Ways Primary Research Can Help Your SEO Efforts

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Praveen Kumar

date icon Jun 15, 2016

date icon 10 min read

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Screenshot from 2016-06-23 05:54:26The rapid changes in the algorithm by popular search engines have altered the online landscape for businesses in a positive sense, by pushing the users to provide most useful and relevant content to their customers. This not only helped the businesses in getting quality leads but also the search engines to serve their visitors better. This is where marketing research and optimized SEO strategies stepped in: before you tackle the online space for rankings you must have a means to understand your customers. By gaining the right intelligence you will gain good insight to your customer’s needs and thoughts. This helps in developing content with informed SEO strategies and that in turn brings in legitimate increase in web traffic.

How Primary Research Helps

  • Establishing the market research early in the development cycle focuses your efforts and helps reduce costly mistakes. Depending on the financial resources available with you, research about the customer needs and product based research can be done through primary research. This is done with the help of surveys and focus groups and the data is gathered and analysed accordingly.
  • Idealy, the making of an online strategy begins with market research long before the development of a website. Here are some of the questions to evaluate your strategy: Is the website producing a healthy volume of visitors? Do these visitors make any purchase? If so, how frequently do they purchase, and within what timeframe? Do you have analytics softwares in place to analyze the location, access and use of your website by visitors? Understanding these questions and the answers to these questions will decide the future course of your SEO strategy and mould your content accordingly- and that your SEO strategy is organic and effective.

Understanding your buyer

User personas are fictional or ideal users that are created to be used in the making of a user-centred content design process to understand the various user types of a website. They can help you in not only finding the right keywords but also create the right content and be a useful tool in identifying the targets for building links. By obtaining quality research data, you can begin shaping an informed SEO strategy:

  1. You will be able to create ideal buyer personas. Group them all by factors such as age, gender, and buying habits. Now you will be able to focus your product line and strategies based on this data gathered.
  2. Jot down customer’s pain point and understand why they need your product in first place or why were they searching for products or services offered by you and competitors.
  3. You must pay attention to the location of your customers. Are they local or international clients?

How understanding the buyer persona helps?

Buyer Personas are a great help in brainstorming for the right keywords. At the earliest stage you need to some broad research of what users might search for in a query within your niche. If you’re generating seed terms, it’s useful to keep buyer persona’s in mind- do they reflect the need and intentions of all the potential buyers? Personas might also be helpful at the final stage in the keyword research process and that is implementation. This might be less important for on-page SEO activities, but it will direct about the tone and direction of the content on the landing pages. Personas for Link Bait User Personas can also be a helpful tool when creating and implementing a link building strategy. First and foremost we could use user personas to identify link baits. For example- Roger the techie, might be likely to own a gadget blog, or is at least highly likely to to be a reader of similar sites. So what sort of content gadget sites link out to? This will help in knowing substance of the content and the format(videos, infographics, guides etc.) So you can also use your personas as a test for your content link bait- Would Roger be interested in this? Would he share it?

Personas for Guest Posting

Finally, User Personas would be a great way to brainstorm for guest post topic ideas. Before you start, you should think what sort of sites your personas might use and what kind of content they might want to read when they get there.

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