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
How to use Google Analytics 4 and Search Console like a pro
Using Google Analytics like a pro in 2026 means three things: connect GA4 to Search Console, tell GA4 what a real lead looks like, and stop trusting the totals until you've taken the junk out. Most small business sites skip all three. We know because ours did. When we audited 2theTop's own GA4
On-page SEO: the right words in the right places
On-page SEO comes down to one sentence Ross Jones put on an infographic for our Nashville SEO meetup back in 2012: put the right words in the right places. Find the words your customers actually type (that's keyword research), then put them where Google and people both look first: the title, the