Small Business SEO Foundation - how well do you know your ideal customer?

If you're doing SEO for your small business, the first, most important step might really surprise you. I don't have student start by choosing keywords or even brainstorming the questions they should answer on their websites and blogs. I have them start with something more foundational: who is their ideal customer? You probably have a good idea who your ideal customer is, but if you're anything like my students and clients (and you probably are), you likely don't know them well enough for SEO. Listen in and find out why knowing your ideal customer is super important to your SEO. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I wanna talk about one of the most important things that I see from a foundational SEO standpoint that challenges a lot of my students and clients when we first start working together, because it's very likely that this is also a challenge that you face, and you may not realize why you're finding this to be a little harder or a little more challenging. So when I start working with somebody, the very first thing we talk about is the ideal customer. Who is it that you help? What do you do? What do they need from you? And most people are gonna say, "Rachel, I know my ideal customer. I'm great. I don't need a refresher on this." But what I find is that very often they don't actually know their ideal customer well enough to really be able to move forward and make progress with search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, whatever you wanna call it. Google has said it's just SEO, but I know people like all sorts of different terms still. So when we're doing SEO, one of the most important things that we can do is to make sure we know who we're helping. What questions do they have? What information do they need? What challenges do they face? Because this is going to impact everything that we do. So I have several groups of students that are going through the course right now, and they're in different, um, spots because we do a cohort. So one of my students a couple months ago was really challenged a little bit with what keyword to choose for their homepage, and what it came down to was there were two or three great options that they could use, but they didn't know which of those options their ideal customer used, which then made it very hard to make a confident choice and move forward w- to start working on the optimization of the page. Because when you don't know what your ideal customer searches for, what words they use, what questions they have- It's very hard to figure out what content to create, what keywords to choose, what questions to answer for the AI-based search. All of this comes together. So you want to know who they are. But more than that, it's not just demographic. It's not just my ideal customer is a six-figure entrepreneur, or my ideal customer is somebody who wants to book a golf vacation. My ideal customer is a parent of a tween child who's struggling with too much screen time. Those are great starts. But beyond that, we also want to know what are their challenges? What are they facing? What keeps them up at night? What do they struggle with? That parent of the tween, why is she struggling with too much screen time? Is she burnt out? Is she working long hours? Is she single parenting? Um, has something gone on in her life where she feels like she doesn't have the support system? Has her child had access to screens maybe for years, and now she's seeing negative impact of that as she's moving into the tween years, but she doesn't know what to do differently because her child's had a tablet for a decade? Those are the type things that we wanna think about. Um, the person who coaches entrepreneurs. Okay, do they coach solopreneurs? Do they coach people with small teams? Do they coach businesses that are six figures or seven figures? Do they coach new businesses? Do they work with businesses that have been established? Like, we really want to understand all of that because let's talk about the, the coach who works with a, an entrepreneur If it's a brand-new entrepreneur, their questions are going to be incredibly different from somebody who's been established for four or five years. If it's somebody that's making 3,000 a month or 5,000 a month, their questions are gonna be very different from somebody who's consistently making 10 or 15 or $20,000 a month. Let's say it's a realtor, 'cause I know I've got a lot of realtors who listen to this. I have a lot of course creators, a lot of coaches, a lot of realtors, insurance agents. My... You are my professional service providers. That's pretty much what... where we hang these days, and I love it. So my realtors, you know, what somebody needs if they are a first-time homebuyer is very different from what somebody needs and the questions they ask if they are a downsizer. Or I have one student, I was just working with her, we were going through some stuff, and she's actually working on building out some insights and information for people who are helping their parents downsize or have inherited a property, because that's a whole different set of needs. So when we think about who do you help and what do we do, it's really, really important to understand who you're helping, how you help them, what questions they have, because this makes a big difference. It will be much easier for you to move forward and choose keywords with confidence. Because when you're first learning SEO, especially as a small business owner, it can feel a little bit overwhelming. But what I've found is very often that overwhelm actually comes from not being super clear on our niche or our ideal customer as much, much more so than not understanding what to do from an SEO standpoint. I have another case in point. I have another student who-- we've had a bunch of conversations about this recently, which is why I was like, "This is probably a really good topic for the podcast," because this is a pattern I'm seeing, is that we need more help figuring out who we're working with. So I have another one. She is, um, an accountant, and she works with people in her state. And so she's trying to figure out is her niche accounting for small