An effective SEO / GEO strategy starts with a good understanding of your target audience and their online behaviors. To make it easier, we advise you to represent it in the form of an SEO persona integrating not only the usual characteristics of a marketing persona, but also information specific to its search behavior. Find out how to do this and a concrete example of an SEO persona from which to develop a powerful search marketing strategy.
SEO persona is not very different from “classic” marketing persona also called buyer persona. Basically, it’s about describing a fictitious persona representing a typical prospect or customer and the link he or she may have with your products or services. The concept of SEO persona proposes to go one step further to detect the keyword themes that your persona is likely to type in search engines. This approach forces you to put yourself in the place of your target and to take their point of view to identify the right keywords.
In the era of AI-Search, where search engines are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence to handle conversational and contextual queries (such as generative searches on Google or Bing), a well-defined persona becomes even more crucial. It not only allows you to anticipate users' deeper intentions but also to optimize content for algorithms that prioritize semantic relevance and personalized user experiences, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of traditional searches based solely on isolated keywords.
Let’s imagine that you run an e-commerce specializing in high quality children’s clothing. Your typical customer is a married man with children who works full-time. When establishing your persona, you need to imagine a real person and put yourself in his shoes. It is a question of understanding the daily life of this person: what are his desires, his motivations, his frustrations but also his interests and the channels he prefers. It is essential to understand the reasons why your marketing persona is sensitive to your product or service, beyond its technical characteristics.
When you want to set up a digital marketing strategy, it can be useful to flesh out your buyer persona a little bit, especially in terms of behavior on the Internet and the way he/she interacts with the online channels.
But how do you go about it? Once again, start by formulating hypotheses by putting yourself in your persona’s shoes. For example, ask yourself:
Once you have defined your assumptions, compare them with the data you have. This will allow you to refine and objectify your persona.
Your company may have conducted market research in the past or a customer survey. You can also turn to your sales representatives who receive regular feedback from prospects and customers. They are best able to inform you about their needs, motivations, reservations and arguments to which they are sensitive.
Similarly, your internal databases (CRM) and web analytics are full of valuable information. Your Google Analytics account, for example, is very useful to establish a digital persona. The “User attributes” tab allows you to find out the age, gender, country of origin and language of the people who visit your website. You can also discover their different affinity categories (= interests).
Through segmentation, you can also focus on a specific acquisition channel or even go further and analyze the behavior of visitors who have made an online conversion.
You can then refine your marketing personas (= general profiles) and specify their attitude, preferences and interests in relation to their preferred channels:
Among the channels favored by your persona, you will very often find “Search”, that is to say search engines such as Google or Bing. The SEO persona is therefore to pay particular attention to the behavior of your target when he/she is looking for information at different times of the Customer journey.
Let’s take our example of e-commerce for children’s clothing and our marketing persona: Nicolas. What are the themes that interest Nicolas and for which e-commerce could offer relevant content (information, advice, solution or product)?
Once this first “screening” is done, you can go to your Google Search Console account (you don’t have one yet? Here are the instructions to create an account). You will then have access to the keywords that generated an impression of your site in Google results.
In the “Performance” tab, you will find all the queries on which your site appeared and the number of clicks generated. This can help you identify the most relevant terms and give you new ideas.
You can also analyze the behavior of your potential customers on your own website.
After performing these searches, you may feel a little overwhelmed by the number of search terms found. We advise you to classify them by major keyword themes, concentrating initially on the queries most likely to generate a purchase or a contact with your company. You can then start by optimizing your site and its contents on these priority keywords, before targeting broader themes.
Once these 4 steps have been completed, you are able to formalize your SEO / GEO persona through his main research themes, as in the example below:
While SEO focuses on optimizing for traditional search engines like Google or Bing, where results are typically lists of links based on keyword matching and algorithms, GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—takes this a step further into the era of AI-powered search. Generative engines, such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity AI, or Claude, don't just rank pages; they generate synthesized responses by pulling and rephrasing information from various sources.
GEO involves optimizing your content to increase its chances of being included, cited, or summarized in these AI-generated answers. This means crafting content that is not only keyword-rich but also structured for easy extraction by large language models (LLMs), using techniques like incorporating authoritative language, statistics, unique phrasing, and clear, fluent explanations.
In the context of your overall search marketing strategy, integrating GEO ensures your brand remains visible as users increasingly turn to conversational AI for quick, comprehensive insights rather than scrolling through search results.
Absolutely, especially if your audience is shifting toward AI-driven tools for discovery and decision-making. Just as an SEO persona helps tailor content for keyword-based searches, a GEO persona refines your understanding of how your target users interact with generative engines. Users of these tools often pose more natural, conversational queries—like full sentences or complex questions seeking advice, comparisons, or summaries—rather than short keyword phrases.
If your data shows traffic from AI referrals (e.g., via analytics tools tracking AI-generated traffic) or if your industry involves informational content (such as advice on parenting, fashion trends, or product recommendations), a GEO persona can reveal opportunities to optimize for these behaviors.
It prevents your content from being overlooked in AI responses and complements your SEO efforts by addressing the full spectrum of modern search. Without it, you risk missing out on visibility in a landscape where generative engines are projected to handle a growing share of queries.
Creating a GEO persona builds directly on your SEO persona but adapts it for the nuances of generative AI interactions. Use your existing marketing or SEO persona (like our example of Nicolas) as a foundation, then layer in AI-specific behaviors. Here's a step-by-step guide, mirroring the SEO process for consistency:
Start with the same informational and transactional themes from your SEO persona, but consider how they manifest in AI queries. For generative engines, users seek synthesized insights, so themes might include comparisons, personalized advice, or aggregated opinions.
Unlike SEO's concise keywords, GEO queries are often longer and more conversational, phrased as questions or requests for reasoning. Put yourself in your persona's shoes: How would Nicolas ask an AI for help?
Validate your assumptions using analytics from generative platforms. If available, check tools like ChatGPT's usage data, Google Analytics for AI referral traffic, or ActivGEO.
Organize the queries by theme, prioritizing those likely to lead to conversions. Then, apply GEO tactics: Enhance content with statistics (e.g., "80% of parents prefer eco-friendly options"), authoritative tone (e.g., "As experts in children's apparel..."), and unique, quotable phrases. Focus first on high-intent transactional queries before broader informational ones.
Once complete, your GEO persona might look like an extension of the SEO example, with added sections on AI query styles and preferred generative tools. This will inform content updates, such as adding FAQ-style responses or data-backed sections to your pages and blog.
With all this data, you have a better understanding of your audiences’ behavior and the type of information they are looking for in relation to your products/services.
You will be able to build a robust content strategy around :
But before reviewing your website and your content in depth, one last step is essential: the semantic analysis. We will see, in a next article, how to perform this analysis as part of a long-term SEO strategy. If you need some help for your GEO strategy, we can help you to proritize and implement it with our GEO services.
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