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This article is aimed at an intermediate skill level. You may want to read or watch the following before you start this one:
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of ensuring increased visitors to your website or your digital content by aligning yourself with the Search Engine requirements.
In today’s digital world, audience targeting in SEO is an important element for creative and cultural organisations looking to make the most of their website. Generating website traffic by looking at numbers of visitors isn’t the only goal. As creative and cultural organisations, it’s important that you are working on getting relevant visitors to your website who will contribute to your overall goals and aims by driving meaningful engagement or revenue.
Each piece of content should align with a specific part of the customer journey and should fit a specific audience profile.
That’s where audience segmentation comes in. Audience segmentation is the key to unlocking the power of audience targeting in SEO. By dividing your target audience into specific groups based on demographics, behaviour, or interests, you can personalise content to resonate with them specifically.
In this article, you will learn how to effectively target your ideal audience through Search Engine Optimisation by understanding audience segmentation and search intent. We will cover:
When it comes to SEO, understanding search intent is crucial for creative and cultural organisations looking to attract their target audience. Search intent refers to the reason behind a user’s online search. There are three main types to consider: informational intent, navigational intent, and transactional intent.
Informational intent is when users are looking for information or answers to their questions. You can look at leveraging this type of search intent by providing valuable and informative content that addresses your audience’s needs. Users may not be looking to buy but your aim is to solidify your brand as an authority figure in your niche area. Your niche is the specialist segment that you want to target. So, it may be ‘Theatre Lovers’. However, it could be as specific as ‘Classical Theatre Lovers That Are Retired’.
Navigational intent is when users are searching for a specific website or page. By optimising your website for relevant keywords and providing a seamless user experience, you can attract users with navigational intent to your website.
Transactional intent is when users are ready to make a purchase or take a specific action. For example, you’re a theatre with a new show to promote and tickets to sell. You can optimise your SEO strategies to target users with transactional intent by including clear calls to action to book tickets or leave reviews.
To take advantage of different types of search intent, you can analyse user search behaviour and conduct search intent analysis to understand what your target audience is looking for online. By optimising your content and website for user intent, you can drive more targeted traffic and improve your overall SEO performance.
Ideally you want to aim to target each type of search intent, making the most of visitors to your website to build or prolong engagement and drive revenue.
Let’s say you are a theatre.
From an SEO point of view, why is it important to still have content on your theatre’s website about a performance that isn’t being shown anymore?
People (potential customers) may be looking for a specific show. So, whilst they find that show is no longer available to see at your theatre, they can be guided towards other shows that may interest them.
Having a webpage on your site rank for informational intent keywords gives you the following advantages:
Next, I’ll explain how you can do this and where it aligns with the user journey.
Each visitor will have a different reason for using your website. To make the most of your online presence, it is important to cater for each different audience profile.
Below are five different stages of the customer journey that you should consider targeting.
Targeting content according to your audience’s interests and trying to fix their unique problems is a great way to get someone to find your website for the first time.
But how do you do this?
By publishing content that answers specific questions or queries, you will be fixing specific problems your target customer or audience faces. This is where informational intent keywords become crucial.
By posting blogs or popular and current updates within your niche, your organisation can develop its brand as an authority on the topic. Also, if your website is well laid out, people can explore much more of what you have to offer.
Using the theatre venue example from before, here are some informational intent questions that would be great to answer:
And here are some other examples that could potentially be used for an art gallery niche.
Whilst they are quite general, you can take these examples and apply them to your specific organisation and see what information you can offer with your unique perspective.
Once someone is on your website, you can use software to profile your audience. This is done by Google Analytics or Meta’s pixel. By implementing these kinds of software, you can learn more about your users. You can see gender, age and even interests of the people that visit your content.
You will also be able to retarget them with ads. Retargeting is the process of showing ads to users who have already engaged with your content. For example, advertising an exhibition to someone who’s been on your What’s On page. They are much more likely to convert from ads if they’ve already used your website.
Looking at your data allows you to learn what works on your website and who you may want to focus on when writing informational content.
We’ll cover how to learn more about your audience further down in the ‘What to look out for in your audience data’ section.
Now that someone is aware that you exist, they should think of you next time they want to consume similar content or answer a similar question. They may start using search terms looking for your brand specifically to find that content. This is an example of navigational intent – when users search for a specific website or webpage.
For example, they may search: ‘new exhibitions at (Your Museum’s Name)’
Once they have experienced relevant and engaging information from you, searchers will develop a trust for your website and go there to look for similar content.
