Custom Post Type Search Results Showing A Positive Negatives

If anyone who has seen this post and can pass it on to someone who knows PHP, SQL and WordPress search functions, I would be so grateful. At this point I will hire the person by the hour to fix this glitch, I just don’t know how to find and hire truly expert WordPress developers.

Here is the code that is producing results correctly when the search term exists, and produces 6 results when the search term does not exist.

<?php
      global $wpdb;

       $keyword = get_search_query();
       $keyword = '%' . like_escape( $keyword ) . '%';

      // Search in all custom fields
      $post_ids_meta = $wpdb->get_col( $wpdb->prepare( "
          SELECT DISTINCT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta}
          WHERE meta_value LIKE '%s'
      ", $keyword ) );

      // Search in post_title and post_content
      $post_ids_post = $wpdb->get_col( $wpdb->prepare( "
          SELECT DISTINCT ID FROM {$wpdb->posts}
          WHERE post_title LIKE '%s'
          OR post_content LIKE '%s'
      ", $keyword, $keyword ) );
      $post_ids = array_merge( $post_ids_meta, $post_ids_post );

      // Query arguments
      $args = array(
          'post_type'   => 'directory',
          'post_status' => 'publish',
          'post__in'    => $post_ids,
      );

      $query = new WP_Query( $args );

      if ( $query->have_posts() ): while ( $query->have_posts() ) : $query->the_post(); ?>

To give more details about my problem, the meta is the root of the problem. Someone pointed out that they believe you should not merge the ids and the meta:

$post_ids = array_merge( $post_ids_meta, $post_ids_post );

Another suggestion to me was to use WP_Meta_Query to query the meta. But, all of my tries produced PHP errors because I am not fluent in PHP. This problem has become urgent, please help.