When I describe SEO, I explain that it is a mix of marketing, technical know-how, and psychology.
From a marketing perspective, you must have an overall understanding of your product, the problems it solves, and how to best communicate to your audience.
From a technical perspective, you must be able to create a foundation for your website that improves search performance.
Now, from a psychological perspective… that is where an SEO can really make a difference.
If you can learn how to not only identify your ideal website visitor but also determine who they are and what motivates them, your SEO work will really pay off. You’ll have the traffic numbers and also the ROI to support your efforts.
SEO isn’t just about the numbers (i.e., keyword ranking positions, number of backlinks, traffic, etc.). It is also about understanding the audience and building an SEO campaign around that information.
When SEO is centered around the right audience, targeted traffic increases, which leads to more conversions.
There are several methods that will help you research and analyze your audience for SEO.
As you will see in the list below, there are tools weaved throughout each method to make things easier along the way.
1. Use Keywords To Gather Demographics Data
Keyword research is one of the core tasks of SEO. Keywords should be targeted and relevant to your products or services, which is something you likely already know.
Once you have a solid list of keywords, select the top five that represent your brand the best and find out the demographics associated with those words and phrases.
Google Trends will provide you with demographic information tied to the location and will show you how the keyword has trended over time.
Google Trends really came in handy during the pandemic when people’s online behaviors were quickly shifting.
One of my clients publishes recipes, and the question came up regarding the types of recipes people were searching for when they were stuck at home.
It was banana bread.
Apparently, comfort food was the focus when we couldn’t leave our homes. You can see in the screenshot below how the trend for “banana bread” skyrocketed.
Screenshot from Google Trends, June 2022
But, what about the demographic data?
Google Trends provides great data on the location, but there is also another tool I like to use for further demographic information, Demographics.io. This tool ties demographic data to keywords.
Using the same banana bread example, below is the data of people who were searching this keyword.
Screenshot from Demographics.io, June 2022
Tip: How To Apply This Information
Identifying demographic information, including age, gender, and location can help you in SEO in many ways.
You can look for local link opportunities in the geographic areas where queries occur.
In terms of age and gender, you can determine topics, interests, and other terminology that is relevant to those groups.
2. Identify Who Is Visiting Your Website
This method is kind of like painting the target around the arrow.
However, it is important to understand who is coming to your website and then you can determine if that is the correct audience.
One of the easiest ways to get this information is from Google Analytics.
Under the Audience section, you are able to view a range of audience information, including age, gender, location, and interests, as shown below:
Screenshot from Google Analytics, June 2022
Tip: How To Apply This Information
This data can give insight into the audience and will help you as you recommend content topics and target geographic areas.
On the other hand, you might look at this information and realize that it does not align with your organization’s target markets.
In that case, you need to take a close look at your keywords and content to make sure there is no misalignment.
3. Analyze Other Brands
To gather information about your target audience, you can look beyond your own website and analyze other brands and competitors.
You would be looking for demographics and psychographics – basically, you want to collect as many insights as possible. The following tools can help you with this type of analysis.
Quantcast
Quantcast pulls together insights on purchase behaviors, occupations, device usage, demographics, domain affinity, and more. The example below is an analysis of Goodreads.com.
According to Audiense.com, they build the audience using eight different criteria, “which can be combined together allowing the creation of highly targeted audiences: Demography, Relationships, Behavior (activity), Conversations, IBM Watson Personality Insights, Location, Interests, and Twitter profile.”
Audiense then creates audience segments by “clustering individuals based on ‘who knows who’ i.e., how these individuals are interconnected. We take into account who follows who and cluster them together – for instance, if person A follows person B then they’ll be clustered together.”
The first screen of the report provides a snapshot of the audience data, as shown below.
Screenshot from Audiense, June 2022
What is so great about this tool is that you can drill down even more. Just check out the breakdown of information available (see the red box on the screenshot).
Screenshot from Audiense, June 2022
Tip: How To Apply This Information
Similar to the last method, this data can give insight into the audience and will help you as you recommend content topics and target geographic areas.
Social platforms are one of the quickest ways to get information about an audience.
You can view follower/fan information directly on your company’s Facebook page, as shown below:
Screenshot from Facebook, June 2022
You can also view competitors’ and other brands’ audience information on Followerwonk.
What’s great about this tool is it also provides you with a word cloud to show you what users are talking about:
Screenshot from Followerwonk, June 2022
Tip: How To Apply This Information
Specifically, the word cloud in Followerwonk can help you identify other keywords you might have missed and can also present content marketing ideas.
5. Send Out Surveys
This method is the most straightforward out of all of them on this list. If you want to understand your audience better, send out a survey.
