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"How to choose a keyword for your business
When we’re talking about SEO, the core of a good strategy is identifying a primary meaningful keyword for your business.
Yes, one keyword.
For your whole business.
Of course, a business website can rank for many, many keywords. Not just this one.
But the foundation of a smart SEO strategy is starting with one, and building out everything else around it.
If you establish one page of your website (for most sites, this will be your homepage) as a paragon of authority, trustworthiness, and reliability, Google will attribute more value to the rest of the pages. And it will become easier for them to rank.
This is how you can leverage the power of one keyword. And this is where you can be strategic with your SEO.
Once you have one big keyword working hard for you, it’s easier to get your site ranking for other keywords. And so on.
The more keywords your site ranks for, the easier it is to get your site to rank for other keywords. This is why the effects of SEO compound over time.
The trick to finding a good principal keyword for your business is to take a step back and think about what someone else might type into google to find a business like yours that provides the services you do.
Unless you’re a big, established brand, no this isn’t your business name, because someone who hasn’t heard of your business won’t know what your business is called.
A principal keyword should be a term that encapsulates the core service or product your business provides. For example:
💡 Plant subscriptions
💡 Espresso bar
💡 Financial advisor
💡 Divorce lawyer
💡 Digital marketing
💡 Shampoo for Asian hair
Some business owners find it hard to choose just one keyword for their business, and end try and use multiple terms on their homepage, e.g. ‘cosmetic dentist and orthodontist’.
Naturally, they’re proud of both of their services and want to be found in search for both of them.
But look at the search volume for these keywords (these stats are US-based):
Cosmetic dentist = 74k/month
Orthodontist = 45k/month
Cosmetic dentist and orthodontist = 0/month (yep, literally ZERO)
In the example above, the business owner hasn’t thought sufficiently from their customer’s point of view about what they might realistically type into Google. As a result, they are potentially missing out big time.
Statistically, it’s clear that a lot more people will type ‘cosmetic dentist’ into Google than ‘Cosmetic dentist and orthodontist’.
So it makes sense to use ‘Cosmetic dentist’ as the main keyword for this business.
Lots of businesses provide multiple services. If that’s your business, that’s fine – you can get ranking for all of those, but you should still choose just one keyword for your homepage as a starting point, and build on it from there.
By failing to choose just one, you might just be missing out on traffic that is already searching for the services you provide.
What keyword do you think your business should be ranking for? Drop your answers in the comments!"
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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