Last updated on May 7th, 2024 at 02:39 pm

As someone that talks to SEO clients and monitors many small business forums I am constantly amazed by the number of people that “want to be top of the search engines” but have no idea what phrases they want to be top for.

When pushed for examples of what they would like to be found for I often get replies such as “my company name”.  It comes as a bit of a shock when I then say to them that the point of SEO is to attract people to a clients site that have never heard of the company but are looking for a service or product that they provide.

The next answer is more often than not that the client wants the site to be found for a single word such as “tax” or “cleaning” (both actual examples).  When asked what type of tax (VAT, Income tax, Council tax for example) or what type of cleaning and where, there is a silence at the other end of the phone.  Using the cleaning example I go on to ask if the site is about cleaning a car, cleaning windows, office cleaning, commercial cleaning, street cleaning and do they want clients in their local area or further afield (and if further afield how far – if the client is based in the north of Scotland for example and the site belongs to a cleaning company in Devon how cost effective would it be to send a cleaner 500 miles to clean an office) ?

This always seems to bring it home to website owners that if you are providing a service you need to target the phrases (and we always work on phrases and not single words), both to the type of service you provide and to the area you are willing to cover.  This is different if you are selling physical hard goods on your site, in this case you still need to target the type of product (silicon wafers  or Digital cameras for example)   but your geographical target would be much wider (the UK, Europe or even globally).

By thinking about the phrases that you want to be top of the search engines for you stand a much better chance of achieving this, and more importantly a much better chance of converting the visitors to your site into paying customers.  So, next time, before you say “I want to be top of the search engines”, stop and think for a few minutes.