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PERSONAS FOR SEO IN 2012 How to build them and how to use them.

MICHAEL KING

Director of inbound marketing

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DOWNLOAD THIS DECK: http://slidesha.re/pubcon-personas

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WHY DO WE NEED PERSONAS FOR SEO?

A question I get a lot is “why do we need to use personas for SEO?” The answer is you don’t… unless you want

to do a good job. You are creating content for an audience whether it be customers, influencers or people who will

link to you. You should understand who those people are and what they want.

What are you

guys targeting?!

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CONSUMER INSIGHTS ARE PARAMOUNT

UX, Content Strategy, Digital Strategy, Conversion Rate Optimizers and traditional marketing all employ consumer

insights. Why did SEO ever think it was exempt?

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WTF IS A PERSONA?

A persona is a hypothetical representation of a segment of an audience. I tend to use four because I find that to

be a manageable number but you can use as many as you’d like

PERSONA C PERSONA B PERSONA A PERSONA D

DEMOGRAPHICS

LIFESTYLES

USER STORY

USER NEEDS

DEMOGRAPHICS

LIFESTYLES

USER STORY

USER NEEDS

DEMOGRAPHICS

LIFESTYLES

USER STORY

USER NEEDS

DEMOGRAPHICS

LIFESTYLES

USER STORY

USER NEEDS

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PERSONAS ARE NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE

“A major virtue of personas is the

establishment of empathy and

understanding the individual who

uses the product”

-Donald A. Norman, Nielsen Norman Group

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PERSONA TYPES

& DATA SOURCES

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BUYER VS AUDIENCE PERSONAS

Sometimes your audience and buyer personas are the same, but most of the time they are not. The people you

want links from are most likely not the same people that are going to buy your product. Treat them accordingly.

Buyer Personas buy your products.

You want them to convert.

Audience Personas Participate in the conversation.

You want them to keep sharing and linking

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AD HOC PERSONAS USING “AFFINITY DIAGRAMMING”

Many people advocate the post-it note approach. I personally find it unrealistic and not that useful. I prefer more

quantitative approaches backed by data.

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AD HOC PERSONAS USING SOCIAL MEDIA

I outlined a process in my “Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media” Mozinar about how to use Keyword

Research, Social Media and Discussion Search to develop ad hoc personas. http://mz.cm/UfXmVv

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THE REAL PROBLEM WITH AD HOC PERSONAS

Ad Hoc personas don’t work well because there’s not enough hard data behind them when people question their

conclusions. Everyone has an idea of who they think the audience is.

While this approach can be very effective

stakeholders may potentially challenge it because

it’s not empirical. However neither is the old

method of handing out post-its to stakeholders

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EVEN AD HOC PERSONAS VIA SOCIAL ARE LIKE…

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DATA DRIVEN PERSONAS

Much more realistic, empirical and easier to justify are data-driven personas which can be created from a variety

of sources of information.

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iACQUIRE’S DATA DRIVEN APPROACH

At iAcquire we have a data-driven approach starting from Nielsen’s PRIZM segments, layering data from Experian Simmons

and finally using Social Inventories from Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and DoubleClickto develop empirical and social

media-relevant personas. Google killed most of cool stuff in DoubleClick’s AdPlanner.

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NIELSEN PRIZM

Nielsen’s PRIZM segments all of the US into 66 predetermined types or “codes” with demographics and

psychographics that can be identified by zip code.

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INSTANT PERSONAS FOR LOCAL SEARCH WITH PRIZM

A common complaint is that personas will take too long. Use MyBestSegments’ free demo to find the top occuring

PRIZM, P$YCLE or CONNEXIONS Segments per Zip Code. http://bit.ly/Qeh0uw

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EXPERIAN SIMMONS

Experian Simmons is an expensive tool made based on survey data made just for this type of customer

profiling. They provide 61 Mosaic types and a whole lot of cross-tabbing and correspondence mapping of

data.

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MOSAIC INTERACTIVE GUIDE

Get free Experian Simmons data by Zip Code: http://bit.ly/R9MzuD

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HITWISE

Hitwise is also integrated with Simmons and can provide direct insights into Search behavior by Mosaic type

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GOOGLE CONSUMER SURVEYS

Google AdPlanner has scaled back the data it gives away significantly, but Google’s new Consumer Surveys is

used to collect data off the back of the DoubleClick network at 10 cents a response.

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SURVEY MONKEY MARKET RESEARCH SURVEYS

SurveyMonkey gets explicit demographic data from respondents while Google infers it from sites you visit while

logged in. We actually have a study using SurveyMonkey that examines Search Behavior launching in November

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YAHOO CLUES

Yahoo provides demographics at the keyword level with the Yahoo Clues tool http://clues.yahoo.com There is also

an API: http://www.s-anand.net/blog/yahoo-clues-api/

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SHARE TYPES

The New York Times performed a study called “The Psychology of Sharing” in which they segmented all social media users

into six sharing personas. This is especially useful if your just using personas for link building. http://nyti.ms/XhaQze

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HOW iACQUIRE BUILDS

PERSONAS

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MEET NORRIS A. ROWLEY JR.

Norris is our Manager of Market Research & Analytics. We work together to build sound and actionable audience

reports for our client base. What follows is the data-driven process we’ve developed to build personas.

@NorRocwell

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CHOOSE BEST GUESS PRIZM TYPES

We start with our best guess of Nielsen MyBestSegments from PRIZM, P$YCLE or ConneXions types as a base

to make assumptions

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DEVELOP EMPATHY FOR THE CONSUMER

Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and go through all of a given brand’s web properties.

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GO THROUGH THE SITE AS THE CONSUMER

Go through the brand’s site thoroughly as a consumer and continue to document the experience.

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EXAMINE THE AVAILABLE DEMOGRAPHIC DATA

Once we have an idea of the client’s online presence we examine our data from both PRIZM and Simmons to

start filling in the gaps and building a story.

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EXAMINE PSYCHOGRAPHICS

Attitudes and characteristics from Simmons adds another layer of insights to who is a persona within the client’s

target audience and helps tell the story.

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EXAMINE MOSAIC TYPE PSYCHOGRAPHICS

We slice and dice psychographics based on cross-tabbing relevant questions, but we also take another look at

the canned psychographics of the Mosaic types to see

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VALIDATE USING SOCIAL INVENTORIES

Determine how valid the segment is online by placing as much data as possible into Facebook, LinkedIn, or

YouTube ads. You may have to infer relationships in some cases.

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BUILD YOUR PERSONA FROM CONCLUSIONS

We use the all the data we’ve collected to build a user story, key traits, digital behavior and engagement insights.

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HOW TO USE PERSONAS

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WHAT ARE NEED STATES?

Need States are classifications of goals that users are trying to fulfill when searching for a given keyword. You can

define these however you like, but the consumer decision journey is more than adequate. This post talks about

them http://mz.cm/T7hGZs

This replaces the obsolete Informational,

Transactional, Navigational query classification

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MAP KEYWORDS TO NEED STATES

Mapping keywords to the need states or in this case the consumer decision journey will keep the content aligned

with the audience and ensure that it meets their needs.

[flowers]

[when do roses bloom]

[what flowers for a first date]

[buying chrysanthemums]

[flower a month club]

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STRATEGIC PLANNING – KEYWORD PORTFOLIO

When performing keyword research we map our keywords to personas, need states and a variety of our data

points to ensure the integration of the consumer insights into the SEO program.

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STRATEGIC PLANNING – SEO COPY BRIEF

We also create a document called the SEO Copy Brief which outlines strategy, personas, keyword bucketing,

best practices, measurement planning and so on to prepare any copywriter that will touch the site to create copy.

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LINK BUILDING - PROSPECTING

Use attributes of your personas to perform searches in Followerwonk and FindPeopleOnPlus.

@JustinBriggs talks about this approach in his Content-based Link Building post on @OutSpokenMedia

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/content-based-outreach-for-link-building/

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LINK BUILDING - OUTREACH

Under the personas approach you can make use hyper-relevant canned messages for outreach or zero on a

user’s interests with hyper-personalized messages.

or

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MEASUREMENT - SURVEYS

Place a custom survey on your site and get user demographics right into Google Analytics with

http://www.userreport.com

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KEYWORD-LEVEL DEMOGRAPHICS

This is the future. Read up on it and use it. http://mz.cm/UfYicl

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KEYWORD OWNERSHIP

Use Keyword-Level Demographics to determine what persona is actually searching and converting. If there’s a

large disparity only focus messaging on those that do search and convert.

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DYNAMIC TARGETING

Since you get the data in real-time you can tailor the experience to the persona that is visiting the site.

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KEYWORD ARBITRAGE

This data will give way to keyword matrices and allow you to understand there the place initial places it to spend

your money.

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SUBSEQUENT CONVERSION PREDICTION

This data will also allow you to predict the subsequent conversion of the user and then aggressive target them in

another channel such as retargeting to ensure the next purchase.

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KEYWORD-LEVEL DEMOGRAPHICS BEST PRACTICES

I have a half-finished Wordpress plugin. If you’d find that useful tweet at me and let me know.

Incentivize the Opt-In (Communities or Coupons)

Use the appID Cross Property

Just track the persona

Cookie and Remarket

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MAP USER PROFILES TO MEASUREMENT

If your site requires profile collect the relevant persona information and map that to measurement.

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USERREPORT.COM

Place a custom survey on your site and get user demographics right into Google Analytics with

http://www.userreport.com

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PERSONAS ARE POWERFUL – USE THEM

We as SEOs need to catch up to other disciplines and adopt consumer insights into the process industry-wide.

Search is about people.

@ipullrank

PERSONAS ARE POWERFUL – USE THEM

We as SEOs need to catch up to other disciplines and adopt consumer insights into the process industry-wide.

Search is about people.

THANK YOU / Q&A

@iPullRank

mike@iacquire.com

www.iacquire.com

MICHAEL KING Director of Inbound Marketing