SEO for a Local Target Audience

Pursuing a local target audience will get you the business you want with the lowest investment of time or money.

A local SEO strategy, by default, focuses on a target audience. The audience may or may not be bound by geography. In any cases, your search engine optimization efforts should be directed at reaching out to the audience that matters most to you. The audience can be customers buying your product or service or reading your blog or online publication. SEO efforts should be directed at getting relevant, targeted traffic regardless of your specific audience.

Know your targeted audience before you begin SEO efforts

The first step of proper SEO is defining your target market. Here are some steps to take.

Define your selling points.

You can start with the customers you have. They know you and you know them. A level of trust has already been established. Ask yourself, what else can I provide them? How am I satisfying their wants or needs? What can I do now that will increase that satisfaction?

Define the demographics of your target market. What you should consider.

• Age – this is an easy one. Certain age groups have needs and wants specific to their generation. What age group does your product/service cater to most?
• Geography – how far will your targeted audience travel to obtain your products or services. In a different vain, how does your product sell from one area to the next. What is the culture of the target area? Is it rural or urban? For instance, cowboy hats sell better in Texas than in the northeast.
• Income – how much money does your target have? Are you selling products and services that are necessities or are they discretionary. Do your targets value quality or are they price conscience?
• Occupations – Professionals dress one way, home service providers another way. Every job or occupation has an acceptable style of dress, level of physical or intellectual ability, cultures and customs. There are tools for every job. What tools, dress or equipment are you selling?

Once you know what the audience is searching for, you need to select the keywords that you think they should rank for. There are tools you can use that will help you decide. Mangools is an inexpensive SEO tool that gives you keyword usage for local areas.

Use the content to take a deep dive into understanding your target.

Using Google Analytics can give you insightful information because it lets you “slice and dice” the audience into many sub-groups. Is there a specific group searching for a very specific solution? What type of content is working better than another? What are the paths followed by converting traffic, which links on the site are they clicking? These are just some of the questions that you need to answer to bridge the gap between where the targeted traffic is headed and where you want it to be.

Use social media for better understanding of your target audience.

Running an ad campaign or two will give you a more refined understanding of the nature of the target audience. A little research will inform you on how to integrate the most powerful search terms for this subsection of the targeted audience in your content. The search keywords and their synonyms can be present in the URL, title, copy, and H tags.

Learn from your competitors

Why reinvent the wheel when you can pick up useful nuggets of information from your competitors? You should also keep an eye out for what the competitors are not doing. If there’s a gap in their SEO strategy, causing them to lose traffic, you want to be the recipient of that traffic. An example would be your competitors failing to harness video for content. Or maybe they’re slow when responding to comments and queries on social media. If you get these things right, good things will come your way.

Other things to note when investigating your competitors’ strategies. What type of content is generating maximum traction on social media for the competitors? How many backlinks do their money pages have? How similar or dissimilar is their product offering from what you’ve got? Could it be that you have a better product to offer, and all that’s lacking on your part is focused SEO?

Do you need help with your local SEO efforts? If so we’re here to help. Contact us and we can discuss your specific issues