Identify your audience
Knowing your target audience gives you an idea of what they may be looking for and what they will type into a search box.
Focus on demographic traits, and analyze your target audience closely to get the best result. The more you understand their behaviors, habits, interests and lifestyle, the more effective your SEO strategy will be.
Analyze the keywords
Once you understand the behaviors and tendencies of your audience, you can use that information to judge whether a keyword is relevant to them.
Put together a list of keywords and analyze each one against your target audience and against the stages we discussed in earlier posts. This helps you understand how your audience specifically phrases a query, which is where search intent begins.
Understand and analyze the user’s search journey
Review the search journey and the different stages a user may be in along it. That helps you identify the most critical stages for building an effective content strategy.
Analyze Google’s search results (SERP)
Analyze the results for your target keywords. Well-ranked content can give you deeper insight into the search intent behind the query in question.
Keep watching the results as sites shift position, because intent can change over time. Studying and analyzing the SERP gives you a wider view of your audience, and that is always useful to you.
Learn from your competitors
Look at competitor content that holds good positions on Google. How did they manage to serve what the searcher intends?
Reviewing and analyzing their pages gives you ideas for how to improve your own content so that it matches that intent.
Get help from your writers and content producers
In many cases content producers are closer to your audience than you are as the SEO strategist. Use that!
Check whether a writer has already produced something that can help your brand and business connect with its audience, because that is what makes an SEO strategy effective. Often these people have valuable insight into, and real expertise at, understanding and engaging your target audience.
Use keyword research tools
Here I recommend a few essential tools for keyword research. I use all of these myself, and in every case the user’s intent is treated as the foundation of my SEO strategy:
- Google Trends
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- and the People Also Ask box in the SERP
Using these tools to research and analyze keywords in SEO can be highly effective.
Omid Bodagh
I am an SEO specialist who likes helping businesses get seen on Google. From WordPress to SEO, whatever an online business needs to grow, I can help with it.
