Why Audience Research is Important than Keywords Research
September 3, 2014
Sarvesh Bagla
Search engines wouldn’t exist had it not been for an audience. True as it is, the driver of search, i.e., the audience was long forgotten making the search engines a selling machine.
But, the wheel has come back to the point where it began and the Hummingbird update seals the fact. Through in numerous posts, tweets and blogs, eminent industry figures and evangelists have spoken about the new transformation in search engine optimization.
Read More: SEO Checklist for better blogging.
Keyword Research
Keyword research has been the center of search engine optimization ever since SEO came into existence. keyword research best practices was to find a list of the most searched terms pertaining to a business, create landing pages for all of them and then stuffing them with loads of keyword concentrated content.
There are numerous keywords research tools are available:-
- Google Keywords Planner
- Wordstream
- Ubersuggest
- Wordtracker & more…
Audience Research: The new approach
Search engines soon realized the fallacy or loop hole in their search ranking protocols. Their existing criteria for ranking were being manipulated for achieving means and ultimately depriving their visitors of results and help.
This is when content stretegy and audience research superseded keyword research in an aim to make search engines semantic and more user-friendly.
Why Audience Research is rewarding?
It’s important to understand that search engines thrive on visitors. If the search engines are not able to provide helpful results to visitors they will never visit the engine again and this will be detrimental for the engine.
Businesses today need to understand the how SEO work and why it’s important to put themselves in the audiences’ shoes and then give them what they’re looking for. Audience research methods will help marketers find keywords that perform more of an answering rather than simply providing content on related topics and areas.
Audience research also emphasizes on finding long tail keywords which form the basis of semantic search. Audience research will help marketers analyze the possible queries and understand the consumer behavior or searches that consumer can come up with and then frame content that can address these specific queries.
How important do you think audience research is? Has it proven beneficial adopting audience research for marketing your business online?
Share your thoughts and takes with us.