Hello, my name is Jake and I’m a recovering keyword addict.
I’m not proud of it, but I used to do keyword research everyday.
Even at weekends.
I would spend my days looking for the most low KD/high volume long tails I could find, add them to a Google Sheet and then do it all over again.
That’s how sick I was.
Erm, but what about audience research methods?
Okay I can hear you:
Your silly little story about keyword research is amusing, but I thought this post was about audience research methods?
Alright, you got me. I am deliberately talking about about keyword research when this article is about audience research.
Why?
Because my audience is other SEOs. 👋
I know that my audience (partly because I know myself) will love dirty lil’ keyword research hacks respond better to something about keyword research vs some-audience-thingy.
So, what is audience research?
Audience research is not some new tactic. It’s not even a new spin on something. It is simply researching and understanding the [su_tooltip style=”bootstrap” position=”west” content=”
Customers, leads, new employees, press, experts, competitors, vendors, a new arch nemesis…
“] people [/su_tooltip] you’re trying to reach with your content.
The logic being: Without knowing who they are and what they want, it’s pretty hard to create useful content for them.
So yeah, it basically is keyword research.
But this is more about about understanding your users vs just knowing what keywords they use.
Sure search terms are good to know, but if you actually know your audience, you’ll be able to [su_tooltip style=”bootstrap” position=”south” content=”
I know keyword research should always be audience-first, but let’s be honest, we’ve all blindly chased keywords.
“] create stuff they want vs what SEO tools tell you they want [/su_tooltip].
How to research your target audience (with AI prompts, scraping & spreadsheets)
There are lots of ways to do audience research. Some methods are more useful than others.
This article is a comprehensive list of practically all the ways you can do audience research.
You can read these in any order. Pick whatever [su_tooltip style=”bootstrap” position=”west” content=”
Or if I wanted to appeal to my SEO audience – pick whatever canonicalizes your curiosity 😉
“] floats your boat[/su_tooltip]:
- Understanding search intent with Google Autocomplete
- How to use your competitors to find missed opportunities
- Web scraping to find SEO opportunities
- Reverse engineer the SERPs for content ideas
- How to find easy to rank keywords based on domain age
- How to plan relevant clusters for topics you know NOTHING about
Before you leave, I am legally obligated to ask you to sign up to my newsletter:
If you do, I’ll send you this spreadsheet that lists out all the research methods in one place:
Cheers ✌️