Your target audience describes the people you want to reach with your marketing efforts because they are the most likely to be interested in buying your products and services. The better you understand your prospects and their pain points and motivations, the easier it will be for you to produce content that will draw them to your brand and convert them. An estimated 93% of online experiences begin with search. People turn to search engines to better understand brands and the products and services they offer. They compare the options they have available and read reviews to gain a more complete picture of the quality of what you offer. Customers also turn to search engines to answer their questions and solve their problems, long before they are even ready to make a purchase.

The online world has become essential to an effective marketing strategy. The key to building a successful website is meeting these customers online and providing them with the information they need. The digital world, however, is immense. Nearly three quarters of Americans say that they go online on a daily basis. Ninety percent of the world’s data was produced in just the past two years. This intensive level of competition means that it is very competitive for brands to connect with their customers unless they know exactly who they want to reach.

The days of showing commercials to audiences based just on age or location demographics, for example, is over. Instead, you need to know the behaviors and motivations of your customers so you can meet their needs and build their relationship with your organization. While this might sound intimidating, identifying your target audience and using the information to create targeted campaigns does not have to be overwhelming. Here is what all brands should know.

The role of your target audience in content development

As you structure your content marketing strategy, your target audience should be your focal point. Effective content marketing does not mean producing material based upon what you find interesting or guesses as to what will entice your target audience. Instead, the content should align with what your ideal customers want to see at each stage of their buyer’s journey and effectively nurture them through the funnel until they are ready to convert.

As you develop your target audience outline, you will be able to identify their pain points that they are looking to resolve. You will gain insight into their motivation, budget, and their role within their company. As you gain more insight, you will be able to see what your prospect needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey, from the early stages, when they are just investigating options, to the end stages, when they are comparing brands and preparing to make a purchase.

As you outline your target customers and their buyer's journey, you will be able to also start seeing what content you have already produced and what still needs to be developed. It will help you make informed decisions about the types of content you still need to create. You will have improved power to persuade your customers, resulting in a higher ROI from your content marketing efforts.

Marketing tactics to create strong customer personas

There are two main aspects to understanding your target audience and your buyer personas: market research and learning about your existing customers. Each part will offer you insight into the people that your marketing tactics will want to reach.

Market research

Your market research will help you understand the people most likely to buy your product. You will be able to survey customers that may be interested in what you have to offer and learn about what they want to see from businesses in your industry and what would influence their final decisions. I recommend using Inbox Dollars to develop your survey. With an Inbox Dollars review you will be provided insights into the factors that matter the most to them, such as product options, price, and service options. You will then be able to understand which segments are most likely to respond to you and what those people in particular would like to see from your brand. To broaden your marketing research, you can also use a marketing analysis on your competitors. Look at their content, success rates, and the audiences that they are targeting. This will help you gauge their marketing tactics and how customers respond to it, helping you to boost your own content creation.

Examining your existing customers

You also want to take a close look at your existing customers. These people have already made purchases, which means that they have seen something they liked about the company. Speak with these people and ask them about what persuaded them to do business with you. Ask them what made them choose you over your competitors. Find out what led them to find organizations within your industry-- their pain points and motivations. Ask questions about their business and their role within the organization. Get to know these customers to bolster your understanding of your target personas.

Putting the research together

Once you have the information gathered from these different types of research, you then want to put them together into a few persona categories. Generally aim for 3-5 main personas. Each category should have similar budgets, pain points, and motivations. If you find yourself with too many personas, see if you are being too particular about each category and if they can be made broader. Conversely, if you only have one or two personas, see if you can make them a bit more particular to help your understanding of your target audience and make your content and marketing tactics more precise.

Measuring your success with your target audience

Once you have gone through the trouble of creating your buyer personas, you want to make sure you have done them correctly. The best way to judge your success is to look at your metrics and see how well you are converting these buyers. Here are a few metrics that can be helpful in your marketing analysis as you implement your new personas.

• Bounce rates: if you are optimizing content for particular topics and keywords, but your material is not answering the needs of that audience, you will see a high bounce rate.
• Conversion rates from one level of the funnel to the next. Since your content is designed to entice people from one stage of the funnel to the next, content that is poorly aligned with this journey will end up having poor conversion rates at each stage.
• Conversion rates from organic traffic. Looking at your conversion rates from visitors who arrived through organic traffic will help you understand how well your material is resonating with those who landed on your page from the SERP. High conversion rates for this group means that you are effectively targeting the right audience and coaxing them through your site to conversion. If most of your conversions are coming from people who heard about you through other means, then your content production might not be effectively engaging the right people.

