How can you use data to inform your seo strategy?

Location and demographic data can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to improve their content strategy and performance in search engines. By understanding where your audience is located, and who they are, you can create more targeted and relevant content that resonates with them.

This can also help you rank higher in search results, and drive more traffic to your website.

Lets dig a little deeper and explore how personalisation, localisation and advertising can all be improved.

Personalise Your Messaging

Tailoring your messaging to your intended audience is crucial to achieving custom and sales. If you run a local business, you can use location data to tailor your messaging to different boroughs, postcodes, regions or cities through knowing who lives there and in what quantities.

This can help you appeal to the specific needs and interests of your audience in that area.

For example, if you were looking to set up a food business in New York City, you might want to emphasize the variety of cuisines available at your establishment, and with insights into demographics you could refine these in ways that would fit a cultural profile. Your audience is likely to be wide ranging too, giving you more choice in who you choose to cater to.

On the other hand, if you own a restaurant in a smaller town, you might want to focus more on the home-cooked, comfort food aspect of your menu, especially where your audience is of a particular age.

By using location data, you can create targeted content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of your audience in each location.

Optimizing For Local Search

Data like this can also help you optimize your website for local search. When people search for businesses or products online, they often include their location in their search query. For example, someone might search for “best pizza in Los Angeles.” By optimizing your website and content for local search, you can increase your chances of ranking high in search results for these types of queries.

To do this, you’ll want to include location-specific keywords in your website’s content, meta titles and descriptions.

You’ll also want to make sure that your business is listed on local directories and review sites, as these can also help improve your local search visibility. By optimizing your website for local search, you can reach a more targeted audience and drive more qualified traffic to your website.

Effective Advertising

In addition to helping with your content strategy, location data can also be used to improve your advertising efforts.

By understanding where your audience is located, you can target your ads to specific regions or cities. This can help you reach a more relevant and engaged audience, leading to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment.

Lets say that you own a retail store that sells outdoor hiking aids for the elderly, you might want to target your ads to people living in areas with a high concentration of outdoor hiking enthusiasts, people living close to or in the Peak District of England perhaps. The use of location and demographic data, means that you can create targeted ads for say people over 55 that speak directly to the interests and needs of the people who live there.

Creating useful content pieces

You might decide that you want to inform and educate your audience, and create a map or a tool that helped inform a particular area of interest.

Returning to our Outdoor Hiking example, you might decide to create a list of massage therapists categorised into regions or postcodes for your customers! A simple geo relational database with the odd haversine distance function embedded into a functional mapping api could be just the ticket for those achey bones in need of a firm pair of hands

In conclusion, the right kind of data offers fantastic opportunities for businesses looking to improve their content strategy and performance in search engines, and can potentially save them thousands in wasted or sub optimal efforts.

We’ve seen that by having an understanding of where your audience is located, that it enables you to create more targeted and relevant content, optimize your website for local search, and target your advertising efforts to specific regions or cities.

The leveraging of location data, means that you can reach a more relevant and engaged audience and drive more qualified traffic to your website.

If you want a great source of data, do check out a project of ours here which we developed to help with needs like this, and if you’d like to have a chat about your site or strategy then feel free to book some time.

Published by Rob Watts

I've worked in search for over 25 years with businesses of all shapes and sizes.