Personas and audience analysis that genuinely shape your website

Personas like these are developed in workshops, documented in polished presentations and included in the project specification. Some are very well researched, with clear descriptions of the audiences’ needs, motivations and relationship with what the company offers. Yet they are often forgotten just when decisions about the website’s content, structure and features need to be made.

The method is rarely the problem. The trouble starts when a persona describes who a visitor is but says little about what they want to do. A website rarely needs to know whether Anna likes yoga. It does need to know why she visits, which questions she wants answered and what it will take for her to take the next step. Those insights should guide the information architecture (how content is organised and found), the navigation and the path to getting in touch.

En persona is a fictional but representative description of a user within a target audience. Based on audience analysis, it should give everyone on the project a shared understanding of users’ needs, behaviours and motivations. Traditionally, it also includes age, job role, family and interests, which can be relevant to branding, communications and advertising.

When we develop a website, however, what matters is the user’s intent: what they are trying to achieve, which problem they want to solve and what information they need to make a decision. A useful persona therefore helps everyone working on the website make decisions, from strategists and designers to editors and developers.

These terms are often used together, but they serve different purposes. The target audience is the people or organisations a company wants to reach, such as purchasing managers at medium-sized manufacturing companies. Audience analysis explores how they make decisions and look for information. A persona then makes those insights tangible by describing a type of user the project team can discuss.

Without proper audience analysis, a persona becomes something else: a well-written assumption about people the project team actually knows very little about.

A classic example is the ambition to create separate pages, or even separate user journeys, for each persona. If a project has identified four audiences, four tailored entry points may sound logical. But different personas often share the same needs, look for the same services and use the same search terms. At the same time, one person may visit the website with completely different intentions depending on how far along they are in their decision-making.

A marketing director looking for a new web agency might want to understand what a new website costs, explore the available CMS options, compare agencies, find a recommended supplier or discover how long a project takes. It is the same person in the same role, but their needs vary considerably. A structure based solely on their belonging to the marketing directors audience misses what determines which information is relevant.

This becomes particularly clear when personas are considered alongside the website’s SEO strategy, because a structure built around internal audience definitions rarely reflects how clients search. Say a company has three personas – a vd, a marketing director and a digital strategist – who are all interested in web development. Creating a service page for each persona produces three pages with much the same content, the same search intent and similar keywords.

Those pages then compete for the same searches rather than complementing one another, a problem known as keyword cannibalisation. Visitors also have to work out which audience they belong to before they can find the right information. The website ends up organised around the company’s view of its clients rather than the questions that brought them there.

That does not mean audience-specific pages are always wrong. Industry-specific landing pages can be very valuable when audiences have distinctly different needs, relevant offerings or search intentions. But those differences need to justify the split, not simply the fact that visitors belong to different personas. Our starting point is that the structure should help users complete their tasks. Internal audience categories must come second.

Creating personas is rarely the difficult part. We see four main reasons why they go unused when decisions are made.

Many personas are created in internal workshops where participants describe their typical clients. That is a good starting point, particularly in an organisation with years of client experience, but it is important to distinguish what you think from what you know. Sales teams’ experience, questions received by client services, website data and interviews with real clients provide a much more nuanced picture. A persona does not need extensive research to be grounded in more than assumptions.

Six or eight personas may suggest thorough audience research, but the more you have to prioritise, the harder they become to use. A home page cannot give eight messages equal space, and a service page cannot cater to every audience’s needs at once. For many web projects, two or three priority personas are a good starting point, although the number should always reflect how different the needs actually are.

Age, family and hobbies give a persona character, but rarely help when designing a page. Knowing that a purchasing manager is 47 tells you little about what a product page should look like. Knowing that the same person needs to compare technical specifications, understand delivery terms and prepare a recommendation for management tells you much more.

The most common problem is that personas are treated as a standalone deliverable: presented, approved and filed away, without anyone deciding how they should influence content, navigation, search strategy or conversion goals. If a persona cannot help the project team decide what to prioritise on a page, its value is limited.

