Audience Research vs Keyword Research: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

For most SEO campaigns I see, audience research is an afterthought.

It’s probably the most important part of any SEO strategy, yet many companies overlook it.

Companies tend to think keyword research is enough for planning a strategy. 

But with keyword research tools, we never get the full picture.

We don’t see:

• Who’s searching for those keywords
• Why they’re searching for those keywords
• Why we should go after these keywords in the first place

You fix all this if you add initial audience research to your process before you even start keyword research.

You get a better understanding of the “why” behind a search and not just the “what.”

In this article, I’ll talk about where companies go wrong with their approach to audience research and how they can fix it.

The Common Mistake with Keyword Research

Many companies, from early-stage startups to established brands, make the same mistake regarding SEO and content creation.

They put way too much weight into keyword research as a way to guide their SEO strategy.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing it this way, keyword research is primarily a tactic and not a strategy lever.

This usually looks like:

1. Using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to generate a list of seed keywords
2. Going after keywords with the highest search volume or lowest difficulty

The problem we run into with this is that keyword research doesn’t tell us anything about the searcher behind that query.

Sure, keyword research tools can give us some insights, but they don’t really tell us the intent behind each keyword.

We have keyword research. So you go into Ahrefs or maybe SEMrush or whatever tool you’re using, and you look at the keyword. Pick those phrase-matching keywords, right? Those terms, you export that list, and then you use some sort of a prioritization model. The problem is keyword research tools can tell you how many people are searching for a particular keyword. You know, what is the keyword difficulty, how hard it would be to rank based on backlinks, whatever, but they cannot tell you who the searcher is. So when someone is searching for something like “What is email marketing,” how would you know if that person is a director of marketing at a company or maybe a co-founder? It could be a college student looking for a definition. Like it’s really hard to figure out what are the exact topics that my buyers are specifically searching for, unless you spend time in customer research. – Usman Akram 

If we want our content to resonate with our audience, we have to go beyond traditional keyword research.

We have to: 

1. Build a deeper understanding of the customer
2. Research the broader market
3. Understand what our audience is truly searching for

Why Audience Research is so Necessary for SEO and Content Strategies

While I kind of touched on this before, audience research is still a must for SEO.

I’d argue that, especially for B2B companies, it’s something you should start with before you even consider SEO.

I think as SEOs, if you really want to drive major impact based on the kind of goals that you are pursuing, which is usually traffic to increase revenue. You have to start with something more foundational, right? So you have to build a deeper understanding of the customer, of the product, of the market in general, and then you have keyword research, the technical part of it. So, yeah, I see it quite often, even for larger companies. Usually we would expect early-stage startups to have this approach, but even bigger brands are not giving a lot of thought to the overall process of content creation.

Obviously, this will guide your other marketing efforts, but for SEO specifically, it can help you: 

1. Understand searcher intent: Who is likely searching for this keyword, and why are they searching for it? Are they looking for information on how to solve a current problem they’re facing or are they looking to consider/purchase a product?
2. Aligning content with user needs: When you truly understand the “why” behind a search, you can create better content that actually resonates with your audience. You understand what issues they’re currently facing, and you can provide an answer that makes them feel like they’re being heard.
3. Informing content strategy: This will be a core part of what I’m talking about here, but audience research will basically supply you with ammunition for new content topics to target. When you have a better understanding of your core audience, you can target the searches that are actually coming from them, not what you think they’re searching for.

How to Get Started With Audience Research and Then Blend it With Keyword Research

Now that I have the “why” out of the way, let’s talk about how to actually do audience research.

Build Out Your Buyer Personas

The first step is to have a general idea of your buyer personas.

These will be the audiences you target with your marketing. 

Ideally, you’ll want to use your personas as a basis for all of your content and SEO efforts.

So basically, the way I think about customer research is you have to figure out a couple of things starting from the absolute foundational level, right? So you first of all, need to know who exactly am I targeting? Right. That is your basic persona. Maybe you have, you know, a marketing director that you want to reach at a SaaS company or whatever, right? So you define that person’s role and their company and all of that stuff, very basic. The other stuff would be what kind of problems they face, right? So their pain points, their motivations, the stuff they care about. And what exactly are they trying to solve for where your solution can potentially come into the equation.

Based on what Usman said, these buyer personas can help you identify:

• Who’s behind those searches
• What terminology they use when they search
• The pain points they’re currently facing

You’ll want to put these personas together based on a few factors:

• What’s the typical job title of your decision-makers?
• What type of budget are they usually working with?
• What size company do they work at?
• What does their daily work like and how can you make their day easier? 
• What does their buyer’s journey look like?
• Are there any barriers to purchase for them?

It is called a persona, after all. Build out a realistic persona based on their name, interests, title, and pain points

When you understand all of this, you have a better idea of how to tie in keywords around that initial research.

Talk With Your Teams Who Are Client Facing

One of the best places to start with audience research is your own team.

If you have an established customer base, your client-facing teams, like demo, sales, and customer teams, will be the best place to start.

They interact with your ICP almost daily, so they can give you some insights into what your audience really cares about.

