What’s a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed (fictional, but data-backed) description of a target customer. This should include things like:
- Demographic data
- Challenges
- Pain points
- Goals and motivations
- Buying criteria
A buyer persona is not (just) a job title or age range.
What to include in a buyer persona
Buyer personas can include job titles and age ranges, but you should go beyond those restrictions as much as possible. When it comes to SEO, your personas are using Google for the following reasons:
- To answer questions
- To get advice/guidance
- To compare solutions
- To find a solution
It’s important to keep these in mind as these motivations will influence the direction of your SEO strategy. When building a buyer persona, make sure to research their:
- Goals and motivations - beyond your product, what do they want to receive?
- Challenges they are trying to overcome
- Pain points they experience along the way
Tools for researching your buyer persona
Here are the following tools I like to use when building buyer personas and doing keyword research for an SEO strategy!
Surveys
Surveys are great for collecting quantitative feedback. This is feedback at scale that can help you spot larger trends and behaviors in your target audience.
- Google Forms - Free and a snap to set up, plus it provides some light reporting to review responses. You can also feed responses into a Google Sheet for deeper analysis.
- SurveyMonkey - A classic survey tool and for good reason, it’s fully featured and provides everything you need to create a good survey.
- TypeForm - For a distinct (and beautiful) survey experience, this is one of my favorite tools.
Online communities
Online communities allow you to see where your customers spend time online, the questions they ask, and how they interact with each other.
- Reddit - Reddit has communities (subreddits) for nearly every niche imaginable. This is one of my favorite places to start my audience research.
- Quora - Quora still gets loads of traffic and traction in niche forums making it a great way to get visibility into your target market
- Google niche communities for forums - Chances are your target audience has a home on the internet, so take to the web and search for it. For example, startup founders might be in Indiehackers, or marketers could be in
Chat GPT
Chat GPT can be an incredibly useful tool for persona research - when used correctly.
It’s important to not lead ChatGPT too much (while also giving it firm guidance) so as to not bias the output too much. I like to start with a prompt like: