How To Write Content for Your Target Audience

Author: Kat Fitzsimmons+

Writing Content that Speaks to Your Target Audience

If you’ve ever written online content before, there’s a good chance you’ve wondered if you're wasting your time. Think about it -- most blogs, for example, (and there are millions of them out there) reach only a tiny audience.

However, if you’re writing a blog or creating other digital content to try and drive traffic to a website, then it’s imperative you get people to find, and engage to what you are writing about. How do you do that? Here are some tips on how to write meaningful, engaging content for your target audience.

Know Your Audience

Marketing is about knowing who you’re trying to reach, and digital marketing is no different. If you want to reach people, you have to have them in mind from the very beginning. In fact, create an ideal character -- put together all of the different demographic boxes you’ve ticked in the back of your mind, and create your “ideal” persona. Then, as you write, write to that specific person.

Speak Only to One Person

Perhaps you have more than one type of person in mind? That’s okay too. However, it’s best to gear each blog towards only one general persona type. Good content writing speaks directly to someone at any given time. Don’t muddle your message by trying to reach everyone. You can write more than one post, which means you can create many voices for each persona.

Understand SEO

Of course, none of this matters if the right eyes don’t see your content. This is where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comes into play. You need to write a post in such a way that Google (and other search engines) are more likely to display your pages when a search happens. Let's assume you have ruled out any major SEO issues with your website and you are strictly focusing on optimizing your blog post. 

Writing SEO Friendly Copy

• Identify your primary keyword. This is a single word or phrase that has the most popularity in search. However, focusing on long-tail keywords can drive a more granular or specific audience. Usually there is less competition for long-tail keywords and therefore a greater chance to gain top search placement.
• The primary keyword needs to appear in specific locations. 
• Identify synonyms. Use as many synonym as naturally fits into your content. Content should flow and talk to your person. Content should not be contrived. 
• Use heading tags. Appropriate use of tags not only allows your audience to read your content easier, it allows search engines to index your content quicker and with more accuracy.
• Use links within your post. There is no set rule on how many links should occur within a post; however, linking needs to be natural. Try to have a combination of link types. 
• Internal links are a must. That means link to other pages or posts of your website.
• External links. At least one external link is a good idea but not totally mandatory. External links or out bound links. These are links that leave your site and land on another webpage. The other page must be very relevant to the linking keyword.
• Create content links. I cannot place enough emphasis on using content links. 
• Understand co-occurrence and co-citation and how this improves SERP (Search Engine Results Pages ) rank.
• Inbound links are super important and somewhat difficult to obtain. The easiest inbound link can come from another page on your site. The even better inbound link comes from another website entirely. This most likely will require an actual relationship to be created in order to obtain an inbound link. Although that sounds like a lot of work; it's really worth it. This type of link can accelerate your post to the top of the SERP.