Creating your SEO strategy can be a great way to clarify and identify your marketing strategy (or vice versa you can use your company’s marketing strategy as a platform for your SEO campaign).  In his book Traction, Gino Wickman asks an important question to help clarify a company’s marketing strategy, “Who is your target market and how can you identify them?” The three ensuing questions to identify your target market are:

1. What is the geographical characteristics of your ideal customer? Is your customer localized to a specific region?
2. What are the demographical characteristics of your ideal customer? Ie. job title, size of business, type of business, industry, age, sex, income or profession (to name a few).  Come up with a a few “personas” of your ideal customer.
3. What are the psychographic characteristics of your ideal customer? How do they think, what are their needs, what are they looking for and what would they appreciate?

So what does all of this have to do with SEO? When we meet with a client to strategize their approach to search engine optimization we often ask the same questions.  Who is your target market? What would he/she look like and most importantly what is the need, want or desire they are looking to fulfill and how can you provide them with that?  A lot of times companies want to approach their SEO strategy by targeting keywords that is well known lingo to professionals in their industry, but to layman internet users those terms mean nothing.  If you’re out fishing and you are trying to catch a specific type of fish you are going to need to use the correct bait.

In the end, you can use your company’s marketing/sales strategy as a great way to kickstart your SEO campaign and identify critical insights into your target market and potential new customers. It’s a great way to kill two birds with one stone – if you are of the hunter type that is.