To get a decent number of surveys returned, keep it short and sweet. Ask questions about basic demographics, overall interests, pain points, and needs.
Use the information you gather in the survey to identify content opportunities, including images and videos, keyword targets, etc.
6. Identify Questions
With Google increasingly showing answers directly in SERPs, identifying common user questions has become that much more important.
Plus, we want to anticipate the long-tail queries of our potential audience, so we can get in front of them at the right time. There are many tools that provide common questions, including:
These tools pull from various data sources, so it is worthwhile to check out them all. Below is an example from AnswerThePublic.
Screenshot from AnswerThePublic, June 2022
Screenshot from AnswerThePublic, June 2022
Tip: How To Apply This Information
Create content around common questions to attract long-tail searches among your audience and to increase your odds of showing up as a direct answer in Google SERPs.
7. Research Secondary Data
Once you know age/interests/etc. of your audience, you can fill in the blanks through further research. Look for studies regarding one of the key aspects of your audience.
For example, if you determine that your audience is in the Baby Boomer generation, head to Google Scholar and look for published research on this group.
Tip: How To Apply This Information
Use this additional research to sketch your personas and get a better view of who it is you are trying to target via SEO.
Final Thoughts
It might seem like a lot of extra work to dive into your audience before getting into SEO tasks. However, it is well worth the time.
You will be able to drive better traffic to your website and improve your ROI on SEO.
Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter, announced that starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators. The new policy applies only to ads that appear in a creator’s reply threads.
The move comes on the heels of YouTube launching ad revenue sharing for creators through the YouTube Partner Program in a bid to become the most rewarding social platform for creators.
Social networks like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have similar monetization options for creators who publish reels and video content. For example, Instagram’s Reels Play Bonus Program offers eligible creators up to $1,200 for Reel views.
The catch? Unlike other social platforms, creators on Twitter must have an active subscription to Twitter Blue and meet the eligibility requirements for the Blue Verified checkmark.
The following is an example of a Twitter ad in a reply thread (Promoted by @ASUBootcamps). It should generate revenue for the Twitter Blue Verified creator (@rowancheung), who created the thread.
Screenshot from Twitter, January 2023
To receive the ad revenue share, creators would have to pay $8 per month (or more) to maintain an active Twitter Blue subscription. Twitter Blue pricing varies based on location and is available in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
Eligibility for the Twitter Blue Verified checkmark includes having an active Twitter Blue subscription and meeting the following criteria.
Your account must have a display name, profile photo, and confirmed phone number.
Your account has to be older than 90 days and active within the last 30 days.
Recent changes to your account’s username, display name, or profile photo can affect eligibility. Modifications to those after verification can also result in a temporary loss of the blue checkmark until Twitter reviews your updated information.
Your account cannot appear to mislead or deceive.
Your account cannot spam or otherwise try to manipulate the platform for engagement or follows.
Did you receive a Blue Verified checkmark before the Twitter Blue subscription? That will not help creators who want a share of the ad revenue. The legacy Blue Verified checkmark does not make a creator account eligible for ad revenue sharing.
When asked about accounts with a legacy and Twitter Blue Verified checkmark, Musk tweeted that the legacy Blue Verified is “deeply corrupted” and will sunset in just a few months.
Regardless of how you gained your checkmark, it’s important to note that Twitter can remove a checkmark without notice.
In addition to ad revenue sharing for Twitter Blue Verified creators, Twitter Dev announced that the Twitter API would no longer be free in an ongoing effort to reduce the number of bots on the platform.
While speculation looms about a loss in Twitter ad revenue, the Wall Street Journal reported a “fire-sale” Super Bowl offer from Musk to win back advertisers.
The latest data from DataReportal shows a positive trend for Twitter advertisers. Ad reach has increased from 436.4 million users in January 2022 to 556 million in January 2023.
Twitter is also the third most popular social network based on monthly unique visitors and page views globally, according to SimilarWeb data through December 2022.
We live in an age when AI technologies are booming, and the world has been taken by storm with the introduction of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is capable of accomplishing a wide range of tasks, but one that it does particularly well is writing articles. And while there are many obvious benefits to this, it also presents a number of challenges.
In my opinion, the biggest hurdle that AI-generated written content poses for the publishing industry is the spread of misinformation.
ChatGPT, or any other AI tool, may generate articles that may contain factual errors or are just flat-out incorrect.
Imagine someone who has no expertise in medicine starting a medical blog and using ChatGPT to write content for their articles.
Their content may contain errors that can only be identified by professional doctors. And if that blog content starts spreading over social media, or maybe even ranks in Search, it could cause harm to people who read it and take erroneous medical advice.
Another potential challenge ChatGPT poses is how students might leverage it within their written work.
