Consult the SEO hive mind to craft your company & product identity

When I first heard people talk about SEO, I thought it stood for “Snake Essential Oils.”

This was back before SEO became what it is today — a time when people, if they knew anything about SEO, associated it with a practice known as “keyword stuffing.” The principle behind this was that if you wanted to own Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a given term, you just stuffed that term into your content as much as possible.

As I began to learn more about SEO, though, I came around to the incredible value it can offer, and not only for optimizing your business’s search engine results. Those are well captured in other articles. What I want to focus on here is the way keyword research can provide invaluable market research for how the world understands you and your product.

A good tool for this kind of research can be found at Moz.com, which offers a free 30-day trial forits Moz Pro dashboard. You don’t need to be an SEO expert to use it, and Moz offers a handy primer to get you started.

This dashboard allows you to experiment with the kind of keyword research I touch on below. I recommend taking it for a spin just to see how it can help you. The dashboard also allows you to plug in your company website to give you a clear snapshot of how the hive mind of the internet currently thinks of your business and what words it associates most strongly with what you do (it’ll also visualize how your business is battling for space in the hive mind with any competitor website you’d like to plug in).

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you sell consulting services. Obviously, you don’t need keyword research (or a potential client) to tell you to be more specific. Now let’s say you offer business consulting services. You’re getting warmer, but still have a way to go.

You have a hard-to-describe product, and you can now ask Google itself to answer the question: How does the internet describe the thing I’m trying to describe?

Do you have a more specific niche than business consulting? Try “small business consulting.” Does most of your business come from a specific region? Try “small business consulting New York.”

This might all seem obvious, but the farther you go down this rabbit hole, the more rewards you’ll reap. This is research, after all, which means that you’ll need to try lots of different combinations of keywords to describe your company and its core offerings. These combinations will generate suggestions for other possible combinations, along with information on how often people search for these terms and phrases, and how difficult they are to rank for in search engine results.

To sum it up, SEO keyword research is like trying to describe your business to billions of people, as many times as you’d like, and seeing what terms and phrases get their heads nodding.

The farther you go, the better you’ll understand what is called the “long tail” of SEO.

The long tail refers not only to the top search keywords in your industry, but the entire ecosystem of words that exist around what you do. Let’s just think of that for a second. You have a hard-to-describe product, and you can now ask Google to answer the question: How does the internet describe the thing I’m trying to describe?

Before you know it, you might be alternating “business consulting” with more concrete descriptors like “marketing department review.” This isn’t to say that you need to turn your entire business into a provider of marketing department reviews. Rather, it will give you the opportunity to understand the cloud of words that surround and shape your offerings, from the epicentre all the way out to the margins. But at the end of the day, I return to the statement: SEO keyword research can help you understand what words and phrases people are most likely to use when they try to describe what you do.

The long tail refers not only to the top search keywords in your industry, but the entire ecosystem of words that exist around what you do.

You can compare this process to echolocation. In order to “see” what’s around it, a bat sends out high-pitched sound waves, which then reflect off of surfaces and return to the bat. The collective input of all this data is a three-dimensional understanding of the surrounding space and all its contours (and even the firmness or texture of those contours).

You can think of your business in the same way. By typing in keywords to search, then following those searches to new combinations of keywords, you are engaging in the process of “echolocating” where your business exists in the most authoritative mind of them all — the internet. This process might also tell you that your business’s offerings are disjointed or confusing, in which case the research might shape what your business even tries to sell. At the end of the day, though, the more of this research you do, the better you’ll understand where you are, where you can go, and how your strategic use of language (what some would call your “textual identity”) can help you get there.

To sum it up, SEO keyword research is like trying to describe your business to billions of people, as many times as you’d like, and seeing what terms and phrases get their heads nodding.

I’d love to hear any stories you might have about how this kind of research helped you not only optimize your website for SEO, but change your understanding of how to position your business and what it does. Please feel free to use the comments below to share your story.

Thanks for reading. To be the first to know about new Selling Air articles and for additional insights, please don’t hesitate to subscribe to the Selling Air newsletter here.