How to research an audience for SEO tools

What to take away

A target audience for SEO tools is the specific group of people whose search, ranking and reporting work a tool is meant to support, described by role, budget and the decisions they make each week.

What counts as a target audience for SEO tools?

Start with the job, not the company size. An in-house marketer at a retailer with four sites and an agency account manager share a title but not a problem. One needs weekly rank movement to justify spend. The other needs client-ready reports across twenty accounts.

Segment on three things: what the person is accountable for, how often they report, and who signs off the budget. Skill level matters too, because it decides whether a tool's defaults are enough or whether the person needs exports and APIs.

A person who reports weekly needs movement data. A person who plans content quarterly needs volume trends. Same keyword, different product.

Write each segment as a single sentence. If you cannot say who it is without listing four adjectives, the segment is too broad to test. The SEO tools: audience research guide for England covers the wider definitions this method assumes.

Where should the audience data come from?

Use three sources and keep them separate until you compare them. Keyword research gives demand evidence. Analytics gives behaviour. Conversations give motive.

Keyword work shows the phrases people type and how those phrases cluster. Semrush keyword research features group terms into themes, which is a faster way to see whether rank tracking and SEO reporting attract the same people or different ones.

Analytics tells you which pages and queries already bring people in, and which of them convert. The Government Digital Service guidance on choosing digital analytics tools is written for public services, but the test it sets, start from the questions you need answered, applies to any reporting stack.

Supplier documentation helps you check what is possible. Feature pages such as Moz Pro: All-in-One SEO Toolkit show the capability set you may need to map onto each segment.

Keep one page per segment, with the source and the date beside every line. If two sources disagree, the newer one wins until you test it.

What does a sourced audience table look like?

The table below is an illustrative example, not a finding. It shows the shift from claims to evidence.

The right-hand column is what you would hand to a colleague. The left is where most teams start.

How do you test the picture?

Take the segment sentence to five to eight people who match it and ask what they did last week. The answers either fit the sentence or they do not. If three people describe a task your segments leave out, add a segment or narrow an existing one.

Write each answer as you hear it. Then compare the words people use with the words in your segment sentence.

Interview formats matter more than sample size at this stage, and the SEO tools customer interviews in England article sets out five structures you can run without a research budget.

Then triangulate. If keyword demand points to enterprise reporting and your analytics show small-site traffic, do not average the two. Record the gap and treat it as a question for the next round of conversations.

Common questions

How many segments should a small team track?

Two or three is usually enough to start. More than that and the comparison work doubles without changing which tools you shortlist.

Can you build this without paid tools?

Yes. Search Console, a free keyword planner and eight conversations will give you a defensible first draft. Paid platforms speed up the clustering step, not the thinking.

How often should the data be refreshed?

Quarterly, or whenever a major platform changes how it reports. Keep the previous version so you can see what moved.

What if two sources disagree?

Say so in writing. A recorded disagreement is more useful than a merged average, and it usually points to a segment you have not separated yet.