Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about increasing your online presence by gaming the search engine algorithms to rank higher in searches relevant to your business. Although content writing and website development are essential skills for SEO, Audience Research and Content Analysis are vital for any effective SEO strategy.

To help you make the most of Audience Research and Content Analysis, we’ve prepared this guide explaining these SEO techniques and how they can help your SEO efforts.

What is Audience Research?

Analysing social media patterns offers a unique insight for brands into how customers are receiving their products, rivals, and advertisements. Audience analysis enables companies to better understand their current and future consumer base to enhance marketing strategies, brand perception and consumer experience. This blog covers the aspects of social media analysis to enable you to create better marketing campaigns and marketing.

Today’s brands know that a major part of the expansion of Google and Facebook is their ability to sell hyper-targeted advertisements. Targeting audiences has never been easier, thanks to the advertising and marketing options available.

The questions Audience Research may answer:

• Which social media platforms do your audience use the most
• What topics should marketing cover
• What values are most important to your target market
• What campaigns are our competitors doing, where did they perform well, and where could they be improved 

Different types of audience research:

• Demographic audience research can separate audiences for you based on their statistical demographics, for example, language, religion, and ethnicity
• Geographic audience research identifies audiences by what area they live in
• Psychographic audience research occurs when you divide consumers into different segments based on interests, activities and opinions, and traits such as values, lifestyle, hobbies, needs and wants, attitudes and spending habits
• Media audience research is done using data collected from social media platforms and other media sources to enable brands to understand their audience
• Competitor audience research occurs when a business evaluates data about its competitors’ audiences

How do you target your audience for SEO?

Like any good marketing strategy, SEO works best when you can identify and cater to a target audience, but it can be hard to identify your target audience when you’re buried in tables of keywords. By identifying your target audience (think potential customers and site visitors), you can better target their interests with relevant keywords and content tailored to them.

The first step in identifying your target audience is to analyse your existing customers and site traffic to see what kind of people your business attracts. Search engine tools like Google Analytics allow you to see the interests and categories of visitors to your site and useful data like how long they spent on each page so you can better identify your target audience(s).

Techniques for Targeting Audiences

Once you’ve noted the interests and affinity categories of your site visitors, you should target keywords related to their interests and improve your site visibility with your target audience. By rewriting site content or changing metadata, you can increase the odds of someone from your target audience(s) visiting your site, and you can find the best keywords by:

Checking the competition

Your SEO competitors (web pages competing for SERP rankings on related keyword/industry searches) are valuable sources of inspiration if you know where to look. Start by making a list of your money keywords – the ones that bring in the most visits, conversions, etc. –look for websites that show up when searching for them and copy the keywords they target to gain some of their success.

Looking for subtopics

After you’ve identified your target audience and chosen the keywords you want to target, you should diversify your keywords with subtopics. Subtopics usually include long-tail keywords that are directly related to the main topic, often in a question format with more focus on converting or purchasing, such as the subtopic “how to market a small business?” for the topic of digital marketing.

What is Content Analysis?

Content analysis is the process of scanning through content (including written content, images, etc.), filtering out irrelevant content and extracting relevant keywords and topics to evaluate its effectiveness. Effective content should be rich in relevant kewords and written with a clear purpose, such as informing the customer about your products and services or persuading them to purchase.

Due to a huge increase in web pages on the internet, more and more content is duplicated or plagiarised, often due to pages using pre-existing templates paired with various snippets of content. Many web pages include content copied from other assets (like a sales catalogue or press release), which is quick and easy but can harm your online presence if flagged as copied content.

Content analysis techniques can uncover these issues and help you create unique content to improve your site’s SERP rankings. Some common issues with site content include:

Keyword Cannibalisation

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when a few pages target the same keyword or search phrase, which is common but usually unintentional. Unfortunately, keyword cannibalisation can confuse search engine algorithms and result in the pages of your site being ranked incorrectly.

By conducting an SEO content audit, you can detect keyword cannibalisation within your website and take steps to eliminate it, which should improve your site’s SERP rankings and SEO performance.

Decaying Content

When your website’s SERP rankings decrease over time, this is known as decaying content and can be caused by various issues like keyword cannibalisation or duplicate content. Over time, your website traffic may decline due to algorithm updates or changing trends, so keeping your site current with regular updates is a good way to improve your SEO performance.

By conducting an SEO analysis on your site, you can identify issues and choose which pages need to be removed, reworked or updated to improve your website’s performance.

Assess your site’s content with SEO Analysis

SEO analysis is the process of examining a website to understand how well it has been optimised, and should evaluate the written content, user experience and long-term trends of a site. Although SEO analysis techniques can very greatly, they should always address the three main SEO components, which are:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimisations that make it easier for search engines to read and sort content on your website, improving organic rankings from users searching for your business or related terms. By ensuring that your website is easy for search engine algorithms to read, categorise and sort, you make it more likely for them to rank it higher than unoptimised sites.

On-page SEO (or Content SEO)

On-page SEO or on-sight SEO involves techniques which boost the page’s numbers through, a better user experience. This is achieved through several techniques known as Core web visuals, page speed, mobile friendliness, title tags, meta descriptions, content quality, HTML headers, image ALT text, Internal linking, and navigation.

Off-page SEO (or Links)

Off-page SEO refers to all SEO tactics that don’t involve your website, such as backlinks to your site, social media management and more. The more your site, business or brand is discussed on other sites, the better your off-page SEO strategy.

Revamping existing content

Over time, your site content can become outdated and ineffective – due to changing details, newer trends or search algorithms prioritising newer content – requiring a revamp or rewrite. By editing published blogs and regularly updating your website, you can ensure that your site is fresh and interesting, as far as the search engine rankings are concerned at least.

What content needs refreshing?

• Inbound links are an important way of increasing site traffic, as search engines consider them a sign of authority, so consider writing content on other sites or making partnerships with other businesses in your industry.
• When content begins to lose traffic, it may need a small refresh to make it more relevant to the search engine algorithms and keep it high on the rankings.
• Older content tends to produce smaller returns on SEO, so consider refreshing new content to keep it relevant by rewriting older blogs, swapping keywords in site text, and so on.
• Updating keywords in existing content is a brilliant way to ensure your content stays relevant, so regular tweaks will help you maintain traffic and rankings.
• When refreshing your content, prioritise the needs of your audience. Your content should be clearly organised and simply written to improve readability.

Conclusion

SEO is a crucial but often misunderstood part of digital marketing that can work wonders for increasing your brand awareness and conversions when targeted correctly. Researching your audience and analysing the content on your site can help you maximise your SEO gains, so we hope this guide helps you make the most of your SEO strategy.

If you have any further questions, why not contact the SEO experts at Cleartwo today?