How to Identify Your Ideal Customer and Why It Matters for SEO. Ep. 145

Have you really figured out who your ideal customer is and what they need from you? Truly understanding your ideal customer will help your SEO efforts because you'll know you're creating the right type of content for your audience. The way your audience interacts with your website is really important to your online marketing, conversion, email list building, and SEO. If you're creating content they aren't interested in, they're not going to stay, sign up for your freebies, become leads, or purchase from you. 

Do you know who your ideal customer really is? How well do you know them? Listen to this episode and find out what to check and how to make your online marketing work better. 

Transcript

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Hi. Welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen. I'm so glad that you're here with me today. I want to talk about something that I've seen pop up more and more, and that is how to really, truly identify your ideal customer and why it matters for SEO. Because I have new students ask me regularly, why does this matter? So who your ideal customer is, is critical to the success of your SEO program because you need to be creating content for them. And if it's not created for them, if you don't really know who they are, it's going to be much harder for you to create the right content. And the right content for you is going to be so dependent upon your niche, your customer, who are you trying to connect with? What questions do they have? What information do they need? And what I find is. Most entrepreneurs think they know their ideal customer, but then when you start asking questions, they realize, oh my gosh, I don't think I know them as well as I thought I did. And so what I wanna walk you through is kind of what I work with my students on to help them understand like, who are you trying to reach? So let's say you're just starting out. You're one of my newer listeners. You're newer entrepreneur, maybe you're building your website, maybe you have it already. Maybe you have your products and services, or you know what you're offering, but you haven't really sold to anyone yet. So you're still trying to figure out. Who you're helping. So let's just say that that's where you are, and that's okay. You are going to need to build an audience in order to build this business of yours, especially if it's an online business. So think about if your business is tied to something that you've done in the past, or it's based upon something that you've learned how to do for yourself, then your ideal customer could easily be an earlier version of yourself. Or it could be somebody that you worked with one-on-one that you helped, even if it was free, it doesn't necessarily have to be that you were paid by this person, but you were able to help them. You guided them, you answered their questions, because that's gonna be really important to understand. What are your ideal customers questions? What are they concerned about? What do they need to know? What do they wish they knew? What keeps them up at night? All of that. It's going to be very important. Maybe you've been around for a while, but you are not, you're starting to realize as you think about this, you know, I'm not sure what keeps my ideal customer up at night. I don't know what their objections are, like, I want to sell X, but. I don't know how to anticipate the objections because you do have to address people's objections before they're going to buy from you. So if you're in a situation like that where you're like, huh, I know'em, but maybe I don't know'em as well as I thought I did, I. Then I want you to really think about it. If you already are established, you have some customers, you have an advantage because you can ask if anybody would be willing to chat with you for 10 or 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes at the most, to get a feel for it. Ask how you can help them, what questions they have, what information they would want from somebody, what they would have to make, what decisions they'd have to make. Before purchasing, why they maybe wouldn't wanna purchase your offer, et cetera. Now you wanna be careful here. Ideally, you wanna work with people who are already in your ecosystem, but are not friends or relatives because your friends and relatives are going to be less likely to tell you the truth if they think what you're doing is stupid or they think it doesn't make sense or they don't understand. Stand, whereas somebody who is not so closely tied to you will generally give you better feedback and you can learn more from them. So because we're so cautious sometimes of our friends and relatives and their feelings, we don't wanna hurt their feelings. Sometimes the information we get from them is not as helpful as if it came from someone else. So if you. Let's say you are here, you've been around for a while. You have a website, you have social pages. You can also look at the information in your analytics, so look at Google Analytics and get a feel for which of my blog posts do they like. Which pages do they engage on for the longest amount of time? Which pages do they basically come and leave immediately? Because that tells you they didn't really like that topic, it's not really helping them. You can also find analytics information to find out like where are they from. Sometimes you can. See age range, stuff like that in your accounts. Also on social, you're gonna get a feel for which posts work well, which posts don't work well. Um, you'll learn gender, you'll learn age, all of that in your analytics, on your social dashboards. If you have a podcast, this is a great one a lot of people don't realize, but if you have a podcast and you go to your Apple Podcast, connect. You can actually see your consumption information for your podcast episodes. That can quickly tell you which content topics are the most interesting to your audience. So I looked at this with a