Creating a search persona lets marketers precisely identify their target user base, as well as grasp how individual users are actually searching for the domain, industry or businesses online, and the keywords they are employing. While establishing or evaluating your Web presence, ‘searcher persona’ allows you to work out whether your content is aligned with your overall marketing & business objectives, how! That’s exactly what we shall try to find out…

Online marketers are increasingly using these personas – a sort of fictitious characters, which reflect different user types emerging over time, within their core demographic. This helps in establishing a specific search pattern. Personas are expected to capture peculiar characteristics, which make a decisive difference in the ways users tend to search for the things your business offers.

Your core searcher persona might well be a particular demographic (first-time home buyers). It might even be the same searcher person at different stages of lead generation/ conversion/ buying process. In an insightful documentation, entitled ‘Marketing in the Age of Google’, search marketing expert Vanessa Fox mentions that a searcher persona is nothing but a detailed description of an individual who happens to embody or constitute a vital group of prospective customers/ consumers.

Questions to ask for defining your searcher persona

To initiate the process of defining your searcher persona, critically review the content currently on your site by asking the questions, including ‘What are you actually looking to accomplish with it and different pages/ sections on the site? Who are the people you want to attract? How do they search for what’s there on a page? Do the site pages meet the search requirements? What’s the call-to-action of a page and keyword related to it? Do you rank for these (or related) key terms/ phrases currently?’

An internal brainstorming exercise and expert’s advice will help you identify different categories of searchers on the Web on basis of similar wants and needs, aspirations and desires. For instance, one group wants to buy your products or services, whereas the other currently just wants to get more details about them. You may then rank these distinct searcher categories in ascending/descending order of importance to decide their stage of buying cycle and your conversion goals.

Link between searcher persona and website conversion

By formulating a plan to help them accomplish the goal of their search activity, you may evaluate your current content, modify or fine tune it, and further customize your offerings so as to make your business site more user-friendly. In other words, you ultimately define how easily or effectively you can compel the users to conversion.

Once you are able to gauge the potential lifetime value of different searcher categories, you can set your priorities right. In a nutshell, your Web presence ideally should cater toward those groups harboring greater potential lifetime values, those having needs aligned with your business offering/ strategy, and thus can be converted into customers more easily.