Does audience segmentation impact your SEO?
Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat, and his team studied 300 websites to learn the truth about audience segmentation.
And he shared the results at B2B Forum 2024, to a room filled with B2B marketers eager to make a bigger impact through SEO.
Watch the video or read the transcript below to get a peek at Tom’s results.
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So let’s talk about audience segmentation.
I think that this is a pretty interesting topic because, look, I’ve been in SEO since 2005. That was my first year actually optimizing websites. I worked at an SEO agency at the time. We were working with a lot of Fortune 500 brands.
So I’ve seen a lot through the years. I’ve been to a lot of conferences. I’ve read a lot of blog posting, [watched] a lot of SEO videos…
And I hardly ever, ever hear anyone talking about audience segmentation!
So we thought it’d be pretty interesting to see: is there a correlation?
If a website does segment the audience, does it help your SEO results at all? Or is it a non factor?
Because we were not seeing any definitive data out there. We were not seeing anyone focused on this. We weren’t seeing any guidance in this direction. So we thought that this, especially for a B2B company, a B2B organization, obviously audience segmentation is critical.
So what’s the impact on SEO?
And what we found was that there is an impact.
There’s a very direct correlation.
So we looked at 300 websites, the ones that were segmenting their audience in the website by industry.
So for example, for healthcare, let’s just say hypothetically that you sell CRM software, right? So CRM software for healthcare, for government, for tech, for manufacturing, for financial services, that type of industry segmentation produced very tangible, significant traffic growth.
What we found was in this study, those websites that were segmenting their audience by industry grew their organic traffic year over year by close to 30%. So 28.7%, so pretty substantial.
And you compare that to the websites that were not segmenting by audience and they grew… but marginally, right?
Only by 4%.
And so in other words, another way to look at that is, there’s a seven-x improvement in your organic traffic growth rate if you segment your website by audience.
And I don’t mean the entire website.
It can be, for instance, you might have an industry section in your content hub. You might have filtering based on industry. And so it’s that type of industry segmentation that we were looking at here.
But this is something that you can’t ignore. It’s something that’s not talked about elsewhere. It’s something, for whatever reason, the SEO industry has completely overlooked!
But this is something that’s low hanging fruit for you. If you do have segmentation in your website today, but it’s very minimal, lean into it. If you don’t segment your audience on your website today, this is something that you should absolutely do.
The data is very clear on this.
And the good news is, the benefits do not stop at increased traffic growth.
What we also found was, if we’re going to look at backlinks and more specifically referring domains—so those websites that are pointing backlinks at your website—we found that on average there was a 36.4% increase in the number of referring domains.
Again, this is year over year data.
If you segmented your audience, one thing which I really want to point out with this is oftentimes when we talk about SEO, it’s a very limited conversation, right? It’s really narrow and it’s focused just on SEO specifically.
But the nice thing about audience segmentation, looking at the correlation with SEO results, is that it helps you impact pretty much all of your marketing, right?
If you’re segmenting by audience, by industry, by specific audience segment, you’re speaking more directly. It’s more targeted marketing, so it’s more effective marketing, right? You’re going to resonate more deeply.
And so simply from a marketing strategy perspective, we would recommend audience segmentation as well.
The nice part about that is that it directly impacts your SEO results.
In addition to that, another thing to think about is, again, let’s just think about CRM software.
You want to rank for CRM software?
Well, it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster for you to rank for CRM software for healthcare as opposed to just CRM software or CRM software for government, for manufacturing, for tech, for financial services, right?
It’s a lot easier and it’s a lot faster.
And that’s another reason why leaning into audience segmentation on your website and building not just one page, but a whole collection of pages, a whole topic cluster around each of your industries is so powerful, because it helps you move into a space that’s less competitive.
It helps you move into a space where you can achieve results that much faster.
Once you start achieving results faster, then it’s easier to achieve adjacent results as well.
And so one takeaway from today that I really want you to walk away with is:
Lean into audience segmentation, because it does have a very direct correlation with better SEO results in the B2B space.
Published Mar 19, 2025
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