This article (Click Here), on our sister site, talked recently about voice search and the words you would enter into the search box of Google to be found in its listings. The article covered how voice searches significantly differ from keyword searches; whichever method is used, the question above is pertinent when marketing your business.
What your potential customers may type or say into that little box at the top of Google may not be what you imagine. If you were someone who repaired people’s roofs, you may assume customers would enter the words ‘roof repairs’ into search engines. However, they may also look for help with their issue by typing ‘How to stop water leaking into my bedroom’. It means the same thing and would come to the same resolution—it just uses completely different words. If you were employing SEO and PPC techniques in your marketing, however, this could make a significant difference.
Potential customers may come across just one of your services before they learn about all the other things you do. This may be how they perceive you until they know more about you, which would influence how they searched for you online. For example, a mobile valet visited my neighbour recently. The guy spent less than a couple of hours making my neighbour’s car look beautiful on the inside and outside, and I know a couple of others on our street booked him for the same service. It was only when he had a number of referrals for more of the same work from the wider estate that we learned he had a large business in a nearby town. He employed a number of people and was known in his area as a garage owner and long-time mechanic; the valet he usually employed was on paternity leave and the owner was covering his work in the interim as the business was short-staffed.
Had the conversation not swayed into this on one of his visits, he would only have been known for his valet prowess to the people in our village. The service he provided wasn’t his main one, but it was just as lucrative as much of his mechanical work when he compared his margins—hence why he was happy to carry out the work himself when his staff member wasn’t available.
I’ve included this example to emphasise my point, though it is a bit of a side-step. Most business owners supply just one type of product/service, and any extras are natural supplements to this, and things customers would expect.
But how you describe your service could still differ from customer to customer, and you need to hit as many deviations as possible to catch all potential leads. So, think of all the different ways to describe what you do.
Novus Marketing Solutions is, simply put, a marketing agency based in Doncaster. Most people looking for our help won’t type ‘marketing agency in Doncaster’ into Google, they’ll likely use the phrases ‘videos for business’, ‘graphic design’ or even ‘I need a new website’. Now that we have such as Amazon Alexa to talk to, we may even expand our request into proper sentences, such as ‘I need help designing my business’s logo’ or ‘I want to increase my business’s visibility’.
For ideas of the words your customers may use to find you, look at the problem you solve rather than the service you offer, because that’s how your customers will approach the issue. In my last example, Novus’s customers may need video marketing, content creation, a new website and a brand refresh to forge ahead of their rivals, but all they’ll know is that they want to be seen more, to be noticed against their competitors, and to be recognised by potential customers. They won’t know how to achieve this, just that they need it.
Look at your business from the outside in. You may find a number of new ways to describe what you do to people who may be using these exact phrases to ask for help.
