Capture Those Kadigans With Your Business Blog

If you haven’t heard of kadigans, you probably do know their cousins the "thingamagigs". I used the word thingamagig myself the other day in the hardware store.  I was after a… well, you know, that thingamagig that hangs over the shower nozzle and holds the shampoo and hair rinse? Luckily, the store clerk quickly realized that what I needed was a shower caddy.  What I’d done, not knowing the correct term for the item, was use a kadigan or placeholder name.

Placeholders are words referring to objects or people whose names are unknown, irrelevant, or just temporarily forgotten. "Whatsherface" would be one example of a placeholder. Back in high school, our class performed Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta Mikado.  The Lord High Executioner sings about his "little list";

 ….apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind
Such as What-d’ye-call him, Thing-’em-bob and likewise Never mind.
And St-st-st and What’s-his-name, and also You-know-who
The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.

Anyway, after the shower caddy incident in the hardware store, I realized that I’d learned a lesson about business blogging and about online search.  Even though I hadn’t known the correct term for the item I wanted, only the result I wanted (a neat shower stall), Ace Hardware was able to make a sale and I got my need filled.

As a professional ghost blogger helping my business clients "win search" through business blogs, I realized online searchers are often in the same boat as I was that day at Ace.  Searchers may not know the correct terminology for the product or the specialized service they need, so they may just describe the desired result, or they may resort to kadigans.

So, in order to capture those searches, you’ve got to be able to match up your blog content with kadigans.  Content that describes the end result from using your product or service can snag kadigan-driven traffic. Content that describes how your product is used can capture attention from searchers   Remember, that day in the hardware store, I wasn’t looking for a thingamagig or a whatchamacallit – what I wanted was  a neat and organized shower stall!

Not only is it smart to assume your potential customers don’t know the name of your business, assume they don’t know the "name" of the solution to their problem!  The reader, by using placeholder words, is saying to you, the business blogger, what W.S. Gilbert was saying: "The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you!.