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Optional: Create anti-personas
Is there a type of user you want to avoid attracting?
An anti-persona is someone who might misuse your product in unintentional or nefarious ways and damage your brand.
Including anti-personas can help you avoid PR disasters like the Tide pod challenge.
From our gardening example, maybe you identify an anti-persona, HOA Henry.
He has a specific idea of what a garden should look like.
He might buy herbicide from your site and spray it on neighbors’ yards without understanding how it could harm plants, wildlife, and even pets.
How would you keep someone like him from finding your products? What kind of search phrases and info would he use compared to your target users?
Add some data to your persona identities
Pair your personas with insights from analytics tools, user testing, and customer feedback. Get some real quotes, images, and video clips to pair with your personas.
Go to analytics tools and find out (or guess) what percentage of your user base is and how your site reflects them. Then, build your optimization strategy around what you learn.
Some insight examples from our gardening website:
If 70% of your users identify as a Larry, make sure your lawncare category content is prominent, and include info that’s relevant to him on product pages.
If Nancy converts the highest, look into how you can convert other personas better while maintaining the features Nancy likes. And include Nancy in user testing!
If Betty might evolve into Nancy, give her lots of informational content so she’ll be a brand ambassador in the future.
If Greta mostly spends time on a certain section of the site, show her relevant articles to get her to similar topics.
If Herb uses wildly different phrasing from Larry, research synonyms and secondary keywords to optimize for both.
If Herb and Nancy like using forums, build your linking strategy around the sites they’re most likely to use.
Approach content for each user persona
Now use your personas to ensure you’re creating content that’s helpful and targeted for each user. Do an audit of your content with each persona in mind.
For example, Larry doesn’t want to know about how leaves can benefit bugs, but he could learn about how they benefit his lawn and save money on fertilizer.
Betty might need to understand her planting zone and frost dates before she starts buying vegetable seeds.
User persona content checklist
Who is this content and each section written for?
Are you answering each user’s questions with your content?
Have you answered all of their questions fully and comprehensively?
Are you speaking in terms they will understand?
Is the content too technical or too formal?
Are you including info in the format they want?
When would they need this info?
Do you have the links and tools they’ll need?
As you work through this exercise, does one persona stand out as a potential brand champion?
This is someone who would write glowing reviews and recommend your brand to others.
You may want to spend extra time creating content for this user to help passively build your brand presence.
Homepage exercise
Start with your homepage.
Which personas are you attracting?
Who is it made for?
Would anyone feel left out or unclear on what they can do next?
Take a look at any popular gardening website.
Who would you guess is the target user?
Which of our example personas does it seem to focus on?
What would you change for each persona?
Weave personas into your SEO processes
Once you’ve established and refined your personas, include them in any SEO strategy session and decisions.
Encourage your SEO editorial team to identify which personas you’re targeting for a page before they start writing or updating. Come back to your personas regularly.
One fun idea is to invite your users to your meetings. This gets people talking and thinking about what’s best for the user.
Print out your personas and put them on your team’s bulletin board or whiteboard.
Bring a copy to meetings and tape persona pictures to an empty chair.
Assign someone to speak up as the Voice of the User in discussions.
“I think Greenhouse Greta would like this approach better because…”
“I like this option as a Nancy. Can a Herb weigh in?”
“Herb should celebrate when we announce this new feature…”
Have the team self-select into each persona and let them speak for their user group.
“As a Lawn Lover Larry…”
“Can we see the user test results from the other Betty?”
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