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Think Like A Customer
The search keywords customers use are their best attempts to sum up and communicate everything they want to get in the shortest possible way.
The choice of keywords differs from person to person because each and every human brain is individually wired; an inconceivable host of neurological connections and associations able to map their life experiences to keywords.
Your Customers & Their SEO Keywords
Crucially however, unlike Google, our brains don't instinctively store life experiences with words, which are merely a conscious input and output. Which makes predicting a Customer's choice of words even harder, but thanks to the relentless technological evolution Search is becoming evermore personal; location, device, personal likes and dislikes as well as those of one's peers are capable of being taken into account in an effort to make the search engine results as relevant as possible to the searcher. Search requires getting to know your Customers in order to use keywords as the emotional and logical connections between their mental buying processes and your corporate output. The ability to identify which keywords they'll use is therefore the vital business competence that a Search Commander must posses, display and continually refine.
The key is to recognise and appreciate upon deeper contemplation that keywords are not clever bits of website coding but your company's view of its Customers' perception.Steve Whiting, Author, The Art of Search
Keywords far more than just bridges connecting a Customer's brain to your website via fingers and a keyboard; they are verbal and non-verbal shortcuts to your Customer's entire life and brand experience, matching their subconscious ideals and conscious expectations. Yet even if I have not bought goods and services from you, you should still regard me as a Customer because the needs of your ideal prospect and present-day Customer are precisely the same.
Yet when likening keywords in SEO to tactical weapons in warfare, we see that, just as weapons alone do not define an army's strength and success, keywords alone cannot strengthen your website and guarantee SEO success. A successful fighting force will have a wide variety of weaponry at the disposal of armed, highly trained and motivated troops, unified by a common higher purpose, lead by a general able to move the divisions into winning positions and ensure the lines of supply.
Warfare is not all about weaponry just as SEO is not all about keywords.Steve Whiting, Author, The Art of Search
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