Professional jargon and SEO keywords: now not to be wrong?

Sometimes, the biggest enemy of a company in SEO is its own expertise! An error as old as marketing itself is to think, "I have this behavior or vocabulary, so my target audience does too." Applied to SEO, this might mean, "We use this technical term, so it will be our main keyword." However, every industry, every company, every service, and every generation has its codes, words, and jargon.

Professional Distortion and "Wording"

The example presented hereafter will talk to many people: upon joining a company specializing in professional printing, I initially thought the range of products and services offered was huge.
Indeed, after discussing with the product/purchase department, the marketing team, and the sales department, I was very surprised because it seemed the company had an infinite range... except that for a multifunction printer, the product/purchase department talked about a copier, others in the company called it a multifunctional printer, and others a photocopier. On the company's website, we found that these products were listed as "copiers". The problem is, their French clients were not talking about copier but multifunctional printer...

The company had clearly defined its buyer persona but had not considered this when working on its SEO, as it was the product/purchase department that managed the content and passed it to the IT department to put online. The departmental approach of the product service here hindered the commercial/marketing aspect.

The SEO Expert and the Business aspect for Keyword Selection

On the other side of the projet, the difficulty when doing SEO as an agency, a freelancer, or even within a company, is to understand the vocabulary used by the company and, most importantly, by its target audience. In other words, while only using a "business oriented" approach can be dangerous, not taking it into account is equally detrimental.

Choosing a keyword based solely on volume, on software recommendations, not knowing the "stop words" (keywords to avoid), or thinking that a term that works for one product will work for all products are easy mistakes. The ideal is immersion with the client, but this remains complicated due to a lack of time. As a result the solution is to work together or at least with back-and-forth exchanges.

We have all known companies that worked on keywords without volume, not targeting the right audience, or based on a misunderstanding of their business, with catastrophic results. Again, the best solution so far is to collaborate, internally (between departments and interlocutors) or externally in the case of an agency. The client must not blindly trust the digital marketing professional when choosing their strategic keywords. Discussing and challenging can only be positive.

Know your market

Using SEO tools provides a large amount of information that would be impossible to collect manually. Information about your site, but also a lot about your industry.

A comprehensive software like Cocolyze allows you to cross-reference search volumes with identified or potential keywords. You can also identify the keywords on which the company is already positioned and compare your positioning with your competitors. If you hesitate between one main keyword or another, this open approach can help you choose to position yourself head-on against your competitors by working on the same keywords or, conversely, to work on specific and niche keywords as explained in our post on Google's E-E-A-T and niche marketing.

Working in Project Mode

Sometimes, a shared document, a meeting, or even an email exchange allows you to move forward and avoid spending hours or days working on keywords that are not worth it in just a few minutes. Why not organize a meeting between the website team, the product owners, and the sales department to discuss the keyword choices? Then, centralize the potential keywords in one place. A tool like Cocolyze or even a shared document allows for interesting and relevant feedback before positioning on expressions, whether long-tail or generic.

Finally, validating together between the project sponsor and the SEO expert not only avoids jargon unsuitable for the target but also ensures that the SEO expert has understood the context and goal of the project.

Cocolyze allows, in all its offers, to have at least two users, thus centralizing all the key elements of a site's SEO. This suite of tools has been built in project mode from the start, to make collaboration as simple as possible. With Cocolyze, you can easily share a project and thus collaborate effortlessly to choose the right keywords, having analyzed competitors, consulted opportunities, etc. Once the keywords are chosen, working on the project is simple!