A case study for knowing your audience
Last week I read a very interesting blog post at SEOMoz. The post was titled "Colloquial Copy: When Perfect is Wrong" and was written by jkellygarrett. It is one of the most interesting and educational posts that I have read to date at this site, and most of their posts are very interesting and educational.
The post talks about jkellygarrett's brother who is in the long haul trucking business and was upset that he couldn't find a website that used to be extremely helpful for his travels. With some creative searching they were able to eventually find the site again and realized something very important. The site was SEO'd but for the wrong audience! Seems a bit like an oxymoron, that you could SEO a site for the wrong audience but indeed you can.
Instead of thinking like a trucker the company or person that did the SEO for the site was thinking and writing like you and I would write. What they must not have realized was that truckers have their own language of sorts. This language carriers over to the internet when they are doing a Google search, and they aren't about to start using other words to find what they want.
So what does this tell us? Well for one thing you have to know your audience. You have to know where they come from, how they speak, what they want, and how they search to get what they want. It's not enough to do keyword research and get a list back that tells what words the search engines find relevant for that group. It's not enough to look at statistical data. You have to realize that perhaps the group you are optimizing the site for is too small to show any relevance on those statistics or keyword lists.
In this case truckers are a group of their own. They use a different language to communicate and they probably use the internet a little differently then you and I. To optimize this site to it's fullest potential the company should have taken the time to really get to know the industry as much as possible. Then they might have realized that the direction they were thinking of going would have lead the site to a dead-end.
Remember, your audience is your customer, don't leave them out in the dark.
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Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
The post talks about jkellygarrett's brother who is in the long haul trucking business and was upset that he couldn't find a website that used to be extremely helpful for his travels. With some creative searching they were able to eventually find the site again and realized something very important. The site was SEO'd but for the wrong audience! Seems a bit like an oxymoron, that you could SEO a site for the wrong audience but indeed you can.
Instead of thinking like a trucker the company or person that did the SEO for the site was thinking and writing like you and I would write. What they must not have realized was that truckers have their own language of sorts. This language carriers over to the internet when they are doing a Google search, and they aren't about to start using other words to find what they want.
So what does this tell us? Well for one thing you have to know your audience. You have to know where they come from, how they speak, what they want, and how they search to get what they want. It's not enough to do keyword research and get a list back that tells what words the search engines find relevant for that group. It's not enough to look at statistical data. You have to realize that perhaps the group you are optimizing the site for is too small to show any relevance on those statistics or keyword lists.
In this case truckers are a group of their own. They use a different language to communicate and they probably use the internet a little differently then you and I. To optimize this site to it's fullest potential the company should have taken the time to really get to know the industry as much as possible. Then they might have realized that the direction they were thinking of going would have lead the site to a dead-end.
Remember, your audience is your customer, don't leave them out in the dark.
--------------
Ignite Media LLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
Labels: copy writing, seo, writing
posted by Ignite Media LLC at
Monday, April 14, 2008
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