This could be:

• Common questions and concerns raised by customers
• Pain points and challenges your audience is facing
• Typical customer profiles and personas

You basically have an entire audience research tool right in your own company.

Look at Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a goldmine of information about your audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. Analyzing reviews can help you:

• Identify common themes in customer feedback, like…
• Understand the features or aspects of your product/service that resonate most with users
• Discover areas where customers are seeking more information or guidance
• Gain insights into the language and terminology your audience uses

This information can be used to create content that directly addresses customer needs and concerns, improving relevance and engagement.

Look at Reddit Posts to See How People Are Talking About Your Topic

One of the best ways (if not the best way) to do audience research is to look at what people are talking about on Reddit.

There are plenty of ways you can use Reddit for keyword and audience research, but the main benefit here is that your ICP is literally categorized based on their profession.

In my case, as an SEO who works primarily with SaaS companies, I can use r/startups, r/SaaS, and r/entrepreneur to understand what my pain points my audience truly has when it comes to SEO.

The other thing would be to use Reddit as a raw tool for user feedback on a specific topic. Or user views on a specific subject. So, if I am searching for a keyword, like video conferencing challenges. Something like that. I’m trying to create an informational piece of content, a very SEO thing to do.

Reddit can give you insights about what people face as a challenge. So, rather than relying on SERP analysis to just regurgitate the same templatized sort of content in your own piece. You can actually use real users’ experiences to inform the kind of content that you should be creating. Right. And again, from a strategy perspective, I use Reddit all the time.

So not only can you understand what topics your audience is interested in, but you can also learn how you can make your content more relevant to what they actually care about.

The end goal of SEO is the user.

And what good is our SEO if the user doesn’t resonate or feel like they’re being heard with what we have to say?

Interview Your Audience Directly

If you don’t have any direct team members you can interview, you can always interview your ICP directly. 

This can either be:

• Direct interviews (video calls or in-person)
• LinkedIn conversations
• Demo calls
• Surveys sent to existing customers
• Inviting your existing customers for a coffee chat
• Cold emailing new prospects for a quick coffee chat

Essentially, you want to gather raw, actionable information from them that you can use to better serve future customers.

With more insight into your customers’ minds, you can tailor your marketing and SEO campaigns around the things that actually matter.

You’ll also have an easier time targeting the right audience. That means more conversions and lower CACs.

But you need to ask the right questions to get the answers you need.

If you want to leverage your audience’s insights directly, you can:

• Ask about their information-seeking habits and preferred content formats
• Inquire about their decision-making processes and factors influencing their choices
• Explore their industry knowledge and areas where they need more information
• Focus on understanding their challenges, goals, and decision-making processes
• Look for common themes and insights across multiple interviews

Build a Topical Map Around Your Audience Research

One of the best ways to blend your audience research with keyword research is by using an overall topical map.

So, when you understand what your audience cares about, you can create an overall topic around that research and then use keyword research to fill in the gaps. 

You can then treat them as big topical themes, right? Like, Hey, my buyer cares, cares about reducing churn. So churn reduction becomes a topical theme that they are really interested in. And then you layer on top of it, a funnel direction for content creation, right? So you say, we’re not going to target the top of the funnel stuff.

They already know about that. You know, what is reducing churn as a definition. I figured in my research that my customers are not a big fan of all of that basic content. So we’re going to, you know, totally remove that content out of the equation. And what we are left with is let’s say middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel content. Now I have clarity, right? I know the topical themes. I know the funnel stages. I can simply jump into Ahrefs, make a list, and I would be able to Exactly know what keywords are relevant or irrelevant, right? And then from that point onwards, you do your classical stuff, server analysis, content creation, all of that stuff. But again, what this adds is a lot of clarity that when you have a big chunk of keywords, you can just scan those out, which you think are irrelevant based on your analysis.

When you come to the table with audience research, it makes it much easier to filter out keywords that don’t actually matter to your audience.

In this case, you’ll likely want to filter your topics down to middle of funnel and bottom of funnel keywords.

That’s not to say that you should avoid ToFu topics entirely, but your MoFu and BoFu content will always have more conversion potential beyond just an informational search.

The best way to put this is: Always consider whether that topic or keyword has any potential for tying in your product.

Whether to promote (BoFu content) or tie in directly as a solution (MoFu content).

With ToFu, the content is mostly informational and doesn’t signal any conversion or consideration intent. 

So while you may be able to tie your products into that content and build brand awareness with it, it’s not going to have the same impact as MoFu content. 

I think Tim Soulo of Ahrefs put this well, even going as far to say that you should avoid using funnel metrics:

Keyword Research Doesn’t Need to be Replaced, It Just Shouldn’t Be Prioritized First

Keyword research is still an important part of SEO. 

But that doesn’t mean it should be your primary focus.

Instead, it should be used alongside a broader, audience-first approach. 

The key is to use keyword research as a complementary tool to audience research, not as a replacement or primary strategy. 

Start with a deep understanding of your audience, then use keyword research to refine and optimize your content strategy.