DIY SEO #2: The Target Audience of Businesses

As you and marketing team decide who it’s target audience is, consider these things:

If someone sends you a referral, what are the key things you look for in that referral?

Who are your best customers?

Are there any particular products / services which you offer which either sell better than others or have a higher profit margin?  You may want to at least start by targeting people interested in those products / services.

Does your business target a niche within a larger market or even a niche within a niche?  The Christian SEO Guys blog is in the market of search marketing.  We focus primarily on the niche of SEO.  Beyond that, we focus on a niche within SEO and that is Christians.  Targeting visitors in the general market can be very tempting especially when you see how much the general market keywords are compared to the niche keywords, but is the traffic from the general market really your customers?

Do you service a particular economic strata?  Some companies offer products and services which most people can afford, but others either offer higher end products or intensionally are only interested in serving higher end customers.  What best describes your business?

For local businesses, are you only interested in people from a certain geographic area or do you also offer to ship products nationally?  If you do offer your product nationally, is that something you want to focus on or do you primarily want to focus on the local business?

Businesses have an additional task in this step because in addition to determining a profile of the type of person you want to target, you also have to consider to the stages of a sale.  For example, for a business that is somewhat socially engaged, they may have blog traffic, tire-kickers, information gatherers, people ready to buy, and return customers.  These different types of visitors have different value to the business.  At which stage are you interested in attracting people.  For many companies they are best off targeting people who are ready to purchase, but some companies who have a good lead nurturing program setup may be interested in targeting people a littler earlier in the stages of a sale.

Additional Task:

• Determine in what stage(s) of the sale process you want your target audience to be.

Photo by jambe

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What are the criteria you came up with for your business?

DIY SEO #1: Planning Your Objectives <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #3: Brainstorming Keywords