Naming Services the Way Customers Do

The two vocabularies

Every trade has one and every customer has another.

The trade vocabulary is precise, describes the solution, and is what professionals use with each other.

The customer vocabulary is imprecise, describes the problem, and is what people type into a search box.

A website written in the first is invisible to anybody searching in the second, which is nearly everybody.

How the gap appears

• The trade word for a job nobody outside the trade uses.
• A solution name where the customer knows only the symptom.
• A product or system name the manufacturer uses.
• An invented service name, capitalised, unique to your business.
• A category name from a professional body.

The fourth is the most damaging and the most common in businesses that have had branding done. A named package sounds distinctive and matches nothing anybody searches for.

Why the trade word feels right

Worth understanding, since the instinct is strong and resisting it feels like dumbing down.

Precision is a professional value. Using the correct term is what competence looks like from inside a trade.

Which makes the plain word feel imprecise, slightly amateur, and like a concession.

It is not a concession. It is addressing somebody who does not have your vocabulary and should not need it to find help.

The precision belongs in the work and in the explanation, not in the label on the door.

Three sources, all of which you already have.

What people say on the phone. The words in the first sentence of an enquiry are the words they would have typed.

Search Console, which shows the actual phrases people used before arriving, including ones you never thought of.

And the suggestions a search engine offers when you begin typing your service, which are drawn from what people actually search.

Ten minutes with those three produces a better list than any amount of thinking about it.

A worked example

A business whose service pages used the correct trade terms throughout, written by somebody who knew the subject well.

They ranked for almost nothing, because the phrases were ones only other professionals used.

Listening to a month of enquiries produced a different vocabulary: people described symptoms, rooms and problems rather than processes.

They rewrote the page headings in the customer language, kept the trade terms in the body where they added precision, and added a line to each page saying what the job is also called.

Traffic to those pages rose over the following months, and the enquiries that arrived were better matched, since people recognised their own problem in the heading.

Nothing about the service or the expertise changed. Only the labels did.

Keeping both

The arrangement that works, since the trade terms are not worthless.

Customer language in the heading, the page title, and the first sentence.

Trade language in the body, where it demonstrates competence and adds precision.

And an explicit bridge: this is sometimes called X, which serves anybody arriving with either word and helps search engines connect the two.

Which means nothing is lost and the page becomes findable, rather than choosing between sounding professional and being found.

The word people use for you

A related question worth checking, since it affects everything above.

Businesses describe themselves with a trade name that customers may not use: contractor, technician, specialist, consultant.

Which matters because somebody searching for help types the word they would use for the person, not the one the profession prefers.

The word is frequently the plainest available, and a business calling itself something more elevated is searching a smaller pool.

Worth using the plain word prominently and the preferred one elsewhere, which loses nothing and covers both.

The counter-case

Where trade language is correct.

Business-to-business work, where the buyer is a professional using the same vocabulary and plain language reads as inexperience.

Regulated or technical terms with a specific meaning, where a plain approximation would be inaccurate or misleading.

Anywhere a certification or standard is named, since the name is the point.

And a page written for somebody already advanced in a decision, who has learned the vocabulary by then.

Invented names specifically

Worth a separate word, since they are actively sold to small businesses.

A capitalised package name, distinctive to your business, is a branding instinct applied where it does not belong.

Nobody searches for it, nobody knows what it includes, and it requires explanation before it means anything.

Which is a cost on every page it appears and a benefit only once somebody is already a customer.

Where a package genuinely exists, name it descriptively and let the distinctiveness come from what it contains.

Where the words have to match

A consistency point that matters more than it appears to.

The service name should be the same in the menu, the page heading, the page title and your listing categories.

Where those differ, somebody who found you searching one phrase arrives at a page headed with another and has to check they are in the right place.

Which is a small friction repeated at every entry point, and it costs a proportion of arrivals.

It also splits the signal, since three names for one service is weaker than three uses of the same one.

Regional words

A detail worth checking, since vocabulary varies by place.

The same thing is called different names in different regions, and a term that is standard in one country is unknown in another.

Which matters for a local business, since the words your customers use are the ones used locally rather than the ones in a national guide.

Search Console will show you the local variants without any guessing, and it frequently reveals a word you would not have chosen.

Using both, where two are common, costs a few words and covers everybody.

What to change

1. Write down what people say on the phone.
2. Check Search Console for actual phrases.
3. Rename headings in customer language.
4. Keep trade terms in the body.
5. Add a line saying what else it is called.
6. Remove invented package names from headings.

The first is by far the most reliable source, and it requires only writing down the first sentence of each enquiry for a single month.

None of this requires a rewrite. It is a change of labels on pages that are otherwise fine, and it is among the cheapest improvements available.

What those pages should contain is covered in describing a service without listing features.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.