client recently. She was trying to figure out her content strategy. She knew something wasn't working quite right, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She needed some help. And so we took a look at her podcast just to see, and her podcast is fantastic. She's a top 5% podcaster. She gets tons of downloads. It nurtures people, does great for her, but she couldn't put her finger on why something. It just felt off. It just seemed like something was wrong. And so we went into her Apple Podcast Connect and we were able to see her follower. Growth is good, her listeners are good. Her engaged listeners were not as great as we would like, meaning not as many people engaged completely with her episodes. And an engaged listener listens to, I believe it's 40% of the episode, and or 10 minutes of the episode in one sitting. So her engaged listeners was a little lower than we would've liked, and it was like, hmm. Ding, ding, ding. We have something wrong. So then we went and we looked at the consumption rate, the consumption percentage, and she releases a post, a podcast episode each week, and several of those had a consumption percentage of about 40%, which tells me her audience did not like those episodes. They did not finish them. They moved on to something else. We want our consumption information to be, our consumption rate to be like 80 to 90% even better, because that tells us people are really interested in what we're creating. So in that situation, she was able to figure out that her ideal customer does not like that topic. It is not engaging to them. She needs to create less content on that topic, whereas we saw. Other podcast episodes that had consumption rates above a hundred percent. So people were listening to it more than once. That told us, this is a really hot topic for my audience. This is something I should definitely be talking about more often. So when you are creating content, you are trying to figure out who your ideal customer is. You're trying to grow a business, it's gonna be really important that you look beyond just the demographic. My ideal customer is Jessica and she's. 40 years old and she has two kids and she used to work in corporate and now she works for herself out of her house. Great. But that doesn't really tell me much about Jessica other than she's 40 and she's got two kids and she's got a house. What I wanna know is more about the psychographic information. What is Jessica really interested in? What does she like? How does she spend her time? How does she commute? What questions does she have? I don't want you just to stop at my ideal customer is this person. I want you to really create a good narrative around them. You should know your ideal customer as well as you know your best friend. You should be able to describe them as well as you describe your best friend. You should know how many years they've been in business, or how many years they've been trying to learn the thing that you teach, or how long they've been struggling with what they're struggling with. You should know what keeps them up at night. What questions do they have? How do they feel their life would change? If they were able to do whatever it is that you help with or sell or take care of that like whatever it is that you do, how would their life change? You need to know why they're afraid to take that leap, and then you use all of that information to help you build out your content strategy so that you are providing the content that they need. You're then optimizing it to make sure that they're able to find it, and you're using that to help you really determine what your offers are, your products, your solutions, et cetera, so that you're truly, truly, truly serving them. You don't wanna just create what you think they want. You want to understand them so that you can connect with them, because you also, especially from an SEO standpoint, if you don't understand them. You don't know the words that they use, and if you don't know the words that they use, you're not going to have the right words in your cop or in your blog post or on your podcast episode. Whether you are optimizing for a podcast search engine, an AI search engine. Or a traditional search engine, you need to know what words your ideal customer is using in all three situations in order to succeed in today's world. If you wanna grow a business online, it's really important that you understand this and you really focus on it because this is going to be. The core of everything that you do is creating the great content that helps them. And if you don't know them well enough, you won't know what content to create and you may or may not create what they're looking for and what they need help with. So that's why I want you to really focus on that. If you're one of my students, you know, you now have a custom GPT that helps you and guides you through the process of really truly identifying and outlining. Who your ideal customer is because of how important this is. If you're not yet one of my students, why not? Come on, join me in class. Let me help you with this. Let me guide you through this the same way that I'm helping everyone else. I would love to be able to work on this with you. And then you get access to the custom GPT that helps you to figure out all of this. Who are you connecting with, what words do you need to use, what information do they need from you? And then it also will help you figure out what content topics to write about. And then we have another one that helps you. Work through the, both the traditional SEO and the AI SEO to make sure the content you're creating is designed to be visible online because that visibility is key to growth. Alright, that's it for today. I want to challenge you to take a look at your ideal customer narrative and determine if you really truly know your ideal customer. As well as you know, your best friend, or if it's time to do some revisions and refinement and get to know him or her, or they, depending on who your ideal customer is, better.