Identifying your target audience will help you better reach the people most likely to respond to your offerings and building a relationship with them. Correctly following these procedures will help you boost your marketing tactics, building more effective campaigns, boosting your ROI, and growing your business.

An SEO checker, a tool that helps you analyze your website to see how well you are optimizing your content and remaining compliant with the best practices for the major search engines, is a valuable instrument in your digital strategy. It is important to note, however, that a checker alone is not enough to maximize your prevalence in the search engines.  

The importance of the digital world in commerce continues to grow. Ecommerce grew by nearly 15% in 2015. In the B2B world, 94% of people say that they perform research online before they make a purchase.

Given that more than half of the traffic to your website originates with organic traffic, there is no doubt that your SEO efforts and your visibility on the SERPs will directly impact the bottom line for your organization.

The better you understand how to maximize your usage of the SEO checker and how to leverage a platform that will take your SEO efforts further, the more return you will begin to see from your optimization efforts.  

Get A Concise SEO Evaluation of Your Site

What does an SEO checker do?

Running an SEO check will help you take a closer look at how your site is currently performing. Most SEO checkers will look at factors such as:

• The usability of your site
• Your site speed
• Metadata
• Your alt tags
• Your social media interactions
• Internal and external links

An SEO optimizing platform will help you evaluate how well your site adheres to SEO best practices. It will alert you to potential problems before they become an issue with your rankings and impact your site traffic.

Although this information is helpful, it does fall short in its ability to help you build a strong site that will maximize your appearance in search.

An SEO checker needs to be paired with suggestions

While it can be useful to have the insight about the shortcomings of your website, the information from an SEO check can only help you so much with maximizing the optimization of your brand. You need guidelines that will also help you improve your site.

Not only do you want to know where you have made errors, but also where you may be overlooking opportunities to take your website results further. For example, the BrightEdge platform can offer insight and suggestions about backlinks.

Rather than just reporting on the sites that link to your page, you can also access recommendations that will offer suggestions about websites that might suitable for pursuing additional backlinks.  

Similarly, you can analyze the pages that rank for particular keywords and receive insight that will let you see where you have the ability to outrank competitors. You will receive not only the SEO check, but also the suggestions about where keywords should be used while also looking at the top-ranking pages for that topic, which will help you understand what the search engines and users want to see.

You need to know what your competitors are doing

The BrightEdge platform will also help you look at your site next to competitors so that you can see keywords that they are ranking for that you are not, where they are having the most success, and where you need to improve.

It is important to remember that in the world of SEO, you are not only trying to rank well within the search engines, you are also trying outrank all of these competitors. That is how you can attract the attention your site needs.

When you have a full analytical platform, you will be able to gain valuable insights into the factors that are helping your competitors achieve their success, allowing you to find holes that will help you outrank them and improve your own reach and ROI. With BrightEdge you will be able to see:

• Keyword gaps where competitors are ranking for particular terms that you are lacking
• The high-ranking keywords and longtail keywords competing domains use
• Their content performance in universal results and specialized results such as Quick Answers and the Local 3-Pack
• Their content performance over time next to yours

BrightEdge Site Comparison will help you find gaps and opportunities.

This insight into what your competitors are doing and what helps them succeed can help you adjust your own strategies and better capture a larger portion of the share of voice.

You need to know how your SEO efforts impact the bottom line

While gains in SEO can be wonderful to see on your charts, in the end, the value of using an SEO optimizer is revenue. You want to build your site so that more people are attracted to your brand and thus convert.

Ranking highly on the SERPs will only help you if you attract the right audience. Looking at your site only through the eyes of a checker will tell you if you are optimizing your site, but not how well those optimization efforts attract people who are interested in your business.

Working with a more complete platform, like BrightEdge, will allow you to analyze the impact your optimization process has directly on your revenue. You can group pages or keywords together and gauge their impact on conversions.  

Page Reporting on BrightEdge helps you gauge your impact on conversions and revenue.

You can also track different types of conversions over time to see the impact of various campaigns on the success of your website. You can even see the impact that your SEO has on different devices by comparing your progress in mobile SEO versus desktop. This can help you pinpoint the needs of your different audiences so that you are better able to tap into the growth of mobile internet use. 

