How to define a user persona?

By answering the following question, you might have a clear understanding of user persona:

• What is a user persona?

User personas are fictional characters, which were used to represent the type of your ideal customer.

• Why you need a persona?

When you sell a product or launch an app or website, it is really important to know who is your target customer and what kind of problems your product or website could solve for them? Thus, you first need to have a deeper understanding of your target customer and their demand.

• What are the advantages of a persona?

Creating a user persona could help you find the right keywords for people who will be using your products as well as create relative content. Plus, user persona could be a useful tool for building a link during identifying targets.

• How to clarify who is your target customer?

You will know the answer after you answer these questions: Who is my ideal customer? What are the current behavior patterns of my users? What are the needs and goals of my users? What issues and pain-points do they currently face within the given context?

Here are some examples:

Before you create a user persona, you’d better do some research or survey for getting more information about your users. While creating the demographic questions of the research or survey, you should not differentiate your segments by only age or gender, instead, you should consider more about the motivation, behaviors of your customers. There is also a time- saving tip for you that you could search whether or not your user personas already exist in other teams or departments of your company, such as the design department. According to the video assigned this week, the speaker, Ashley pointed out that the company could also look back to their historical customer information, such as ICP (ideal client profile) to know what’s their target customer looks like?

(More information: https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_gdmjk9hb)

How does this relevant to the SEO?

If you have a user persona, you would know better about your target customer. If you know well about your target customer, then you can craft a content strategy that’s designed to reach that segment. Once you have created the specific content, which relevant to your target customer, you could pull out all your neat SEO tools to rank it. People in the segment who see it will likely respond positively. In some cases, if you have two different types of target customers, you need to create personas for each of them. When you doing the SEO, you might need two different ads to reach each of your targets because they would look different when they have different needs.

Thus, it’s significant to build personas not only so that you can segment your market, but also so that you can adapt your SEO strategy to people in each segment.

Citation:

• Veal, Raven L. “How To Define A User Persona.” CareerFoundry, 1 Mar. 2019, https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/how-to-define-a-user-persona/.

• Desai, Rashi. “Defining User Personas.” Medium, The Startup, 18 Mar. 2019, https://medium.com/swlh/defining-user-personas-b01934ed2d26.

• Lincoln, John LincolnJohn, et al. “Personas & SEO: What You Need to Know [Infographic].” Business 2 Community, 25 July 2017, https://www.business2community.com/infographics/personas-seo-need-know-infographic-01887261.