How to make your SEO better with personas

What are data-driven personas?

Data-based user personas are - to put it simply - exemplary target group representatives. To put it in more detail, they are detailed descriptions of target group representatives in terms of their demographic characteristics, their environment, motivation, wishes, dislikes, media use and brand use. They provide an authentic picture of the user - transforming barely pictorial data sets into tangible people. The data-driven persona gives anonymous target groups a face, makes abstract data tangible and focuses the view of all employees on the customers and their needs.

Personas are based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, e.g. representative studies, user surveys, target group observations or expert interviews to explore characteristic personality traits. Furthermore, analyses are used that are collected internally or are already available: Who buys what, when and how? Media behaviour is also analysed: Which media are used for which purpose, how often and when? Together with many other data, computer-generated models are created on this basis, which are individually positioned with names, external appearance and other specifics. Finally, one persona can be considered alone, but also different personas together in an exchange: How do they behave together? Which persona influences which and how?

Let's look at some examples. How is a persona developed in concrete terms? Basic criteria are name, appearance, age, profession, marital status, hobbies, attitudes, expectations as well as wishes. Below are three fictitious examples of prototypical target group representatives of the Kenwood brand.

Further examples, independent of the Kenwood brand, are listed here: www.persona-institut.de/beispielpersonas

SEO advantages of personas

In SEO strategies, success-relevant keywords are crucial for good visibility on the search results pages. The central question: What are the appropriate keywords to optimise your own ranking in the search results? data-driven personas provides valuable insights for this: They list the target group's hobbies, values, pain points, etc., draw a customer journey map and, based on this, derive a characteristic search behaviour with regard to the product or service. First of all, services such as Ubersuggest can be used to find suitable keyword ideas in general. After a rough selection of interesting keywords is available, they are structured by individual filters, e.g. search volume, traffic potential, competition. Tools such as those of our partner Searchmetrics help here.

Let's look at our three examples, the user personas Martin, Ines and Philipp. For example, as a rather newcomer to the Kenwood brand, Martin searches for "accessories for Kenwood", while Ines wants to find "used accessories" and Philipp searches for "new accessories for Kenwood". On this basis, you can now compare whether the defined keywords match the User Personas and their user intent. In the next step, the buyer persona can be used to specify which subpages of the homepage should be optimised for which keywords. For Martin, an overview of products and accessories is given directly at the start. Ines finds the refurbished, used products via a separate landing page. And the latest accessory trends and innovations are listed in the company blog.

By the way, data-driven personas (also called buyer personas) also helps in B2B. An example: A company wants to enter into a cooperation in the area of e-learning and is looking for cooperation partners who can provide support, especially in the IT area. In return, it offers know-how that is interesting for the cooperation partner. In short, the question is which cooperation partners seem relevant and how to successfully establish contact. Buyer personas help to directly design a suitable communication strategy. Only with a data-based buyer persona do you see all the important success factors listed. These include preferred topics, communication channels, area of responsibility as well as challenges that the exemplary contact person deals with in everyday life. A detailed picture of the potential cooperation partner helps to perfectly match all communicative activities to him or her - starting with the choice of words for establishing contact.

How data-driven personas helps with link building

Who could be an interesting link partner? Which websites would be a good fit for good backlink building? For this purpose, data-driven personas is recommended, because it provides information about which magazines, blogs and journals the target group regularly uses, which media they still use, on which channels and social platforms they consume content and exchange information about it - i.e. where touchpoints make sense, for example in the context of a link partnership or a guest post.

Data-based personas can also be used to narrow down specific target group-relevant topics, e.g. websites with environmental or mobility topics. In addition, this allows you to better check which media format should be placed most appropriately within the framework of a link partnership: Are many videos used in general? Does this belong to the media preferences of the personas? Are the texts rather longer or shorter and visualised with info-graphics? Everywhere, the insights from the data-based personas can help to form a preference.

In short: data-driven personas supports the link building strategy in that you can get a much faster, clearer and more successful overview of which digital offers are relevant as potential link partners. Also, when contacting the website operators, you can convey much more authentically why a link partnership seems to make sense.

Another advantage of personas is more effective guest blogging. Which topics are to be preferred? How should the topics be presented in the media? Which platforms are the most relevant? All this can be answered easily when working with data-based personas.

Use personas in content marketing

The great opportunity of personas is the reciprocity. The target group representatives find themselves in the personas and the marketing industry recognises the target group as it really is. This is the foundation for telling impressive stories with advertising that fascinate and don't just sound nice. It's the foundation for advertising activities that don't have a lot of wasted coverage, because you know exactly which media your target group prefers. Organic social media posts - also no problem with personas. Viral moments happen on the social web primarily when users voluntarily share a post. And this is more likely to happen when the content inspires the target group. And this enthusiasm is made possible by social media personas, because thanks to them you know exactly which content will really score with your target group.

Conclusion: The top 3 practical insights

1. data-driven personas are authentic target group representatives and provide valuable insights for keyword research, target group-specific content formats and distribution channels.
2. Link partnerships can be built more efficiently and successfully: Thanks to data-based personas, you know which media, blogs, social accounts are really important for a cooperation request.
3. data-driven personas make convincing storytelling possible: Thanks to them, you know exactly how your target group wants to be addressed and when on which platforms in such a way that your information stays in the minds of the target group.