To succeed in SEO, it’s essential to understand what your audience is searching for and why.
Audience research goes beyond basic demographics, diving into the intent behind search queries to reveal what truly drives people’s decisions.
By analyzing search behavior, you can map out an audience journey that aligns with their needs, allowing you to create SEO strategies that are both targeted and effective – without needing extensive resources. Here’s how to get started.
Traditional audience research: Methods and limitations
Traditional audience research is a broad process that gathers, analyzes and interprets audience insights around a persona. These analyses can include:
Demographic characteristics: Age, gender, job, etc.
Psychographics: Interest, hobbies, values, lifestyle.
Firmographic: Company type, size, etc.
Behavioral insights: Action trends and patterns.
To traditionally gather this data, a researcher would ask questions directly to the customer or audience, doing things like:
Voice of customer (VoC) surveys: Survey customers to understand their problems.
Focus groups: Interview a small number of people similar to your audience profiles.
Interviews: Interview customers one-on-one.
David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather and often referred to as the “Father of Advertising,” highlighted a key issue with traditional market research:
“The problem with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”
Instead of conducting time-consuming studies to build personas, audience research tools can help you identify audiences. However, they have significant limitations in finding and analyzing behavior and what drives behavior.
Similarweb: Robust audience insights to find audience segments online based on websites they visit.
Audiense: Create a list of influencers, social or websites to find audiences based on their affinity to a website.
Brandwatch: Use keywords to search conversations across social and press.
There’s a better way to uncover actionable audience intelligence that is executable for most SEOs.
A better way for audience research in search
Audience research for SEO involves analyzing search behavior patterns around a set of problems to understand search intent.
Intent is what someone tries to accomplish (goal or objective) and what they want in that specific situation.
To uncover the intent of a search, build an audience journey map based on your ideal customer’s problems:
Ideal customer problems: Who is the customer, what do they want, what are their problems and what questions do they have?
Analyze search behavior data: How people search for brands or topics related to their problems/opportunities.
Identify drivers: What conversation or expert is driving the audience to search?
The ideal customer problem profile
Who is your ideal customer (e.g., what does your best customer look like) and what problems do you solve for them?
In every transaction, people are either trying to solve a problem or seize an opportunity.
This need defines their intent, which often goes deeper than the typical categories of transactional, informational or navigational intent.
To truly understand search intent, you must first identify the underlying problem and what the person hopes to achieve by solving it.
Most audiences need help understanding what they want, so analyzing behavior can be a proxy for their desires. Uncovering what positioning or messaging drives this behavior is the closest you can get to intent.
Uri Levin, a two-time unicorn builder and author of “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution” puts it:
“At the end of the day, the entrepreneurial journey is about value creation, and the simplest way to create value is to solve a problem.”
In this step, identify a list of your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and the problems you can solve.
The next step is understanding how your audience behaves on their journey to solve these problems.
The search behavior
Search behaviors are the trends and patterns of an audience’s journey to finding a solution to their problems.
For example, when someone reads an article about an amazing new weight loss device that allows users to lose weight and build muscle without workouts, they will search Google or social media for the device name or maybe just a “new weight loss device.”
Using a search engine or platform search function is a natural pattern people follow. Robert B. Cialdini, author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” calls these “Click, whirr,” which are fixed-action patterns in people’s behavior.
Most people use natural search patterns to understand problems and solutions deeper.
After reading content on social or in the press, people use search engines to research the topic.
Up to 79% of people say they’re more confident when they feel they’ve done the necessary research, according to Google. And 75% of people say they cross-check multiple sources to validate facts. Many use search engines to do that.
People are influenced by social media and the press but use search engines to find information, with search engines driving 70% of visits in one study.
Search engines are a fixed-action pattern touchpoint on your audience’s journey to solve their problems.
Now, we need to understand what is driving these patterns.
The triggers
Triggers are actuators of search behavior that can significantly impact the nature, direction or magnitude of trending search behavior.
If audience search behavior shifts, the shift has triggers.
Triggers change an audience’s state. These can be changes to internal thoughts (“The best brand is X”) or external actions (“I need to search for X”). Analyze these triggers to find what’s driving behavior.
Triggers can be internal (internal to a person, organization or system) or external (broad environmental impact).
An example of a trigger is when the Wall Street Journal publishes an article about solving the weight loss problem and lists several products to help. The readers will then search for more details about the product or type of product.
Sometimes, a single article can generate hundreds of brand searches, while other times, a company or product’s messaging has to be seen several times before it drives action.
These drivers explain why a trend is happening by identifying the root cause.
Understanding triggers can help marketers with the following:
Strategic decision-making: Leverage trends or create them to accomplish goals.
Keyword opportunities: Based on the audience journey stage or need, identify which content should be seen for which keywords.
Content planning and distribution: Identify which sites your audience visits for information related to their problem and any gaps in information they need.
Create linkable assets: Identify what content an audience will share and engage with.
Design funnels: Plan out messaging and UX funnel to push the audience further toward a decision.
The journey
An audience journey map is a visual map of the decision-making process someone goes through to solve a problem and accomplish something.
The journey is the path an audience takes to solve their problems. It shows the intent, along with the touchpoints and messaging experienced at each step.
The problems, opportunities or questions the audience has at each step tell you what your audience is searching for.
The key elements of a journey include:
Problems: Issue that must be solved.
Opportunities: Benefit(s) of solving the issue.
Questions: Questions need to be answered to make good decisions.
A journey can have different stages, but I would start with:
Awareness: A significant problem exists.
Discovery: Find solutions.
Decision: Select a solution.
The journey map will give you a structure and context to understand why the audience is reacting to the divers. Why the divers are important. And what drivers matter most.