I'm writing some copy and the premise is a story about a small business owner. "small business owner" is NOT the keyword phrase I want to optimize the page for, but I find myself using "small business owner" overa and over again.

The product is for small business owners, but I don't expect to rank for "small business owner" or for people to search for "small business owner" in an effort to find my product.

My question is: Should I try to change the wording to avoid repeated use of small business owner (I've thought about using SBO)?

I'm afraid that if I use a different term/phrase each time that I may confuse potiential customers reading the copy. What do you people think?

Leave it as it is. So what if you rank well for "small business owner"? If you get traffic from it is a good thing. They may actually turn into a buyer. Or they may know someone who is interested in your product. Or they may like it and link to it which is good for SEO.

Just be sure to also include the phrase(s) you want to rank well for as well and you'll be fine.

You can throw in SBO a few times to dilute the longer term but that won't help much as the SEs can reward terms that have equivalents within close proximity. They are smarter than ever them darn search engines.

Think of other terms such as businessman or investor ...

Do the best you can to make your real keyphrase stand out (bolding, H tags, italics, image names and alt tags, repetiton within reason etc.

You are certainly going to have to craft your content carefully and for that alone, the search engines will reward you.

Good luck