The dynamic search environment continually influences your ranks, traffic, and conversion rates in the ever-changing world of SEO.
So, how can digital marketers react to changes quickly, prioritize efforts, and achieve SEO success?
The solution resides in effective and relevant data analysis. A comprehensive overview of a website’s organic search performance data, on the other hand, frequently obscures the answers to the fundamental concerns that arise with each change:
- What occurred?
- What was affected?
- How significant was the impact?
- What should be the top priority?
- What caused that to happen?
This is where segmentation comes in. Segmentation is an important SEO approach that allows you to simply digest your site’s data and draw critical insights by dividing it down into relevant groupings.
This article will teach you how to utilize segmentation to evaluate data at scale and transform it into actionable tasks.
What is SEO segmentation?
As a marketing tactic, segmentation allows you to break down a problem into its constituent elements and then classify them based on shared qualities.
You may then zoom in on certain groupings and do a scaled analysis.
What you may not understand is that we utilize segmentation regularly. When people look at their spending by category (eating out vs. groceries) and make budgets by category, they segment their money.
Alternatively, individuals may segment their routines to calculate how many calories they burn during 20 minutes of jogging vs swimming or other strength training exercises. It’s a strong notion that allows for in-depth investigation.
The SEO segmentation structure consists of three steps:
1: Determine the components.
2: Determine the components’ shared properties.
3: Form a group and do an analysis.
You compile a list of all the accessible elements and examine them to find what common traits they have. Then you form a group.
In SEO, you may segment anything: pages, keywords, themes, metrics, and competitors. And you must do so to examine trends, opportunities, competition, and content!
Case Study!
Shahid is working to improve his online business, marketinglad.io, which specializes in premium SEO and Link Building services.
He is keeping track of the average rank and other data for all the keywords he is tracking. He notices the following in his GoogleRankCheck account:
So far, so good, but what does he take away from it? Consider his website’s total average position. It takes into account all of his brand keywords, as well as broad-matching and long-tail keywords.
Sure, the rankings and visibility are growing, but he isn’t seeing any particular data that would provide us with insights into the website’s development in specific areas. Without more specific data, he cannot draw reasonable conclusions or make sound judgments to ramp up efforts for additional website improvement.
Knowing that he’s combining keywords with vastly diverse qualities, he may consider segmenting the keywords to learn more about his website’s SEO status. This will provide him with a far more thorough perspective on rankings, site behavior, and search engine trends. It will also help him identify which sectors he should focus on in order to increase awareness and conversions.
So, how do we go about it?
Let’s begin with the following sections.
- Keyword Segmentation
You’re undoubtedly aware that branded keywords (those that incorporate the brand name or a version of it) have quite different properties in terms of user behavior and rankings. They have the greatest CTR, ranks, and bounce rates. Visitors are already aware that they are seeking your brand, branded keywords should be treated differently.
The first step is to distinguish the keywords: this will help us understand our search engine trends and behavior.
Branded keywords, as we can tell, have substantially greater search visibility, average position, and click potential. Because their positions are unlikely to alter significantly, it makes sense to invest some SEO efforts in other areas of your website.
Non-branded keywords have a substantially lower average position, search visibility, click potential, and rankings that are less steady.
Combining branded and non-branded terms obscures the insights we want. Why? When individuals look for information unrelated to the brand, this changes the brand visibility statistics. This indicates we’re not doing everything we can to figure out how to make our website more visible to potential consumers.
- Keyword Context
When evaluating the many sorts of SEO, it’s critical not to overlook keyword context. Creating category-based divisions like this is a good method for determining how each one performs on search engines. When new material or backlinks are added, or current content is modified, you now have a dependable means to see the impact of these changes on your website.
- Search Volume
To truly understand what’s going on with your SEO, it’s also critical to distinguish between high-volume and low-volume keywords. High-volume keywords are in high demand, and as a result, ranking highly for them is more difficult.
Lower-volume keywords are searched for less frequently but are less likely to be picked as a focus, so there is less competition if you do choose them. This is also known as a “long-tail” term, since if you plot search volume vs conversion rate for various keywords, the low-volume one’s spread out along a “long tail” to the right as the conversion rate improves.
Break down all the terms you want to rank for into high-volume and low-volume groupings. Consider adding a third “medium-volume” group if your website is extremely vast and you’re targeting a significant number of keywords. Define the groupings based on the monthly search volume.
Types of Market Segmentation for SEO Success
Most marketers think that market segmentation may be divided into four or five categories. If you concentrate your efforts on the following “buckets,” you will notice great effects in your business:
- Geographic
Geographic market segmentation is self-evident. It is usually determined by characteristics such as nation, area, state, city, zip code, climate, urban vs. rural, and/or proximity to a certain site.
Geographic market segmentation is obviously critical for brick-and-mortar enterprises and local firms. However, it is equally critical for online firms that provide real items or services that may be affected by factors such as climate. Local SEO is all about geographic segmentation.
- Behavioral
This is when things begin to get interesting. Customers are separated into behavioral market segments, depending on their decision-making behaviors. Consumption habits, purchasing patterns, lifestyle, and usage are all included.
To understand behavioral segmentation, you must collect extensive purchase data and watch their behaviors. In order to crystallize your strategy, you’ll also need to make certain informed assumptions.
- Demographic
The most fundamental is demographic segmentation. (It’s also one of the easiest to deal with, given to the huge data trails that individuals leave online.) It often contains facts such as age, gender, income, location, education, ethnicity, family situation, yearly income, and other pertinent information.
While demographic segmentation may be very broad for some firms, it may be quite beneficial for others who want the capacity to select based on criteria such as age, gender, geography, and so on.
- Firmographic
Firmographic market segmentation closely resembles geographic segmentation, except that it primarily targets B2B firms.
It considers elements such as company location, firm size, number of workers, gross income, and other factors related to the business’ makeup.
This can also assist you in correctly targeting organizations in sales and marketing scenarios. It provides you with the knowledge you need to approach a small firm with 20 workers with one message while approaching a large corporation with 2,000 employees with a completely other message.
- Psychographic
Finally, there is psychographic market segmentation. This is most likely the most challenging of the five categories, but it may also be the most beneficial. Values, attitudes, interests, personality characteristics, lifestyle choices, psychological influences, motives, priorities, and subconscious and conscious beliefs are all included.
Psychographic segmentation requires a combination of empirical and subjective insights. We may obtain some of this information by mining your website and social media statistics. You will, however, need to delve deeper and get to know your market on a more intimate level.
This may be accomplished by going through social media profiles, clients being interviewed, focus groups being held, and other hands-on tactics being utilized. Good psychographic segmentation informs businesses on how to market offerings.
Conclusion
When tracking your SEO initiatives, there are several ways to be creative and separate keywords. Using these strategies can give you a better idea of how different link- building activities and modifications to your page’s content affect different areas of your website, whether it’s a certain product category, a specific sub-page, or a collection of keywords.
This makes it easy to identify the primary factors influencing changes in your search visibility trends and to make wise decisions by targeting the segments driving the most profitable traffic to your website.
Having said that, SEO segmentation is a must-have tool for optimizing your procedures and raising your brand’s search presence. When you start using these tactics, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them!