In marketing we spend a lot of time getting to know our customer. We have to right? These are the people we are trying to sell to. As a marketing channel, SEO can also stand to gain ground as a result of customer profiling (and social media, PPC, everything). If we know our demographic we can choose better keywords. For instance, someone might not know the exact name for a service, or that they even need that service, so we can optimize for more general terms that they look for in the research stage. But we can even take it a step further…
The reason people are getting so excited about customer profiling and SEO is because we can find terms to optimize for that we never considered previously. Also, our abilities in customer profiling are expanding. This is mostly due to big data. But it’s not only that, it also relates to social media marketing. Let take a moment and look at an example.
Customer Profiling SEO Outline
We could approach customer profiling like this from a search and social media perspective for almost any website.
Do your customers who love car insurance, also love gekos and also have trouble remembering your car insurance service? Customer profile can allow you to create a marketing strategy to solve that.
Customer
Customer Demographic Data
Customer Interests
Locations for Customer
Websites Customer Spends Time On
Top Keywords for Customer
Product / Service Research Terms
Branded
Non – Branded
Product / Service Terms
Branded
Non – Branded
Common Customer Interests
Etc.
At this point you probably get the idea. By having a clear customer profile it can help our SEO. We know the websites to target for promotion, we know the segments of keywords to create and we know at what stage in the buying process people select those keywords. Also, by finding similar interests and other websites these customers spend time on, we can develop content for social media that they might be interested in. For example, someone who is interested in surfing may prove to also be interested in deep sea fishing. This allows us to reach out and widen our content pool. Consider a post on The Top 10 Fishing and Surf Destinations on your favorite surf website.
Overall, customer profiling is nothing new. Furthermore, we will always go after the core keywords first in SEO. But if you hear customer profiling as a buzz word in the SEO world over the next couple months now at least you have a little more background.
