When SEO ends and psychographics begins in building an audience for web content.

A lot of attention right now is given to the technical tasks associated with structuring and presenting content in a way that allows the search engines to index your content effectively.  This sort of activity involves tasks commonly associated with Search Engine Optimization.  Activities like content silo’ing, meta-tagging, keyword placement, XML site map submitting, cross linking, A/B and multivariate testing, etc, are some of the tactics involved in a broader strategy for ensuring your content is optimized for search engine indexing.  If your content is well indexed by the search engines, then the people out there searching for something related to your content will hopefully find you before they find someone else.  The irony obviously, is that in this stage you have to appease the bot to get to the humans.  You need to know how the bot “thinks” as much if not more than how your audience thinks.

But assuming you do a good job of appeasing the bots, and the bots in turn bring you unsuspecting humans, then you have to know what to do with the humans.  This is where a deep understanding of your audience’s psychographics will help in developing a strategy for broadening and, more importantly, deepening your relationship with your audience.  Psychographics refers to an understanding of who your consumer is, where they are coming from, what they are looking for, and how they look for it…what motivates them.  It’s the psychology counter point to demographics which is more focused on quantitative group profiling than understanding the motivations or attitudes, interests, and opinions of the people that compose that group.  Both are important.  But the motivations side of that coin is most often overlooked.

Publishing excellent content is good.  Leveraging Search Engine Optimization practices to promote your excellent content is great.  But if you have a growing audience for your content, it rapidly becomes important to understand why they like you.  Knowing why your audience likes you will help build a sustainable approach to your content strategy as you understand the motivations behind the numbers for your success.

So, this all begs the questions, “how do I discern the motivations of my audience?”  Well, there in lies the tough stuff.  It requires primary research.  I mean talking to actual humans….I know, this is something we thought we could avoid in an era of Analytics.  I thought for a long time, that math would enable me to tool away in my little digital cave and at the same time affect real people through the internet everywhere.  Well, it seems analytics shows us what’s working, but still fails to explain the details of why (or as a colleague recently pointed out…why not)  Primary research with real life humans is still required in understanding why humans behave they way they do.

The good news is that this primary research when coupled with rigorous analytics is like pulling the curtain back to expose a method behind the magic.  And that’s powerful.