While we may have talked about the basic concept of keywords in the past, such as determining the vernacular of your target audience then focusing your efforts on those keyword phrases, we had only touched slightly on the tools that small business owners can use to help them discover which one of those phrases are the most potent to use.
As an SEO, one of the questions I get asked the most is “how do you come up with keywords,” whether it’s for titles, meta descriptions, or anything else. It’s really not as complicated as everyone makes it because whenever I hear that, what I actually hear is “how do I connect with my target audience?” Well, the first step is to learn who they are, which means you have to figure out where they congregate, i.e. social media, meetups, etc., study their behavior and how they interact with one another, then create a profile based on that data in order to fill a niche in the community.
This is the thing: without keywords, the entire concept of SEO, or search engine optimization, would be without purpose. Whenever we “google” something or call upon a bevy of proprietary digital assistants ready to answer any and every query, we are hoping to get the most relevant results that match our query, no matter how misguided it may be at first.
On October 28th, 2021, news broke that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, had changed the name of his parent company from Facebook to Meta, thus naming himself CEO and chairman of Meta. For those who may not know, Zuckerberg not only owns Facebook, but also Instagram, WhatsApp, and a host of other services, some of them not directly related to social media. When asked by reporters what the purpose behind the renaming was, he responded with it “being awkward” to have differently branded social media services under the umbrella of another social media brand, in this case Facebook.
“What? Google My Business?”
Yeah, hopefully. If your customers wanted to leave a review for your or point you out on a map when their relatives from out of town come to visit, you are going to want them to find you, and if you like making money, you are going to want to make that process as painless as possible.
So what if I told you that Google themselves provides a free tool that allows you to manage your business’s online presence across all of Google, including Maps and Search?
In the world of SEO, there is never a certain winner, or an approach that will consistently place you above your competitors. That is why it is so important to continually create content that resonates with your target audience by speaking their language. And that word, language, is at the crux of SEO, since capitalizing on the keywords that drive the “language” of your target audience, and doing it better than the other guy, is the goal…