In web projects, we prefer personas that describe users’ tasks, questions and decision-making processes. A useful persona should answer five questions:

1. What does the visitor want to get done? The task or problem behind the visit, for example: I need to find a supplier who can handle our production volumes and understand roughly what it will cost.
2. Which questions does the visitor need answered? These inform headings, content, FAQs, guides and landing pages.
3. How does the visitor find the website? Through a search engine, a recommendation, an advert, social media or a search for the company’s name. Different entry points create different expectations of the content.
4. What barriers and uncertainties are there? Price, technical requirements, lack of trust, lead times or difficulty comparing options.
5. What is a natural next step? Booking a meeting, sending an enquiry, downloading a product sheet or reading more. For someone early in the decision-making process, the right next step may be to learn more.

With those five answers in place, you have a much stronger foundation for shaping the website’s content and features.

Good audience analysis does not need to be a large, expensive project. Much of the most valuable knowledge already exists within the organisation. The work involves gathering it, filling any gaps and turning it into actionable insights.

Talk to the colleagues who deal with clients every day. What questions do sales teams receive before preparing a quote? Which objections come up most often? What do clients ask support about? Add data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and existing client surveys to build an initial picture of the needs, questions and barriers people actually have.

It is easy to get stuck in the company’s own view of why clients choose it. Just five to ten interviews can reveal recurring patterns, even if they are not enough to draw statistically reliable conclusions about the entire audience. Ask what the client was trying to achieve, what information was missing, which alternatives they compared and what decided their choice. Try to understand what brought them to the website in the first place, rather than what they think of it.

This is where audience analysis meets SEO. Keyword research reveals the words people use, as well as the questions and needs behind their searches. Someone searching for how much does a website cost is at a different stage from someone searching for web agency Stockholm or the name of a specific agency.

We usually distinguish between three types of search intent (the purpose behind a search). Information-seeking visitors want to understand a problem or explore possible solutions. Visitors comparing options already know the alternatives and want to weigh them up. Decision-focused visitors are looking for a specific supplier or a way to get in touch. This is not a comprehensive SEO classification, but it is a practical model for identifying the content needed at different stages of the client journey.

Once you have gathered the evidence, look for patterns. We recommend grouping users by needs and tasks rather than job title, age or industry. A vd and a marketing director may share the need to understand what a new website costs, while two marketing directors may have completely different starting points depending on their companies’ size and goals. The aim is to identify differences that genuinely justify different content or features.

Not every audience can have equal priority. Start with the users who matter most to your organisation’s goals and the needs your website is best placed to meet. Two or three priority personas are often enough to give the project a shared direction. They do not restrict who can use the website – they determine what comes first when needs compete for the same space.

A persona only becomes useful when it informs decisions: when planning the structure, writing content, sketching designs and choosing features. We usually work through four areas.

Deciding what content is needed and how to organise it means balancing audience needs with search intent, what the company offers and the website’s goals. That rarely means a separate page for each persona. More often, a shared structure works better, allowing different users to find answers to their own questions.

Every page needs a clear purpose: which questions should it answer, and in what order? A visitor comparing suppliers may first need to understand the differences between solutions, while another wants to see previous projects, technical specifications or indicative pricing before reading further.

User insights reveal which elements need prominence, how navigation should work and where visitors might hesitate or get stuck. The aim is to make the shared experience more relevant, so a separate design for each persona is rarely needed.

For a prospective client, the goal might be to request a quote; for an existing client, to find support information quickly. Each priority user task therefore needs to be linked to a goal or metric, so you can assess whether the website is working.

We recommend naming personas after their main task rather than giving them a fictional first name. Someone comparing suppliers says more about how the website should help the visitor than Anna, 42.

This is a simplified example. In a real project, the details should come from your audience analysis.

Keep descriptions short. What matters is how useful they are when decisions need to be made.

When a company is commissioning a new website, its target audiences are an important part of the brief. Our article on writing a brief for a web agency explains what to include. You do not need finished personas at that stage. It is often enough to describe your most important visitors, their needs and what they should be able to do on the website, then carry out more detailed audience analysis during the project’s discovery phase.

If you already have well-developed personas, they provide a valuable starting point. Be open to expanding or revisiting them as user behaviour, search intent and the website’s structure are analysed. What determines the project’s success is how those insights are put into practice on the website.

Personas and audience analysis deliver the most value when combined with a well-considered SEO strategy, a clear structure and measurable goals. Every page can then be justified by what visitors are trying to do there. A persona that does not help explain that is probably describing the wrong things.

Thoughtful audience analysis is an important part of the groundwork, but there are other questions to answer before starting a web project.

Our guide Public procurement for a website walks you through the process, from audience and brief to project specification and supplier selection.

Download the guide Public procurement for a website