Sinead Bidwell

Mobile and Web Development

Segmentation and SEO Report

Organic searches make up 53% of website traffic (Bright Edge Research, 2023) so it’s vital
that I use effective SEO to market my website. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) determines
where you rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) so it’s important to have a strong SEO
to improve your ranking. SEO is more useful for generating traffic through organic search;
however, my competition have already established a high SERP ranking so I’d need to
continuously update my SEO strategy to keep up with them.

As my website is targeted at a varied audience, tracking different segments of my customer

base will be useful to determine who my biggest audience is and how I should be marketing
my website. One marketing strategy won’t be suitable for the entirety of my target audience
so by segmenting them I can figure out what strategy will be most effective for a specific
segment of my target audience.

Demographics are a quick and easy way to segment my audience as I can look at age,
gender, income, ethnicity, and location, however, I would need to decide what information
would then be useful when using it for marketing. Whilst producing different adverts for
different segments would target a wider audience, too many adverts would demonstrate an
ineffective use of segmentation and wouldn’t be profitable. Segmenting by demographics
would generate a large amount of data that could be used to track my consumers. One way
would be by age as I am trying to market to anyone over the age 16 so it would be useful to
find out the largest age demographic of users on my website. Finding the largest age group
would allow me to promote adverts on the suitable platform for those users. For example,
using TikTok to promote my website wouldn’t be useful for an audience over the age of 50
as they only make up 11% of TikTok’s users so a platform such as Facebook may be more
appropriate. Segmenting by location would be useful as I could then use my site to promote
concerts that a located in that area. For example, if users are based in London, I could then
send them emails notifying them of upcoming events that are happening in and around
London. However, if the user was based in America, I would then know not to notify them of
London based events unless they’d set it as a preference.

Another way to segment and target my audience would be through psychographics.

Psychographics focuses on the customers ‘emotions and values’ (Adele Revella, 2023) which
means that they look at opinions, lifestyle choices and qualitative data rather than
quantitative data such as age. My target audience would be people who enjoy records,
music, and live music events so I could create a marketing strategy to target this segment of
my audience. Segmenting my audience by psychographics would mean I can target a larger
audience with one advert rather than creating multiple adverts to target many smaller
segments. However, segmenting by psychographics gives me one group of people who all
enjoy the same things so whilst I could track the number of users in the segment, I wouldn’t
have much data about the individual users. To get varied data from this segment, I could
market my website on different social media platforms to track where most of these users
are seeing my website before interacting with it.
In order to successfully target certain
segments of my audience, I
researched my two biggest
competitors: Impericon and EMP, to
see the demographics of their
consumer base and how they are
marketing themselves. Out of the
two, EMP is the bigger company with
2.8M visits on their website however,
they have a higher bounce rate.
Having a high bounce rate could mean that the user didn’t have a positive user experience
on the site, or it could mean they couldn’t find the items they wanted. Strong SEO would’ve
led customers to EMP but this doesn’t necessarily mean that EMP successfully reached the
audience they were specifically targeting.

Both images below show the comparison of Impericon (navy coloured) and EMP (orange
coloured) with data from November 2023.

Looking at the companies, it’s clear that most of their users come from the direct channel of
distribution which means they’ve acquired a consumer base who already know and trust the
brand. The second largest channel is organic search which means users have searched
keywords that have led them to these companies due to them ranking highly on SERPs
because of their strong SEO.

The predominant form of SEO I will be doing is on-site SEO which refers to the content I have
created on my website. To improve my on-site SEO, I will want to make sure my keywords
are relevant to my site and are words people search for. By using Google Trends, I am able to
see which of my keywords would be most effective to include and what words I need to
change. As shown below, using key words such as ‘vinyl’ and ‘records’ would be effective as
they are words that are regularly searched. On the other hand, the word ‘cassettes’ is
relevant to the content of my website but is not a regularly searched term.
Other effective keywords would be ‘concert tickets’ and ‘musicians’ however, these words
can also be really vague and doesn’t give much detail about what the website sells or does.
Once I’ve generated my list of keywords, I would need to ensure that they are used
frequently throughout my website whether it’s in image descriptions, product descriptions
or titles.

Creating a domain more suited for the website will begin to improve my SEO as it will
remove words unrelated to the website and help my site reach a wider audience. At the
moment, the web address is https://sineadbidwell02.wixsite.com/anthemapparel however,
if it was anthemapparel.com then it would be easier for users to find the website as the
company name would be the domain name and not just the path. As well as this, I would
want my URL to be concise as longer URLs are difficult to be processed by search engines, so
the website would be ranked lower. Shorter URLs are more effective as they should only
contain the key information about the website so users can easily read and understand what
the page is about. Another effective SEO strategy is using meta tags which are pieces of code
that go in the <head> section of the website’s HTML and are displayed as descriptions in
search engine results. Meta tags used in combination with a short URL would ensure that
the domain is relevant to users and would generate more traffic through organic search as
my website would rank higher on the SERP. It’s important to recognise the fact that meta
tags are only effective if they are regularly updated to stay relevant with the content and
purpose of the website. As well as this, the tags used should contain language suitable for
my users, as any jargon or over complicated words that may not be understood by a majority
of my audience would be ineffective because the users would be searching for simpler words
that they use regularly. Therefore, my tags should be simple and easily understandable
whilst still being relevant to my website.

(Semrush, 2023)

I would be collecting data to understand the behaviour of my consumes and to work out if
any segments have similar traits or major differences. Any data collected can be useful, but I
would want to ensure the data I’m collecting is necessary and for an intended purpose. I
could set events that I want to track based on my marketing strategy. For example, if I were
to promote the record subscription feature on my site, I would use Google Analytics to track
an event based on subscribing, which plan is the most subscribed and what users are picking
as their items for the subscription box.

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM) are two tools that are beneficial to
improving my website’s SEO and SERP ranking. Providing a simplified route to implementing
code, Google Tag Manager removes the need for a ‘developer, or specialist coding
knowledge’ (SEOWorks, 2023). GTM can be used for tracking events and engagement
metrics by collating data from both GTM and Google Analytics to then offer insight about
marketing strategies and overall performance. By adding the provided tags onto my website,
GTM can track key bits of data such as which tags have led the customer to my website so I
can then track what part of my SEO strategy is most effective. Another benefit to using
Google Analytics and GTM to track my SEO is that I can assess which marketing distribution
channel is generating the largest amount of traffic and therefore I can focus on marketing my
site through one particular channel.

References:
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https://www.hotjar.com/blog/psychographics-in-marketing/ [Accessed 14 December 2023].
- Aleh Barysevich. (2020). 10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO. [Online].
Search Engine Journal. Last Updated: 28th July 2020. Available at:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/important-tags-seo/156440/#close [Accessed 12th
December 2023].
- Bright Edge Research. (2019). Organic Search Improves Ability to Map to Consumer Intent:
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report/BrightEdge_ChannelReport2019_FINAL.pdf [Accessed 14 December 2023].
- Catey Miller. (2022). The Difference Between Organic Traffic and Direct Traffic Website
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- Connor Lahey. (2022). 12 SEO Tips to Boost Your Organic Rankings & Traffic. [Online].
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