Should I Make Pages for My Different Customer Types?

SEO Question: Some of my clients sites have different customer types. I am afraid of pigeonholing the prospects. Should I make pages for the different customer types?

SEO Answer: If the services offered and price ranges are drastically different or people buy your products for exceptionally different reasons then it makes sense to create pages for different demographic groups.

Here are some of the advantages of creating different pages based on different demographics:

• Most people will not enter your site through the home page: If people do transactional or informational searches they are far more inclined to land on an internal page than a home page. Why? Because there are many more web pages than web sites. Creating the individual pages allows you to drill down and build large quantities of traffic by being relevant for many highly targeted niche phrases.

• Conversion: pages which speak to a specific audience will do much better than pages that try to appeal to everyone
• Improved margins and targeting: If you participate in pay per click marketing or any other type of marketing that runs on thin margins creating a page that can convert well to a specific self selected demographic will allow you to continue to compete while some competitors are forced out of the market on margins.
• More doorways: Each additional page of targeted useful content is another ticket in the search lottery. If your competitors just focus on the generic what words and you create quality targeted content around the why words you should be able to pick off some low hanging fruit.

If most of your business comes from one client type then it may make sense to set the home page to target that market segment by default.

In addition to targeting different demographics it may also make sense to create pages targeting their common questions, problems and important points along the buying cycle.

If your demographic groups and empathetic buying points are vastly different (and perhaps diametrically opposed) it may make sense to create different brands and sites to allow you to target the different demographics without risking offending or turning off other groups.

You can still use your home page to give people the gist of what sets you apart, but by focusing pages on common problems and questions consumers may have, and creating pages for different consumer types you open many additional doors to your site which are also easier to advertise and are more likely to convert.

There are a ton of fun or cool demographic tools or ideas being shared on the web. A couple examples:

• New York City demographic map by decade from 1900 to 2000

• using termites to activate the sales cycle