When a synonym isn’t something else when it comes to SEO

We’ve been working on some new SEO techniques over at Totali. One of the things we’ve been finding, is the old way of thinking was Google would search what you’re looking for even if you didn’t quite know what it was you actually wanted.  This means if I was looking for an iPhone Developer I might not find iPhone Development.  This is something very important to understand if you’re working on search engine optimisation.

Say what you mean

It’s important to be clear when you’re writing copy for you website, you want your customers to understand your products or services, and terms like SEO, might not mean search engine optimisation, it could mean special engineering order (check it out if you think I’m lying!). I’ve found when talking to people whose main language is not English, you generally speak with less colloquialisms, and use a better selection of works to get your message across, and it looks like Google is expecting you to do the same.

So how does this affect our SEO results

Well, this is something that I have recently worked out while playing around with some new search engine optimisation techniques.  At Totali, we are targeting iPhone Development specifically in the New Zealand market.  What I found was if I was searching for an ‘iphone developer’ we were less likely to come up, but if I searched for ‘iphone development’ we ranked much higher.  This got even better if I searched our exact working which is ‘iphone app development’, but it turns out app and application work the same in this case (or have small bearing).  This brings me to my next point.

If your market is packed, it’s harder still!

So applying my new idea, given we already know (or make the safe assumption) that if a market place has a small amount of competition, it is very easy to target, but if you’re a web designer it’s near impossible unless you really target your market to a small geographic area, and even then it’s tricky. So taking this understanding, let’s apply it to SEO or search engine optimisation services.  See the way I think about SEO is the same as most web developers do, it’s all about the search engine, but because the market is massive, and there is certainly plenty of competition, a client searching for SEO services, or search engine optimisation is probably looking for something completely different, maybe they are really wanting website results, so some food for thought there.  For us, app and application are the same, but a potential client might not search for iphone app developer, they might search iphone developer or even iphone development, so you need to make sure you cover your market, but don’t write bad copy, your customers will still running away because you’re not perceived to be professional (go figure!).

So what is a guy to do?!

The way I see if, write what you should be already!  Write great copy, that explains in simple terms, exactly what your product (or service) is.  Google seem to be preferring simple language that explains all the jargon as well as use it.  I think using this way to writing decent copy is the way to go.  If you’re looking for copywriting, or SEO services, give us a yell over at Totali, where we love to work on search engine optimisation, and always like to try new things.