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Here’s what I’m covering this week: How to build user personas for SEO from data you already have on hand.
You can’t treat personas as a “brand exercise” anymore.
In the AI-search era, prompts don’t just tell you what users want; they reveal who’s asking and under what constraints.
If your pages don’t match the person behind the query and connect with them quickly – their role, risks, and concerns they have, and the proof they require to resolve the intent – you’re likely not going to win the click or the conversion.
It’s time to not only pay attention and listen to your customers, but also optimize for their behavioral patterns.
Search used to be simple: queries = intent. You matched a keyword to a page and called it a day.
Personas were a nice-to-have, often useful for ads and creative or UX decisions, but mostly considered irrelevant by most to organic visibility or growth.
Not anymore.
Longer prompts and personalized results don’t just express what someone wants; they also expose who they are and the constraints they’re operating under.
AIOs and AI chats act as a preview layer and borrow trust from known brands. However, blue links still close when your content speaks to the person behind the prompt.
If that sounds like hard work, it is. And it’s why most teams stall implementing search personas across their strategy.
- Personas can feel expensive, generic, academic, or agency-driven.
- The old persona PDFs your brand invested in 3-5 years ago are dated – or missing entirely.
- The resources, time, and knowledge it takes to build user personas are still significant blockers to getting the work done.
In this memo, I’ll show you how to build lean, practical, LLM-ready user personas for SEO – using the data you already have, shaped by real behavioral insights – so your pages are chosen when it counts.
While there are a few ways you could do this, and several really excellent articles out there on SEO personas this past year, this is the approach I take with my clients.
Most legacy persona decks were built for branding, not for search operators.
They don’t tell your writers, SEOs, or PMs what to do next, so they get ignored by your team after they’re created.
Mistake #1: Demographics ≠ Decisions
Classic user personas for SEO and marketing overfocused on demographics, which can give some surface-level insights into stereotypical behavior for certain groups.
But demographics don’t necessarily help your brand stand out against your competitors. And demographics don’t offer you the full picture.
Mistake #2: A Static PDF Or Shared Doc Ages Fast
If your personas were created once and never reanalyzed or updated again, it’s likely they got lost in G: Drive or Dropbox purgatory.
If there’s no owner working to ensure they’re implemented across production, there’s no feedback loop to understand if they’re…
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