User Personas & B2B Keyword Research

July 27, 2021

Written by admin

Stephen is a search engine optimization strategist at seodynamix, an SEO company that helps eCommerce and B2B companies attract qualified website traffic and converts them. Previously, Stephen worked as a digital marketing manager for a B2B ad agency. He graduated from WVU with a Master's Degree in Integrated Marketing with an emphasis on digital marketing.

Many B2B companies don’t think of using a user-centered approach with their B2B SEO tactics when trying to reach their target prospects with their services or products. The development of B2B personas can help businesses identify keywords for each of those decision-makers involved with the various stages of the sales process. For instance, a procurement manager’s search queries will be different than those of a product engineer. Logically, there would be different keywords and content to reach those two different audiences.

Developing User Personas: B2B User Persona Examples

To provide you some context on how to create user personas, here are two B2B user persona examples:

buyer persona example 1
slide7 persona proc desktop

As you can see, each of these two personas has unique role identifiers with different challenges. Having this persona information, you develop seed terms when brainstorming keyword ideas addressing their challenges other unique identifiers. In Mohit’s case, you can have seed terms around a KPI such as “lowest cost supplier” and Ethan’s top concern “system reliability.”

B2B Keyword Research Process Utilizing User Personas

If you are not familiar with keyword research, it is the process of utilizing third-party tools to gather keyword data relevant to your B2B business. Researched keyword performance data from prospect searches can provide your business with a tactical advantage with your B2B SEO campaigns. It will allow you to do the following:

Gather Relevant Keyword-Driven Persona Data 

After the brainstorming process for initial seed keywords for each of your personas, you will be able to expand your keywords with those third-party keyword researching tools to discover additional opportunities looking at search volume and competitiveness. Keep in mind, B2B keywords have low search volumes and competition. It is good because it will give your business the ability to stand out from your competition.

Once an initial keyword list is complete, you can pull an export from Google Search Console to see if you are getting any traffic to any of those terms on any of your pages. If you are, how much? Are they bouncing off the page because the content doesn’t address or solve your persona audience’s challenges?

User Persona Design Keyword Themes 

It is good to think of all the ways your prospects might search for your B2B services and products. Again, it is about leveraging those persona identifiers and unique challenges with synonyms of descriptive words in your concepts.

Let’s say that Mohit is an employee with a car manufacturer and is researching spring suppliers. His task is to find gasket springs from a different spring supplier. Let’s try creating a keyword theme for “gasket springs” based on his job function and his important KPI of low cost.

 Keyword modifiers:

  • Intent approach: “find a low-cost spring manufacturer.”
  • Location approach: “find spring low-cost spring manufacturer in Michigan.”
  • Price or quality approach: “lowest-cost spring manufacturer.”

 Search engines such as Google do a larger sweep in returning a search result for Mohit. Using these long-tail keywords based on persona identifiers enhances the chances for more qualified traffic for B2B companies.

B2B User Persona Keyword Targeting

After you have narrowed down your keyword phrases, you must consider which to pick out that you wish to target with various pages on your website. There is a strong possibility you might have to build out new pages to reach your target personas. An SEO copywriting team can assist in developing website copy tailored to your target personas, which leads to a good user experience enhancing the likelihood for conversions.

 

On-Page Implementation & Content Revisions

It is necessary to include your keyword choices by placing them into the most important on-page SEO elements (title tags, H1s, and meta descriptions). You might want an SEO copywriter to review to determine if the page’s content is relevant to your target keyword with your existing website copy.

Performance Measurement

To measure success SEO success of persona keyword targeting for each of your pages, you should benchmark organic traffic before and after implementing your new keyword choices. You can look at metrics such as traffic (has it increased with more qualified traffic?), click-through rates (have they increased?), bounce rate (has it decreased?), and rankings (do I rank on Page 1?) for these new keyword phrases.

As a B2B SEO agency with over 10-years of experience, we can help you identify keyword personas and incorporate them within your overall digital marketing strategy with other KPIs that will allow your business to pivot based on performance.

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