selfie taken at a party by Columbus SEO company and Columbus website design firm Sevell

... and less time networking in the evenings.

It's a fact, the better your SEO is, the easier it is for your prospects to find you online. And for us, that translates into less time we have to spend networking after work, and more time spent with friends and family.

So focusing on good SEO for our website is essentially a selfish effort that makes our sales efforts much more effortless.

And good SEO centers around blogging, and using the right keywords in the right places. Which is why we view our content creation and blogging as "new business development." Which is the whole reason we're blogging in the first place. Because blogging IS new business development. And we can do it anytime from anywhere.

One Columbus website design firm's experience

We speak from experience, because we've spent time researching keywords, and even more time writing blogs. And since writing blogs can be done anywhere, anytime, we can be involved in new business development even at 6:00 am from home on a Monday (as we are right now).

When we check our Google ranking, we know we show up on page one for 2 or 3 keyword phrases we use in every blog post. And by focusing on those keywords in our blogs, and behind-the-scenes on Page Titles and Meta Descriptions, Google's algorithms connect those keywords with our website.

So when a prospect searches one of those keywords, we show up well in those search results.

Of course, that doesn't mean we show up well for every possible keyword our prospects might use when searching for Columbus website design or Columbus SEO firms. But we show up for the ones we decided are important.

How to select the right keywords for SEO

Since there's lots of options for keywords, you have to decide the right 3 or 4 to focus on.  Why 3 or 4? Because if you focus on 10 or 15, you'll be spreading yourself too thin to use all those keywords efficiently.

There is a scenario where you can focus on 25 or 50 keywords, and that is when you're running Google's AdWords. But that topic is for another blog. This one is about focusing on a few strategic keyword phrases and incorporate them into your blogs on a regular basis.

Looking at the keyword research we've compiled here, you can see there are many options for keyword phrases that work for us. We like to use ones that have Low or Medium competition. With that as our guide, the keyword phrases that meet our criteria are:

  • "Columbus website design" with 30 monthly searches and Low competition
  • "Columbus SEO company" with with 90 monthly searches and Medium competition, and
  • "Website design Columbus Ohio" with 90 monthly searches and Medium competition

The reason this type of keyword research is so important, is we might have used the keyword "Columbus SEO firm" instead of "Columbus SEO company." But Google tells us there are 90 searches a month "Columbus SEO company" and none for "Columbus SEO firm".

It's similar to the phrase "home builder." People ONLY search that phase as two words, not one. So if a home builders incorporates the word "homebuilder" as one word into their SEO, they'd be wasting their time.

For those who say "I don't get new business through my website"...

... we say, that's because your website isn't built well. From experience, we believe our website is our main marketing tool, and you understand how important it is to rank high in Google. If you want to have that same experience, maybe we can help.

keywords for Columbus SEO company Sevell