Personas for SEO in 2012 (PubCon)

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

MICHAEL KING
Director of inbound marketing

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

WHY DO WE NEED PERSONAS FOR SEO?

What are you
guys targeting?!

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.

@ipullrank

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?

@ipullrank

WTF IS A PERSONA?

PERSONA A PERSONA B PERSONA C PERSONA D
DEMOGRAPHICS DEMOGRAPHICS DEMOGRAPHICS DEMOGRAPHICS

LIFESTYLES LIFESTYLES LIFESTYLES LIFESTYLES

USER STORY USER STORY USER STORY USER STORY

USER NEEDS USER NEEDS USER NEEDS USER NEEDS

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

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

BUYER VS AUDIENCE PERSONAS

Buyer Personas buy your products. Audience Personas Participate in the conversation.
You want them to convert. You want them to keep sharing and linking

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH AD HOC PERSONAS

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

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

MOSAIC INTERACTIVE GUIDE

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

@ipullrank

HITWISE

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

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

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/

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

HOW iACQUIRE BUILDS
PERSONAS

@ipullrank

MEET NORRIS A. ROWLEY JR.

@NorRocwell
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.

@ipullrank

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

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

HOW TO USE PERSONAS

@ipullrank

WHAT ARE NEED STATES?

This replaces the obsolete Informational,
Transactional, Navigational query classification

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

@ipullrank

MAP KEYWORDS TO NEED STATES

[flowers]

[when do roses bloom]

[what flowers for a first date]

[buying chrysanthemums]

[flower a month club]

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

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/

@ipullrank

LINK BUILDING - OUTREACH

or

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.

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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

@ipullrank

KEYWORD-LEVEL DEMOGRAPHICS

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

@ipullrank

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.

@ipullrank

KEYWORD-LEVEL DEMOGRAPHICS BEST PRACTICES

Incentivize the Opt-In Just track the persona
(Communities or Coupons)

Use the appID Cross Property Cookie and Remarket

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

@ipullrank

MAP USER PROFILES TO MEASUREMENT

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

@ipullrank

USERREPORT.COM

Place a custom survey on your site and get user demographics right into Google Analytics with
http://www.userreport.com

@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.

@ipullrank

MICHAEL KING
Director of Inbound Marketing

www.iacquire.com

mike@iacquire.com

@iPullRank

THANK YOU / Q&A

Personas for SEO in 2012 (PubCon)

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