If you want to refine your keyword research, one of the measures you can use is audience segmentation. When done right, this ensures you target the right audience. But what is audience segmentation? How do you do it right for the best results? Let’s find out in this guide.
What is Audience Segmentation in Keyword Research?
This refers to dividing your customers into smaller, more specific groups such as preferences, patterns, behaviors, and demographics. The aim is to have a better understanding of your customers to provide them with tailored products, services, and content. You can also tailor your keyword research strategy to each group to get targeted traffic that can increase conversion.
Why is Audience Segmentation Important in Keyword Research?
There are several reasons to do audience segmentation. These are:
Find Keywords for Every Demographic
When you segment your audience, you can understand the keyword phrases they use to search for products in your niche. You can then create content incorporating those keywords to attract the right audience.
Answer Search Queries
Specific demographics may have search queries that affect them. When you understand the queries that a certain demographic has, you can focus on responding to those queries, improving user experience.
Optimize Your Site for Each Demographic
When you understand your audience, you can optimize your audience user experience for every segment. You can ensure that you provide content and design that resonates with your groups. For instance, when selling products and services for different age groups, you can create landing pages with images and content appealing to each age group.
Better Insights
Customer segmentation can provide important data on customers’ demography, preferences, behaviors, and needs. By doing data analysis, you can find new growth opportunities and optimize your site accordingly.
Ways of Audience Segmentation
You can segment your audience according to:
Behavior
When doing behavior segmentation, there are several questions to ask yourself:
- What do you need to do for your audience to accept your content or product?
- Does your audience seek for your content, product or service with a certain goal?
- How do you plan to keep your audience? Will it translate into loyalty?
- Will your target audience find your content valuable?
Geography
By dividing your audience depending on geographical location, you can do keyword research for local seo. To segment by geography, you only need to determine where a person is searching for a keyword.
The type of keyword used can also help you segment according to geography. For instance, when someone searches for the keyword Chiropractor in Salt Lake City, you can easily tell where they are located. This can be important for local SEO.
Demographic
This is perhaps the most common kind of segmentation. It involves segmenting your audience depending on age or gender. When you optimize your content for such demography, you can easily connect with each segment emotionally.
Psychographic
This type of segmentation involves looking at the search terms to understand more about the person doing the search. To do that, you can collect data on the people’s pain points and any reservations they may have about your products. When segmenting data in this group, you should also consider:
- Personality
- Lifestyle
- Social class
Technographic
This is a type of segmentation that enables you to group your audience according to the technology they use most. You can then do keyword research based on their preferred technology. For instance, if your audience searches for your products on mobile devices, you can do keyword research for voice searches. Such keywords are usually longer and have a conversational tone.
Tools and Techniques for Audience Segmentation
These are the tools and techniques that will help you with Audience segmentation:
- Personalization tools. There are tools such as Dynamic Yield and Optimizely that can provide customized experiences for different customer segments.
- Keyword research tools. Tools such as Ahref, Semrush and Google Adword keyword planner can help you identify keywords each segment is using.
- Analytics. You can leverage analytic data tools such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to see how customer segments interact with your brand.
- Surveys and focus groups. These will provide you with direct feedback from customers.
- Heat mapping tools. Software such as Crazy Egg and Hotjar can give insights into how different audience segments interact with your brand. You can use this data to find areas to improve and optimize your site for better engagement.
How To Target Customer Segments With Relevant Keywords
Here are ways to do audience segmentation in keyword research.
Understand Your Customer Segment
Consider who your customers are. You can categorize them according to behavior, age, demographics, interests, and preferences. You can then create content that resonates with each group.
Do Keyword Research
Once you know which segment your customers fit in, you can do keyword research to know the terms and phrases each group uses to find your products. There are different keyword research tools, such as Ahref, Semrush, and even Google SERP analysis. You can then optimize your website and content for every segment.
Create Targeted Customers
When you find the keywords that each of the groups are using, you can create targeted content that meets customer needs and interest. Ensure that your articles use a language that appeals to each group. Your content should also be structured in a way that enables people to find it.
Optimize Your Site
You should then optimize your pages with the keywords. Some areas in which you should incorporate these keywords are in the title, url, headers, meta description and content body. Avoid overusing the keywords, as this may result in a penalty due to keyword stuffing.
Keep Monitoring
Keep checking the performance of the keywords used. Consider if they are meeting your goals. Some of the site metrics to monitor are:
- Traffic
- Conversion
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
Keep adjusting your site and pages accordingly. For instance, if you notice a certain keyword brings more traffic for a certain demographic, you should create more content around it.
Conclusion
If you would like your SEO strategy to be effective, you should target customer segments with the right keywords. This way, you can create targeted content that will cover the interests and needs of each segment. You can also use the right keywords and phrases to attract the right traffic. Following the steps outlined in this guide, you can easily do audience segmentation that will refine your keyword search.
