mobile app, you can send in-app messages and ask users to take a survey. I found that people who love the product are often more than willing to share their insights with you. If you don't have the capability of doing a survey or reaching out to existing users, another method is emailing past customers. Or maybe including a request in a newsletter or regular correspondence you send to your users. You can also try gathering some information through out the onboarding process if you have one. Other good resources within the company, include asking your support team and sales team. These individuals regularly deal directly with the customer and potential buyers. I suggest that you meet with these teams to see what kind of questions they are frequently asked and what information may be helpful to a potential customer. Regardless of whether or not you can reach out to existing users, it's also a good idea to do research outside of what your current customers can tell you. This will help you expand your net so you can reach more users and different types of users. A full marketing persona will be complete with a user profile, average age, income, the type of job they have and more. This helps build a full marketing and content strategy. However, at this stage, for your initial keyword research, just determining what they're searching for and how will be the most important things you need to know right now.
