SEO Learning Series – 2: Determining your Ideal Customer

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great 4th. Now, before determining the key phrases for your website, you need to be real clear on who your ideal customer is. This information is vital to your marketing efforts, as it will determine how you do all your marketing, not just your website.

Here are a few useful guides to determining your ideal customer:

Determining your Ideal Customer

Your ideal customer is the one who absolutely should buy your product or service. It’s just perfect for them. They have the need, they have the money, they have the buy-in of any other stakeholders (spouses, parents, co-workers, etc.), and they have a natural affinity for you and your company. On a piece of paper imagine that you are your ideal customer (try to do it in a word document so you can just copy/paste your list into the Google generator). Jot down the answers to these questions “pretending to be the ideal customer that is searching for your site:

What’s your name? (Really, give yourself a name. Don’t skip this because it seems silly.)
What’s your age? Marital status? Do you have kids?
Where do you work? What do you do for a living?
What do you look like?
What do you believe in?
What communities do you belong to?
What really ticks you off?
Who do you want to be like?
What’s your role as you perform your online search for this product/service? Parent? Hobbyist? Employee?

Find the Key Phrases your Ideal Customer would use to find EACH AND EVERY WEB PAGE ON YOUR SITE.

Pretending to be the ideal customer, write the following: “If I could only…” and complete the sentence from the ideal customer’s point of view.

FOR EXAMPLE

“If only I could find a Web Designer that is easy to work with”.

Now answer these questions pertaining to your sentence. Remember this is from the ideal customer’s point of view that is searching for you.

What are you hoping for?

How will you know when you’ve found the right solution? Talk about the emotional as well as technical aspects of the searching task.

Something you’re looking forward to solving?

Are you afraid of making a mistake (purchasing the wrong service or buying the wrong product, etc.)?

Who might be judging or second-guessing you?

What triggered your search?

Your choice of keywords – words, not phrases (buzz words for searching)?

Now you have your ideal customer and their emotions and thoughts before they are about to search for you. Starting with EACH WEB PAGE on your site, read what’s already on your web page and write key phrases/sentences using the thoughts and emotions of your ideal customer that they would key into a search engine to find this particular web page.

This list of key phrases (for each and every web page on your site) is what you will put into the Google generator. You need to do each page as they are totally unrelated because any one of your web pages can come up in a search – it’s not always the first page (home). The page that will come up is the one that was best optimized for whatever the person used to search for the page in Google (the key phrases used).

Hope this makes sense…until next time.