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 @ipullrank

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… @ipullrank

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 @ipullrank

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 @ipullrank

DEVELOP EMPATHY FOR THE CONSUMER
Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and go through all of a given brand’s web properties. @ipullrank

GO THROUGH THE SITE AS
THE CONSUMER Go through the brand’s site thoroughly as a consumer and continue to document the experience. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

DYNAMIC TARGETING Since you get
the data in real-time you can tailor the experience to the persona that is visiting the site. @ipullrank

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. @ipullrank

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

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