Organic search is the use of search engines to promote your website; it is known as “organic” because you rely on building a relevant website which “naturally” ranks highly in the rankings instead of being paid for advertising, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
To be effective, search acquisition requires optimization of your website for both users and search engines and there are four major areas to consider:
1. Visibility – your site is easily visible to the search engines;
2. Site Architecture – the website is spider-friendly and lends itself to being crawled;
3. Indexing – the site content is readily indexed by the search engines; and
4. Human Use – the site content is relevant and delivers value to human users.
Clearly, the three initial areas deal with the website structure itself, but in truth, the final area is where the payoff is earned. How real people find your site is important, but the profitability and commercial success is governed by how well your website and content serves the needs of the users once they find they.
Human Use Factor and Search Persona: Putting Yourself in the User’s Shoes
We’re dealing with the last factor first, but it pays to maintain a picture of the search user in mind as you go through the entire cycle. Creating a “search persona” provides for enhanced customer engagement because you are fine tuning your website to what users want in practice, but the issue is how do you construct a search persona to begin with?
Step out of the virtual world and into the traditional marketing/sales world for a moment and ask yourself the following:
- Have you established clear business targets, including projected conversion rates?
- Have you identified the target market and applied segmentation to establish optimal conversion targets?
Now start asking yourself questions which bring this traditional marketing approach into the virtual world:
- What search terms are being used by the target group?
- What is the key decision that leads to making the buying decision, i.e. conversion?
- What is the most appropriate and effective content for your target market based on the search terms identified?
- How compelling is your content, especially in delivering relevant information which accelerates the buying decision to conversion?
Some of the answers to these questions will be understood intuitively, however your keyword research and web analytics will play a major part in helping you to understand target market behavior and characteristics.
Search Persona in Practice
Here’s how you apply a search persona in practice – for our purposes we are applying the search persona concept to a diet/fitness web business:
Stage One: Searcher Goal – “I’m dieting and have reduced weight loss due to plateau effect.”; “My workouts are not effective because my nutrition intake is wrong – how do I adjust my nutrition to give my body fuel.”
Stage Two: Searcher Queries – “Plateau effect”, “diet not working”, “fitness workouts not working”
Stage Three: Task Completion – find the solution to nutrition intake to enable effective workout and enhance weight loss.
Stage Four: Business Goal – creating brand awareness; conversion to buy diet solution; conversion to buy fitness plan or subscription.
Stage Five: Searcher Critical Conversion Factors – how fast do you deliver the solution to user; how well is your solution tailored to the user; how effective is the solution offered in practice; benefits are geared to users’ needs and are clearly identified.
Search Persona Workflow
Now we have an idea of our “search persona”, we need to establish a work flow for them:
Stage One: Search Terms Identified – during keyword research we focus on “diet not working”:
Stage Two: Search Engine Ranking – we need to rank in the top three positions on Google for “diet not working”.
Stage Three: Ranking Display – the search will return a title, description and url – these need to be optimized so they tell the user what clicking on that result will give them once they get to the website, for instance the url may be, http://dietnotworking.com, the description returned by a typical Google search result may be;
“How to combat plateau effect on your weight loss
May 01, 2010…Maximizing weight loss with diet and exercise needs you to fuel your body to
carry out the calorie burning exercise. …
www.dietnoteworking.com/…/plateau-effect-solution.html”
Stage Four: Page Content – optimize your page heading and content for users and search engines and does the page content fit in with the tone and context of the website as a homogenous whole? Does this tie in with your brand marketing and convey a uniformity of message?
Stage Five: Conversion – ensure you have a call to action in your content, this may be “Click here for more information” or “Checkout” to finalize the purchase.
…and Finally
Now you have a search persona and an idea of the workflow through which they will move, but now you have to organize the content and data. At this point you will have to work closely with your web designer to establish how best to construct the web site architecture to reflect your research, optimize user experience and maximize sales.
Takeaway
The human factor is the most important when it comes to acquiring and retaining customers using organic search. Constructing a search persona puts you in the shoes of the users you are interested in targeting, and from gaining an understanding of who your target users are, you can then move forward to construct a workflow which will take them from search engine, to landing page and into the content where the conversion to a buying decision will be made.
Once you have established search persona and workflow, you can then optimize every other factor and aspect of the website and SEO strategy to reflect your findings on just who your target users are and how they will react to your presentation.
