ICP Personas Tool

Using the ICP Personas Tool

What is the ICP Personas tool?

The ICP Personas tool uses AI to help you build and manage Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) personas for your website - structured profiles of the distinct types of people you're trying to reach with your content.

Unlike most Labs tools, ICP Personas isn't a one-off analysis. It's a place to create and store personas that the Persona Page Evaluator then uses to assess how well your pages serve each audience.

Why is this useful?

Great SEO content isn't just relevant to a topic - it's relevant to a person. When you know exactly who you're writing for, it's far easier to answer their real questions, address their objections, and choose the formats they prefer.

Without a clear picture of your audience, content planning tends to drift toward generic topics rather than the specific questions and concerns real users bring to your site. The ICP Personas tool gives you a consistent, structured place to define those audiences - and feeds that understanding into persona-aware analysis across SEOTesting.

How does the ICP Personas tool work?

You can build personas two ways: generate them with AI, or create them manually.

Option 1 - Generate personas with AI

From your dashboard, click 'select your website' dropdown at the top the page. Select the site that you wish to use the tool for, then select 'Labs' from the left-hand menu, and scroll down to find 'ICP Personas':

Click Generate with AI.
In the box, describe your business and target audience. You can also specify how many personas you'd like - for example: "Generate 2 ICP profiles for SEOTesting.com, an SEO testing and analysis SaaS platform."
Click Generate. The tool drafts a set of complete personas, each with profile fields and suggested insights.
In the results window, review the drafts and tick the ones you want to keep (all are selected by default).
Click Save Selected. The chosen personas and their insights are then added to your list.

Option 2 - Create a persona manually

In the ICP Personas tool, click Create Manually.

Enter a Name (the only required field) and fill in any of the other profile fields.
Click Save.

Personas are saved per website, so each site you manage can have its own distinct set of audiences.

What's in a persona?

Each persona is made up of a profile and a set of insights.

Profile fields

Name (required) - a short label for the persona, e.g. "Agency SEO Manager".
Job Title - their role, e.g. "Head of SEO".
Expertise Level - Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, or Expert.
Goals - what they're trying to achieve.
Pain Points - the problems and frustrations they face.
Objections - reasons they might hesitate to buy or act.
Buying Triggers - what prompts them to take action.
Preferred Content Formats - e.g. video tutorials, case studies, how-to guides.

Insights

Insights are individual notes attached to a persona that capture how they think and what they ask. Each insight has:

A Type - Question, Concern, Objection, or Goal.
The Text of the insight, e.g. "How do I measure the ROI of SEO testing?"
An optional Keyword Tag to link the insight to a target keyword, e.g. "seo testing roi".

Insights are especially useful for content planning - your personas' questions and concerns are a ready-made list of topics to write about.

Adding insights

Expand a persona in the list to see its details.
In the Insights section, click + Add Insight.

Choose the Type, enter the Text, and optionally add a Keyword Tag.
Click Save.

Editing and deleting personas

Expand any persona to Edit or Delete it, or to manage its individual insights. Note that deleting a persona cannot be undone.

How your personas are used elsewhere

Once saved, your personas power the Persona Page Evaluator - it checks how well a given page addresses each persona's needs, questions, and pain points, and suggests improvements.

Note: The Content Evaluator also has a "Persona Relevance" view, but those personas come from the persona data inside an imported Query Fan-Out export - not from the personas you save here. The two persona features are separate.

Tips for better personas:

Start with AI, then refine. Generating a draft and editing it is usually faster than starting from a blank form.
Keep personas distinct. Two personas that overlap heavily are less useful than two that represent genuinely different audiences.
Invest in insights. The questions and concerns you capture are what make persona-aware analysis - and your content planning - genuinely useful.
Tag insights with keywords where you can, to tie each audience question back to the terms you're targeting.

Updated on: 22/06/2026

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