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Building An Organic Audience Profile to Inform Your SEO Strategy

DialogTech

Understanding the audience you reach through organic search is key to your SEO strategy. Even if you think you know exactly who you’re reaching through SEO, building an organic audience profile can help you optimize your content and website to reach even more users.

Understanding Search Engine Impression Share

The first step in building this organic audience profile is to identify the top search engines that drive organic traffic to your website. In most cases, Google will be on the top of that list followed by Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Record the amount of average monthly traffic you receive from your top two or three search engines.

Using Average Time Spent on Site to Determine Value

After you’ve broken down the number of average monthly visitors from these search engines, it’s time to gather information around the time users spend on-site from each engine. Average session duration will help you understand whether or not the traffic you are receiving from Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. is valuable. You may be able to rank search engine value by the time users spend on your site from each search engine. More often than not, the more time a user spends on your site, the more valuable that user is to your business.

To determine average session duration from each search engine using Google Analytics:

  • Set your time frame to the past thirty days compared to the previous thirty days
  • In the left side bar navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium
  • In the top set your view to display organic traffic only

From here you can view the average session duration for each search engine, along with other important metrics for this activity, which include bounce rate, pages per session, and, most importantly, goal completions. Goal completions can range from a certain amount of time spent on-site, an e-commerce purchase, a form submission, or phone calls. In our analytics, we use call tracking to count goal completions as phone calls, as they are the most valuable lead type we can receive.

This view will help you better understand the traffic that is being sent to your site from each search engine and how it is converting. For example, you may see that although traffic from Yahoo is significantly less than the traffic sent from Bing, the bounce rate is lower, pages per session is higher, the average session duration is longer, and the goal conversion rate is higher. This would indicate that the traffic from Yahoo is highly targeted to your offering and you may want to consider running ads on Yahoo, or optimizing content specifically for the Yahoo search engine.

Gathering Demographic Information to Build an Organic Profile

The final step in this process is to gather demographic information of users from each search engine. Demographic data will help you target organic content to users based on specific data about them – gender, age, location, etc.

In Google Analytics:

  • Navigate to Audience in the left side bar
  • Select Demographics and make sure you have this feature enabled (Note: if you do not have it enabled you may need to wait at least 24 hours for data to populate)
  • Here you can view data around age, gender, and location the user is searching from
  • Also in the audience section you can find data around behavior, technology use (i.e. devices), and browser type

The demographic information can be very telling of the geographic locations your ideal audience is searching from. Using this data, along with age and gender information, you can do several things:

  1. Create content specific to locations with a high search volume for your offering
  2. Optimize your content for the type of devices your ideal users are searching on
  3. Start running paid search ads on search engines with key audience demographics
  4. Run paid search ads in locations with high search volume
  5. Target paid search ads to your ideal demographic age range and gender

Once you’ve completed all of these steps, put together an outline of your ideal audience based on this data. Which search engines send the most targeted traffic to your website? Which search engine has the highest conversion rate? Which locations, ages, or genders are searching for your offering the most and of those, which spends the most time on your site? This profile is something you can review with your content team to inform future decisions in content creation and it can also inform important decisions in PPC strategy as well.