The best keyword research for a small business starts with a conversation. Talk to your customers, the person answering your phone and whoever closes your sales, write down the exact words they use, and only then open a keyword tool to check them. I don't start keyword research for a new page
How to market a boring product: find the pain point, then fix your site before you buy ads
To market a boring product, you sell the problem it solves to the one person who cares about that problem, and you make sure your website converts that person before you pay for a single click. Matt Slaymaker of Slaymaker Marketing runs ads for brands spending around $100 a day and brands spending
How to expand your business into a new market (and when a franchise is the faster route)
If you want to expand your business into a new market, find the pain point the people in that market actually have, then pick the route: open your own location, ship from where you are, or buy into a franchise that already built the foundation. That's the short version of what Brandon Moon of TD
The 3 pillars of future-proof SEO: what survives every Google update
We've written about nearly every Google update since 2009. Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Google+ Your World, authorship photos, even Klout scores. Then our own organic traffic fell off a cliff anyway. Here's what GA4 shows for 2thetopdesign.com. Organic search sessions went from 8,344 in 2023 to
Recycle, repurpose and reuse your content: one conversation, a month of marketing
The cheapest piece of content you'll ever publish is one you already made. Recycling content means taking something that exists (a talk, a video, a sales call, an old post) and turning it into new formats for new places, without starting from a blank page. I wrote the first version of this post in