Getting your SEO strategy right demands well-targeted competitive insight plus very specific recommendations, going beyond any optimization process basics’ rulebook.  An elaborate, extensive and precise audience research is very vital because it gives you a comprehensive understanding of your existing and prospective customer base.

In an earlier elaborate post, we have already shared with you ingredients of the new SEO process, simplifying it in a detailed step-wise manner for fine tuning your strategy.

Well begun is half the job done, so the ‘Opportunity Discovery process’, as already emphasized, plays a very vital role. And within it, there are whole sets of intricacies and nuances involved that SEO specialists can unravel when they get to the actual implementation part. As, we’ve grasped:

• Some of the tools to know about your end user profile are: a. Google Analytics b. Double Click Ad Planner and c. Facebook Insights.
• Other means of tracking them involve a mix of Analytics Mining and Social Listening juxtaposed with quantitative analysis.
• Avenues like Quantcast, ComScore and Forrester Research provide you accurate data of the users’ profile to help you target them better.

Let us focus in greater depth on the aspect of audience research through Analytics Mining and Social Listening:

1. Doing even routine keyword research will allow you to identify some of the very obvious choices in terms of the keyword phrases that people are employing to locate your site. They might be doing so by Googling questions. Many times, these queries – in the depths of your search logs – are seeking answers your current content pages don’t have.
2. So most times, the visitors end up leaving your site and bouncing back to the search engine, to try out the next result. If you are able to offer them the requisite answer or solution they’re looking for, you’re not only satisfying them, but also creating the opportunity to form a lasting relationship with the prospective customers by utilizing various types of calls-to-action.
3. Analytics tools provide a wide array of information about your visitors’ location, referring sites, unique visitors’ count and content popularity via a graphical interface. This provides webmasters numerical data and the option of comparing the various different time periods on metrical schemes.
4. Qualitative as well as quantitative analysis is critical to expose core content strength/ weakness of your website based on which, one or more of the recommendations, such as Web Page Content Density; Optimum Keyword Density; Keyword Proximity; or Strategic Keyword Placement can be made.
5. Until now, data mining and predictive analytics has been the domain of highly skilled statisticians and quantitative analysts. However, more user-friendly and easy-to-follow predictive analytics tools offered business intelligence (BI) & analytics vendors are changing the scenario. We are also witnessing the increasing adoption of open frameworks to create predictive analytics models for the purpose of data mining and text mining.
6. A new, powerful mix of Social and Search is also dramatically changing the whole spectrum! Targeting, branding and marketing power of social tools lies in ‘historical’ data or archive they build from your business perspective. Of course, what also matters is real-time search to get an insight into the complex consumer behavior for executing your optimization and promotion strategies more effectively. They ideally should strike a blend of your core business strengths and your immediate competitors’ perceived weaknesses.For this, marketers must harbor a habit of intuitive Social Listening – driven by a sustained customer interaction, and not simply indulging in blatant self-promotion. This is critical to the process of fathoming the evolving trends and consumer psyche.

These are elements that you can collate in a template and use it as reference for every future project. Defining your target audience, in a nutshell takes holistic competitive research, fairly accurate search traffic projections, optimized content strategies based on specific goals and prioritizations.