I have had a lot of issues in the last couple of years with my website audience. I haven’t really been able to put my finger on it.
The problem has been that somehow my website has attracted a lot of “wrong type of people”. Somehow I ended up listening to their criticism and catering to their needs. While doing this, I simultaneously lost my core.
I tried to alleviate by just looking at behaviour of the people. However, when giving tasks to content writers this does not work. The text will be really bland and lack soul.
I tried to think of this through demographics at first. I looked at stuff like:
- age
- sex
- income level
- education level
- profession / lack of it
This really did not do it.
I thought about this long and hard and decided I have to look at this from the point of view of etnography and phenomenology. Finally when I did this, was I able to choose my audience better.
I also noticed that for my chosen tribe, a lot of the words have different meaning due to the values, drivers and assumptions these people have about how the world operates.
I believe this gives a really interesting perspective to the way I look at keywords. Depending on the tribe this person belongs to, a keyword might have a completely connotation and even meaning. Now it is only about picking the keywords but understanding that with my keyword selection I can drive the correct audience towards my site, too.
(And yes, I have read my Foucault and Skeggs)
Markus Ossi 