businesses in that state, or is it accounting for small businesses within specific industries? And what you have to think about is like, well, do I wanna work with people who are local to me? Do I wanna limit myself to people who are only in these industries? Or do I want to maybe expand it out a little bit and say, "I do work with these industries, but I work with small businesses. I do accounting for small businesses in my state or in my regional area"? Because that's going to change the keywords that she goes after. If she's going after Um, if she's niching down and saying, "I work with, um, small businesses. I offer accounting for small businesses in my state," then her keyword is gonna be something related to small business accounting in her state for like her homepage. But if she's focusing on accounting for brick-and-mortar locations or she's focusing on accounting for online business owners, then her keywords would be very different. It would be, you know, accounting for entrepreneurs, accounting for course creators, accounting for life coaches, things like that which are not at all the same. So we really do want to understand because we want to be able to use the right words to bring the right people into our world. So hopefully that makes sense. You can kind of understand like why this matters. The next thing is we have to figure out then what kind of content to create, what blog posts, what answers to, you know, what questions to answer for AI, all of that. And if we don't know if we're servicing a brand new business owner versus somebody who's been in business for five years versus somebody who is earning six figures, or if we don't know if we're working with, um, companies in our local area versus online businesses, or we're not sure... You know, we're a realtor and we say we can help everybody, but we haven't really specialized between move-up buyers or downsizers or people who are helping their aging parents. We don't know what type of content to create specific for our ideal customer, and so we end up creating more generic. And in today's world, especially with AI, generic content is not enough. It's what Google is now calling commodity content, and they don't want you to create commodity content. They want you to create what they refer to as non-commodity content. And now non-commodity content is content that is created for a specific person. It goes above and beyond what you can get in the AI summary or the AI answer. Hopefully, it'll be cited, but it gives more insights and information. It includes anecdotes, personal stories, experience, examples, all sorts of things that make it better quality and more helpful. Because right now, what we're looking at, if your ideal customer is somebody who wants to buy a house, and they go in and they search for houses for sale in your area, AI's gonna answer that, or AI and Zillow or Redfin. I mean, they're gonna answer it. You're not gonna stand out. But if you're like my student who is really building out her content base and her content strategy all around Probate. What happens when you have a home and you need to sell it and it's in probate? Um, inheriting a home, helping your gr- your parents downsize. Now, if you're creating content that has questions that can be answered, like what do I do in a probate situation? What do I need to know before I try to sell a home dur- in probate? What do I do to help my parents downsize? How do I handle selling an inherited house? What are the tax implications of selling an inherited house? Like, these are all the types of questions that she and I found when we were doing some research recently to help her understand what to create so that she can stand out and not lose her visibility to AI, but she can actually be somebody who is cited. This is why you have to really, really understand your ideal customer, who they are, what questions they have, um, how you help them, because this is going to help you create a much stronger content strategy, much better information. So what you wanna think about as you're trying to work on this is: Who am I helping, and what questions do they have? One of the things that I have my students do that might be helpful for you is to write a narrative about your ideal customer. I want you to think of them and really write it out like they're your best friend. Who are they? What do... What lights them up? What frustrates them? What do they struggle with? You know, really go beyond just she's Jenny, and she's 35 years old, and she has two children, and she lives in Alabama, and she needs an accountant. Like, let's not use just that. Why does Jenny need an accountant? And What is she doing that she's not sure about? What is she not confident in? What feelings does she have associated with it? What questions does she have? All of those things are going to help you to generate this ideal customer profile that'll make it much easier for you. If you're in Simple SEO Content or you're working with me one-on-one, you have access to the custom GPT that has been created to help you, that I built and trained to help you do this. You also have access to me to review your niche with you. If you've got any questions, you know I'm happy to help you with that. Um, you also have the Ideal Customer Workbook to guide you through what to do and what to think about. If you're not, I want you to read the blog post that goes along with this. It's on the blog. It talks about SEO for small business. It's your ideal customer profile, and really understanding who it is that you're trying to help and how you help them. Because the more clear you are on who you help and what they need, the easier it's going to be to do SEO. So if you've ever tried to do SEO before and you found yourself kind of stuck, not wonder... not confident in what keywords to choose or what words your ideal customer would use or what content to create, it's a really, really good chance that you're just not clear enough on your ideal customer yet, and that's what you need to start on. That's where you need to focus your energy first to be able to figure out what you're doing from here. All right. That's it for today. I hope you found this helpful. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.