Understanding Your Keywords. [A Guide]

SEO: You hear about it all the time. It’s ever-present, but it’s complicated, convoluted and no one can truly explain it well. But what it means, really, is money in your pocket.

Expert tip: Hire a pro. Many people will promise you the moon: instant results guaranteed. They’ll be able to perform for a short period of time, but then Google will find out they cheated the system, and they’ll punish you. Your SEO guy will be long-gone and you’ll be picking up his mess.

As a small business owner, the most important part of your business is being able to be found. If no one can find you, no one can hire you. The number one component of being found is where, and how, you appear on Google and other search engines.

Your SEO starts with your Keywords.

The first thing you (or the professional you hire) should do is start with Keyword Search Tool (we use Google’s) and search for keywords that center around your business. Make sure that you pick keywords that have a high search percentage and a low competition percentage.

Expert Tip: Don’t get too crazy with keywords. While you want to be found you also want to sound genuine. If you’re writing blog posts that are keyword rich, but make no sense, you’ll sound like a bot. And bots don’t get clients.

Now that you have your keywords, you’ll want to integrate them. Write about them, use them in your blog posts, use them in your meta (we can help), use them in your social media posts, and utilize hashtags. (#). The point of keywords is associating your business with your selected keywords. For example, one of our keywords is “Small Business Web Design” (among others) so we write about Small Business Web Design, we post on our social media outlets and we use the hashtag #SmallBusinessWebDesign. We do this in the hopes of associating Soul Graphics with that keyword so that when someone Google’s “Small Business Web Design” we’ll pop up as a company that know about, a provides that service.

Get creative with your keywords, but stay within the realm of what is working on Google. You’ll learn this by getting to know their keyword search tool.

And lastly, but probably most importantly, understand that SEO takes time and don’t try to manipulate Google’s algorithm. For one, it’s constantly changing, and two, no one really knows it. If someone promises you the moon, they’re probably too good to be true. Great SEO takes time, diligence, hard work, and most of all patience. If you’re doing it right, you’ll start to see more views on your social media posts within a month or so. Then you’ll start to see your results on Google, and after a while you’ll start building your pipeline. Be ready for this. Have a CRM in place that can help you maintain your leads, build your pipeline and convert clicks into clients.

More on that in a future post.

If you liked this post, show us some love and follow along for more.

Follow Soul Graphics on Twitter.