One of the interesting things about SEO for small business is that people don’t look at the right keywords to optimize. It usually stems from not really knowing who they’re selling to. They don’t know their audience or the avatar of the people visiting the site.
For example, you might be wanting to show up for keywords that your competitor is checking. If you look at sites like wordtracker or semrush, and you’re typing in keywords and you’re trying to see who shows up, usually people are checking on their competitors. If you’re typing in your keyword in Google and saying, oh, do I show up somewhere in the top 10 or on the first page of Google? Well, it’s because you’re wanting to see where you are compared to your competitor.
Then people get in this rut of trying to optimize their website to show up for those keywords ahead of their competitor. And the funny thing is that those, in most cases, are actually technical keywords that only experts use.
You really need to get into the mind of your potential buyer. In some cases they’re not going to have that technical knowledge. They’re not going to be searching the same way that you and your competitor might.
A lot of small businesses that I consult with find out that they’ve been spending all their energy trying to show up for the wrong keywords. And it’s because they didn’t take the time to research their customer. They didn’t go into Amazon, they didn’t look up the topic and then look at reviews and see what the language is that people were using when they were writing the reviews. They didn’t go into Facebook groups and look at the interaction that was going on. They didn’t look up forums on the internet and see who’s talking to their customer and what the language is, what their interests are, right?
So you really have to get into the mind of your potential customer in order to understand how they might be looking for you online.
And what I’ve found, and this is really the basis for the book that I have coming out soon, is optimizing solutions for people, not keywords, not the traditional SEO method. Because when you’re trying to rank for keywords and search engines, you’re really just running that maze and that giant rat race.
The best way is really to make sure your website is targeting solutions and actually solving people’s real problems. When you solve problems, instead of focusing on the keywords, your website actually shoots to the top. And it’s because you’re giving people what they want.