Many people think about search engine optimization as a series of technical task. While undoubtedly true, the nature of SEO is much more complex when it comes to all that encompasses it. Nobody can execute an effective SEO strategy without first understanding many intangible or subjective concepts. People are not technical in nature, and appealing to individuals requires an intuitive touch. In order to build a lasting SEO position, it is necessary to have the right audience connected with your website, blog or brand. In order to ensure that your SEO efforts are being focused adequately and that your technical efforts bear fruit, we’ve put together a series of suggestions on how to effectively build an audience that complements your efforts.

Determine Your Demography

Before you can begin pinging your website with quality content, you must first understand both your subject and your audience. In order to understand your audience, you must first understand its demography. It’s important to first establish whether your audience will be fairly uniform in nature or will encompass multiple, smaller communities that have overlapping interests. In the case of the latter, it becomes necessary to determine the base characteristics of each group. From here, you can begin determining which specific niches or topics are most likely to share segments of this audience. This gives you an idea of where you need to build bridges and what specific types of content you should create in terms of its primary and secondary angles.

Evaluate the Intangible Elements of SEO

Search engine optimization is more complex than ever before, and that makes it difficult at times to determine how to proceed. Depending on your niche or subject of interest, your audience may have different behaviors and emotions when it comes to expression through social media and search engines. Building effective SEO in a given niche requires optimizing your content in subtle ways to appease these constituencies. It is very difficult to measure such intangible elements – how an audience reacts to a certain emotion, how user experience with respect to design is affected across different niches, and so forth – but a variety of intuitive and community-based observations and communications can occur to improve the process. In short: communicate with existing audiences, monitor competitor behavior and go with your gut when it comes to building a brand that appeals to your audience.

Be Detail-Oriented

It is impossible to be meticulous with respect to every little detail and facet of conversation, but appealing to niche audiences in this day and age is a cornerstone of SEO. In order to build an effective audience, you must be aware of which specific segments of a (usually much larger) audience that you wish to reach. Once you have determined the exact profile of these individuals, you must then compete against anyone and everyone who may wish to vie for their attention. Being as obsessed with every detail as possible in your content will not only improve long-term SEO benefits, but it will ensure that those who are pinging your website come back over and over again.