If one can write an essay just by running a prompt (and without having to do any actual work), that greatly diminishes the quality of education – as learning about a subject and expressing your own ideas is key to essay writing.
Even before the introduction of ChatGPT, many publishers were already generating content using AI. And while some honestly disclose it, others may not.
BankRate started publishing articles written via AI, they even disclose it on the site. I have found 160+ articles. The first article I was able to find dated April 2022. It would interesting to see how these articles rank. Original finding by @tonythill. #AI#gptchat#SEOpic.twitter.com/BY9JlUZBiz
Also, Google recently changed its wording regarding AI-generated content, so that it is not necessarily against the company’s guidelines.
Image from Twitter, November 2022
This is why I decided to try out existing tools to understand where the tech industry is when it comes to detecting content generated by ChatGPT, or AI generally.
I ran the following prompts in ChatGPT to generate written content and then ran those answers through different detection tools.
“What is local SEO? Why it is important? Best practices of Local SEO.”
“Write an essay about Napoleon Bonaparte invasion of Egypt.”
“What are the main differences between iPhone and Samsung galaxy?”
Here is how each tool performed.
1. Writer.com
For the first prompt’s answer, Writer.com fails, identifying ChatGPT’s content as 94% human-generated.
However, when I tested real human-written text, Writer.com did identify it as 100% human-generated very accurately.
2. Copyleaks
Copyleaks did a great job in detecting all three prompts as AI-written.
Screenshot from Copyleaks, January 2023
3. Contentatscale.ai
Contentatscale.ai did a great job in detecting all three prompts as AI-written, even though the first prompt, it gave a 21% human score.
Screenshot from Contentscale.ai, January 2023
4. Originality.ai
Originality.ai did a great job on all three prompts, accurately detecting them as AI-written.
Also, when I checked with real human-written text, it did identify it as 100% human-generated, which is essential.
Screenshot from Originality.ai, January 2023
You will notice that Originality.ai doesn’t detect any plagiarism issues. This may change in the future.
Over time, people will use the same prompts to generate AI-written content, likely resulting in a number of very similar answers. When these articles are published, they will then be detected by plagiarism tools.
5. GPTZero
This non-commercial tool was built by Edward Tian, and specifically designed to detect ChatGPT-generated articles. And it did just that for all three prompts, recognizing them as AI-generated.
Screenshot from GPTZero, January 2023
Unlike other tools, it gives a more detailed analysis of detected issues, such as sentence-by-sentence analyses.
Screenshot from GPTZero, January 2023
OpenAI’s AI Text Classifier
And finally, let’s see how OpenAi detects its own generated answers.
For the 1st and 3rd prompts, it detected that there is an AI involved by classifying it as “possibly-AI generated”.
AI Text Classifier. Likely AI-generated
But surprisingly, it failed for the 2nd prompt and classified that as “unlikely AI-generated.” I did play with different prompts and found that, as of the moment, when checking it, few of the above tools detect AI content with higher accuracy than OpenAi’s own tool.
AI Text Classifier. Unlikely AI-generated
As of the time of this check, they had released it a day before. I think in the future, they will fine tune it, and it will work much better.
Conclusion
Current AI content generation tools are in good shape and are able to detect ChatGPT-generated content (with varying degrees of success).
It is still possible for someone to generate copy via ChatGPT and then paraphrase that to make it undetectable, but that might require almost as much work as writing from scratch – so the benefits aren’t as immediate.
If you think about ranking an article in Google written by ChatGPT, consider for a moment: If the tools we looked at above were able to recognize them as AI-generated, then for Google, detecting them should be a piece of cake.
On top of that, Google has quality raters who will train their system to recognize AI-written articles even better by manually marking them as they find them.
So, my advice would be not to build your content strategy on ChatGPT-generated content, but use it merely as an assistant tool.
As the content battleground goes through tremendous upheaval, SEO insights will continue to grow in importance
ChatGPT can help content marketers get an edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content
Making sure your content rank high enough to engage the target audience requires strategic planning and implementation
Google is constantly testing and updating its algorithms in pursuit of the best possible searcher experience. As the search giant explains in its ‘How Search Works’ documentation, that means understanding the intent behind the query and bringing back results that are relevant, high-quality, and accessible for consumers.
As if the constantly shifting search landscape weren’t difficult enough to navigate, content marketers are also contending with an increasingly technology-charged environment. Competitors are upping the stakes with tools and platforms that generate smarter, real-time insights and even make content optimization and personalization on the fly based on audience behavior, location, and data points.
Set-it-and-forget-it content optimization is a thing of the past. Here’s what you need to know to help your content get found, engage your target audience, and convert searchers to customers in 2023.
