Personas: Who You're Writing For
Describe the people you want to reach, and every audit starts judging your content the way those people would — and tells you which fixes matter to whom.
The same page can be great for one reader and useless to another. A guide that delights an engineer ("configurable retry semantics") loses the office manager who just wants to know if the tool will save them time. Personas let you tell SitePulse who your content must work for, so audits stop judging against a generic average reader and start judging against your readers.
Once personas exist, two things change:
- Scoring gets honest. Content quality is judged against your hardest-to-please persona, not the average — because content that only works for your easiest audience isn't done.
- Fixes get prioritized. Every rewrite suggestion is tagged with which personas it helps, so you can do the fixes that matter to your most valuable audience first.
An example
A legal-aid site defines two personas: "Maria", a first-time self-represented litigant who needs plain language and step-by-step reassurance, and "Case Worker", a professional who wants precise forms and citations fast. An audit of the "power of attorney" page might score well for Case Worker but poorly for Maria — too much legalese, no plain summary. The suggested fixes tagged for Maria (add a plain-English opening, define terms on first use) are exactly the changes that also make the page more quotable by AI assistants answering Maria's questions.
What you describe in a persona
| Field | What to put there | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Name | A memorable label | "Technical Buyer" |
| Description | Who this person is, in a sentence or two | "Senior engineer evaluating tools for their team" |
| Reading level | How dense their comfortable reading is | fairly technical |
| Tone | How they like to be spoken to | professional, direct, data-driven |
| Topics of interest | What they care about | performance, integrations, security |
| Pain points | What they're trying to solve | slow build times, vendor lock-in |
| Avoided words | Terms that would put them off | "synergize", "leverage" |
Only a name and description are required — but the more you fill in, the sharper the scoring and suggestions become.
Creating personas
Go to the project's Personas tab. You can write them yourself with Add Persona, or click Generate with AI and let SitePulse draft 2–3 personas either from a description of your product or from the language and topics of your already-audited pages (works best after a few audits). Always review AI drafts before switching them on — you know your audience better than any inference.
Each persona has an Active toggle; only active personas influence audits. Personas are captured at the moment an audit starts, so editing one later doesn't rewrite old results — run a fresh audit to see the effect.
Where personas show up
- Content Quality scoring — the persona breakdown appears in the audit's Content Quality section, and the weakest persona's result is the one that counts.
- Rewrite suggestions — each suggestion carries badges showing which personas benefit (green = clearly helps this persona). Filter by your priority persona to work top-down.
- Brand-voice fixes — persona-specific avoided words extend your Brand Voice rules during audits.
Two or three personas is the sweet spot
One persona flattens your audience back to an average; six makes every fix list noisy. Most teams do well with a technical reader, a business reader, and an end user.
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