BrightEdge StoryBuilder makes it easy to see progress by device.

An SEO checker can help you build a successful website, but it can only take you so far. For you to maximize the potential of your site, you need to combine a checker with a complete platform that will provide you with the insights you need to help your site stand out against the competition.  

Website traffic describes the visitors who arrive on your page and the data you can collect from these visits. When these prospects visit your site, you have the opportunity to entice them to enter your sales funnel. Understanding how to build your website traffic is a critical part of building an online reputation. An estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers and 81 percent of customers research products and services online before making a purchase. There has also been tremendous growth in ecommerce, with an increase of nearly 15 percent in 2015. A site that receives strong site traffic will be better positioned to capture this revenue and grow their brand. There is more to successfully building a website, though, than focusing on the website traffic report. You want to time your scaling efforts to ensure that your site is prepared for the influx. This will not only maximize your profit, but it will also help you protect your reputation and build your relationships with those visitors. A successful website will be equipped to handle online transactions while also being organized to encourage people through the sales funnel. Ideally, your content should mirror the funnel itself. In other words, you want to have the majority of your content focus on visitors at the top of the funnel, while also creating some targeted and useful content for those further down the funnel. Links between different levels of content can encourage people to move through your site, engage with your material, and enter your sales funnel, eventually becoming paying customers. You will find as you start examining your site traffic that it is arriving from a variety of different places, including organic and paid traffic sources. Here is what all site owners should know about how to increase website traffic.  

What types of traffic should I examine on my website?

You should expect site traffic to arrive from a variety of different sources. The five most important ones that you will want to track and optimize for are:

• Organic traffic: meaning those who arrive on your site by clicking on results on the SERPs
• Social traffic: those who arrive on your site after interacting with your brand on your social media pages
• Paid traffic: those who land on your domain after clicking on an ad you placed on sites
• Email traffic: people who visit your site by clicking through a link that you had placed in an email message
• Direct traffic: Those who are familiar with your site and brand and just type your address directly into the search bar

While there are several different sources of traffic, it is important to remember that they are not all equal. Some traffic sources will bring more people to your domain than others. Namely, organic traffic brings more than half of the visitors to your page, on average. This means that your visibility and ranking on the SERPs is responsible for more traffic than your social, PPC, and email traffic combined. This is an important point to keep in mind as you begin the process of building traffic to your site.  

Understanding how to increase website traffic

The key to understanding how to increase website traffic revolves around being better in tune with what your customers want to see and providing it for them on your website. The better you are able to align with the needs of your prospects, the more enticing your site will become for people navigating the web.

How do I optimize for organic traffic?

Given that organic traffic drives more than half of the visitors who land on your page, the focal point of understanding how to increase website traffic comes down to SEO. Properly leveraging SEO can help you build your site traffic and drive interested prospects to your page, encouraging them to enter your sales funnel. Optimizing your content for SEO and organic search should be an encompassing process that begins before you even write a single piece of content.

1. Use keyword research to identify topics and vocabulary that will appeal to your targeted audience.
2. Create high-quality content that is optimized with the keyword appearing in the title, H2 tags, URL, alt text, and body.
3. Distribute the content thoroughly to ensure that you attract the eyes of those most likely to be interested in your piece to encourage backlinks and high engagement metrics.
4. Review the information supplied through the BrightEdge backlink checker to uncover opportunities to ask for backlinks to boost off-page SEO.
5. Monitor your progress with BrightEdge to see your success by page group and keyword group.

How do I optimize for other sources of site traffic?

For the rest of your traffic, there are also a few steps you can take to boost the number of visitors to your site.

1. Keyword research: this is not only for organic search. Keyword research will help you identify topics that are popular within your target audience. This will help you create emails, social media postings, and PPC ads that will better attract people to your page.
2. You can also boost your paid traffic by analyzing your sales funnel. You want to have a keen understanding of who your customers are and what they are doing at each stage of their buyer’s journey. This will help you create more targeted materials because you will have a better idea of what they are looking to read.

Monitoring your website traffic report and understanding how to increase your website traffic are important steps in the development of a successful website. Before you look at your traffic, first make sure your site is ready to handle the boost in visitors. Then begin to optimize your page for the different traffic sources, remembering always to keep your focus on organic.