AI automation going to be integral for content optimization
As the content battleground heats up, SEO insights will continue to grow in importance as a key source of intelligence. We’re optimizing content for humans, not search engines, after all – we had better have a solid understanding of what those people need and want.
While I do not advocate automation for full content creation, I believe next year – as resources become stretched automation will have a bigger impact on helping with content optimization of existing content.
CHATGPT
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language generation model that leverages the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture to produce realistic human-like text. With Chat GPT’s wide range of capabilities – from completing sentences and answering questions to generating content ideas or powering research initiatives – it can be an invaluable asset for any Natural Language Processing project.
The introduction on ChatGPT has caused considerable debate and explosive amounts of content on the web. With ChatGPT, content marketers can achieve an extra edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content. It offers assistance with generating titles for blog posts, summaries of topics or articles, as well as comprehensive campaigns when targeting a specific audience.
However, it is important to remember that this technology should be used to enhance human creativity rather than completely replacing it.
For many years now AI-powered technology has been helping content marketers and SEOs automate repetitive tasks such as data analysis, scanning for technical issues, and reporting, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI also enables real-time analysis of a greater volume of consumer touchpoints and behavioral data points for smarter, more precise predictive analysis, opportunity forecasting, real-time content recommendations, and more.
With so much data in play and recession concerns already impacting 2023 budgets in many organizations, content marketers will have to do more with less this coming year. You’ll need to carefully balance human creative resources with AI assists where they make sense to stay flexible, agile, and ready to respond to the market.
It’s time to look at your body of content as a whole
Google’s Helpful Content update, which rolled out in August, is a sitewide signal targeting a high proportion of thin, unhelpful, low-quality content. That means the exceptional content on your site won’t rank to their greatest potential if they’re lost in a sea of mediocre, outdated assets.
It might be time for a content reboot – but don’t get carried away. Before you start unpublishing and redirecting blog posts, lean on technology for automated site auditing and see what you can fix up first. AI-assisted technology can help sniff out on-page elements, including page titles and H1 tags, and off-page factors like page speed, redirects, and 404 errors that can support your content refreshing strategy.
Focus on your highest trafficked and most visible pages first, i.e.: those linked from the homepage or main menu. Google’s John Mueller confirmed recently that if the important pages on your website are low quality, it’s bad news for the entire site. There’s no percentage by which this is measured, he said, urging content marketers and SEOs to instead think of what the average user would think when they visit your website.
Take advantage of location-based content optimization opportunities
Consumers crave personalized experiences, and location is your low-hanging fruit. Seasonal weather trends, local events, and holidays all impact your search traffic in various ways and present opportunities for location-based optimization.
AI-assisted technology can help you discover these opportunities and evaluate topical keywords at scale so you can plan content campaigns and promotions that tap into this increased demand when it’s happening.
Make the best possible use of content created for locally relevant campaigns by repurposing and promoting it across your website, local landing pages, social media profiles, and Google Business Profiles for each location. Google Posts, for example, are a fantastic and underutilized tool for enhancing your content’s visibility and interactivity right on the search results page.
Optimize content with conversational & high-volume keywords
Look for conversational and trending terms in your keyword research, too. Top-of-funnel keywords that help generate awareness of the topic and spur conversations in social channels offer great opportunities for promotion. Use hashtags organically and target them in paid content promotion campaigns to dramatically expand your audience.
Conversational keywords are a good opportunity for enhancing that content’s visibility in search, too. Check out the ‘People Also Ask’ results and other featured snippets available on the search results page (SERP) for your keyword terms. Incorporate questions and answers in your content to naturally optimize for these and voice search queries.
It’s important that you utilize SEO insights and real-time data correctly; you don’t want to be targeting what was trending last month and is already over. AI is a great assist here, as well, as an intelligent tool can be scanning and analyzing constantly, sending recommendations for new content opportunities as they arise.
Consider how you optimize content based on intent and experience
The best content comes from a deep, meaningful understanding of the searcher’s intent. What problem were they experiencing or what need did they have that caused them to seek out your content in the first place? And how does your blog post, ebook, or landing page copy enhance their experience?
Look at the search results page as a doorway to your “home”. How’s your curb appeal? What do potential customers see when they encounter one of your pages in search results? What kind of experience do you offer when they step over the threshold and click through to your website?
The best content meets visitors where they are at with relevant, high-quality information presented in a way that is accessible, fast loading, and easy to digest. This is the case for both short and long form SEO content. Ensure your content contains calls to action designed to give people options and help them discover the next step in their journey versus attempting to sell them on something they may not be ready for yet.
The audience is king, queen, and the entire court as we head into 2023. SEO and content marketing give you countless opportunities to connect with these people but remember they are a means to an end. Keep searcher intent and audience needs at the heart of every piece of content you create and campaign you plan for the coming year.