My PubCon deck about data-driven personas for Search Engine Optimization

1. PERSONAS FOR SEO IN 2012
How to build them and how to use them.
MICHAEL KING
Director of inbound marketing
@ipullrank

2. DOWNLOAD THIS DECK:
http://slidesha.re/pubcon-personas
@ipullrank

3. 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

4. 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?
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5. 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

6. 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
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7. PERSONA TYPES
& DATA SOURCES
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8. 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

9. 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.
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10. 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

11. 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.
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12. EVEN AD HOC PERSONAS VIA SOCIAL ARE LIKE…
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13. 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.
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14. 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

15. 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.
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16. 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

17. 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

18. MOSAIC INTERACTIVE GUIDE
Get free Experian Simmons data by Zip Code: http://bit.ly/R9MzuD
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19. HITWISE
Hitwise is also integrated with Simmons and can provide direct insights into Search behavior by Mosaic type
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20. 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.
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21. 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
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22. 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/
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23. 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
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24. HOW iACQUIRE BUILDS
PERSONAS
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25. 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

26. 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
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27. DEVELOP EMPATHY FOR THE CONSUMER
Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and go through all of a given brand’s web properties.
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28. GO THROUGH THE SITE AS THE CONSUMER
Go through the brand’s site thoroughly as a consumer and continue to document the experience.
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29. 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.
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30. 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.
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31. 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
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32. 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.
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33. 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.
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34. HOW TO USE PERSONAS
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35. 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

36. 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

37. 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.
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38. 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

39. 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

40. 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.
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41. MEASUREMENT - SURVEYS
Place a custom survey on your site and get user demographics right into Google Analytics with
http://www.userreport.com
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42. KEYWORD-LEVEL DEMOGRAPHICS
This is the future. Read up on it and use it. http://mz.cm/UfYicl
@ipullrank

43. 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.
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44. DYNAMIC TARGETING
Since you get the data in real-time you can tailor the experience to the persona that is visiting the site.
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45. 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.
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46. 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.
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47. 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

48. MAP USER PROFILES TO MEASUREMENT
If your site requires profile collect the relevant persona information and map that to measurement.
@ipullrank

49. USERREPORT.COM
Place a custom survey on your site and get user demographics right into Google Analytics with
http://www.userreport.com
@ipullrank

50. 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

51. 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

52. MICHAEL KING
Director of Inbound Marketing
www.iacquire.com
mike@iacquire.com
@iPullRank
THANK YOU / Q&A