This can be a great time for users to subscribe to a mailing list. Encouraging users to sign up to an mailing list or to continue to engage with social media is great because keeping people – retention – is more efficient and cost-effective than acquisition.
Another positive is that once customers scroll across an ad or piece of content on your social media, they will be much more likely to engage.
Having an email list can be invaluable. Email marketing is the best performing marketing channel because it’s a self-selecting group of people who want to hear from you. Once someone becomes a returning visitor to your website, they are much more likely to sign up.
Email marketing is the most personal way of keeping in touch with your customers because your mailing list is most likely to trust you and therefore convert e.g. purchasing your art or visiting exhibitions.
Ideally you want all your website visitors and customers to be part of your mailing list. However, not everyone subscribes to emails. Here are some top tips to increase sign-ups:
If you’re interested in learning more about improving your email marketing, here is great read written by our Email Marketing Tech Champion: Top tips for email marketing.
By creating relevant informational content, you have started to get people visiting your website. Now it is important to have relevant product or purchase pages. Some consumers will already know that they want to buy and will actively be searching with transactional intent.
Ideally your website will lead customers to product pages after search terms such as:
Google will profile customers that are visiting your site and know whether you are suitable for them to buy from by seeing how much of an authority you are within your website topics. That’s why it’s crucial you know your ideal customer’s interests, personalities and profiles as it allows you to provide them with the best content. This in turn will mean Google can give you traffic. Find out more about the logic behind Google’s ranking process in their article How results are automatically generated.
If you can develop enough traction to your website and get users to keep coming back, then that’s great! It sends positive signals to Google and should result in increased bookings and/or sales. It is much easier to convert someone who is regularly visiting your website or online shop.
So, what should you be doing now for your regular site visitors?
You could provide blogs, regular updates or have a what’s new/coming soon section. An upcoming events section can be a motivator for people to sign up to your email marketing or newsletter e.g. ‘Be the first to hear about new shows’.
Once you have traffic on your website, it is important to see who your visitors are. This will help you understand how to cater your content towards specific users and guide you on what content you should create in future.
How can you check who your audience is?
You can check on who your audience is by looking at analytics. There are various types of software that can be used. Let’s walk through them below.
If you use a web provider such as Shopify or Wix, they will have their own in-built analytics. These usually give you a lot of feedback on who is using your website and how they are using it.
You can install code on your website through Google Analytics and it will track for you for free. It can give you important metrics such as age, interests and gender. It will also tell you key metrics to aid decision-making such as how long they spend on your website, what are your most popular webpages etc. If you need support setting up your Google Analytics, you get can in touch with our Data Analytics and Insights Tech Champion.
This is another free Google tool which will help you discover the keywords that your website is ranking for. It will show you which keywords are more popular.
This is a more advanced keyword and search tracking tool. It gives you detailed information on keywords, letting you discover demand for topics and questions. It is invaluable for anyone trying to perfect their website’s SEO, but it isn’t a free tool.
HotJar is a great tool which records how users interact with your website. Once they click on your site, you can see how certain elements are performing. It lets you know how people are using your website and then you can make improvements according to the user’s behaviour. The initial plan is free to use but there are paid upgrades as well.
Look at what type of content performs well on your website and do more of what works.
Videos – Videos can be a great engaging way to communicate with your audience. Younger audiences sometimes prefer video content.
Text -This is the traditional way people have used websites and it is important to find out what format resonates best. You can choose between blogs or articles as well as many other formats.
Content length – Sometimes users prefer short form summaries, but some prefer longer form. Find out what is giving you the highest retention rate and focus on it.
Here’s a list of some audience metrics you can measure and build profiles around:
Of course, there are many more but those are some great ones to start with. You may have different audience profiles for different parts of your website; the people who buy tickets may have different professions and locations to the people who like your blogs or experiences.
Many websites generate traffic and visitors but miss out on converting those visitors to loyal customers. This is why it is so important to conduct enough target audience analysis to identify who your ideal customers are and what drives their online behaviour. Understanding different types of search intent, knowing the purpose of your website content, identifying key user journeys, and understanding website data will ensure that your website works harder for you. This information will help you to develop an effective SEO strategy that aligns with the needs of your audience.
The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free one-to-one support to all creative and cultural organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up for our newsletter below and follow us on X (Twitter) @ace_dcn for the latest updates.
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