What People Type When They Need You

The vocabulary gap

A trade develops precise words for things, and customers do not have them.

Somebody with water coming through a bedroom ceiling does not search for remedial waterproofing or membrane failure. They search for water coming through ceiling, or leak upstairs, or damp patch on ceiling.

A site written entirely in the trade's language describes exactly the right service in words nobody types.

Which is one of the most common reasons a genuinely competent business stays invisible while a worse one appears above it, and it is entirely fixable by writing differently.

What customers actually type

• A problem, described in symptoms rather than causes.
• A question, frequently starting with how or why.
• A price question: how much does something cost.
• A location, or an implied one.
• An urgency word: emergency, tonight, same day.
• A comparison: one option against another.

The first is the largest category by far, and the one trade sites serve worst, because a services page is organised around what you do rather than around what has gone wrong.

Finding the terms without a tool

Three methods, all free, and better than most paid research for a local business.

Type into a search box and read the suggestions. Those are real searches, ordered by frequency, and typing your service will produce a list you did not expect.

Read the questions box in the results, which lists what people actually ask about the subject.

Scroll to the related searches at the bottom of a results page.

Twenty minutes across those three methods produces a list of genuine phrases, in customer language, at no cost at all.

Asking your own customers

The method that beats all the others and almost nobody uses.

Ask every new enquiry how they found you and, where it was a search, what they typed.

People remember what they typed, and the answers are specific in a way no research tool can produce, because they include the exact phrasing, the misspellings and the local terms.

After twenty enquiries you have a genuine picture of your own market's vocabulary, in their words rather than yours.

It also frequently reveals that a good proportion found you through a listing rather than the website itself, which changes where the effort should go.

A worked example

A damp specialist whose site used the correct technical terms throughout: rising damp, penetrating damp, condensation control, membrane systems.

Search Console showed almost no impressions for any of them.

Asking customers produced a different vocabulary entirely: black mould on wall, damp smell in house, wet patch behind wardrobe, mould in bedroom corner.

He wrote three pages around those descriptions, explaining what each symptom usually means, what causes it, and what it costs to put right.

Those pages became the main source of enquiries within about four months.

The technical pages stayed in place, because a proportion of visitors genuinely do use those terms, and each symptom page linked across to them.

Writing for the term without writing badly

The balance worth striking, since neither extreme works.

Use the customer's words in the heading and the opening, because that is what matches the search.

Then use the correct terms in the body, explaining them, because that is what demonstrates competence and helps the reader.

A page headed Black mould on a bedroom wall, which then explains that this is usually condensation rather than rising damp, does both jobs.

What does not work is repeating the phrase mechanically, which reads as manipulation and helps nothing.

Write the page for somebody who actually has that problem and the terms appear naturally, because you are answering their question in their own words.

The counter-case

Where trade vocabulary is the right choice.

Any business whose customers are other businesses, where the buyer uses the technical terms and searching in consumer language would look unserious.

Specification-driven work, where matching a standard or a process name exactly is the point.

And regulated fields where a specific term has a legal meaning and a plain-English substitute would be inaccurate.

In those cases the vocabulary gap runs the other way, and writing too simply is the error.

The test is simply who is doing the typing: a homeowner describing a problem, or a buyer working from a specification.

Misspellings and local terms

Two categories worth knowing about and mostly not worth chasing.

Search engines handle misspellings well, so a page spelled correctly will usually match a query that is not. Deliberately including misspelled versions makes a page worse and gains almost nothing.

Local and regional terms are different and genuinely matter. What one region calls a driveway another calls something else, and a business using the wrong regional word is invisible to half its market.

The same applies to Canadian against American spelling, where the correct choice is whatever your customers use, which for a local business is the local convention.

Where two regional terms are both common, using one in the heading and mentioning the other naturally in the text covers both without contortion.

Search Console as the confirmation

Once pages exist, this is where the guessing stops.

The query report lists the actual searches that showed your pages, including many you never targeted.

Terms with plenty of impressions but few clicks usually indicate a title problem. Terms already producing clicks are working and worth building further on.

And terms you expected and do not see at all are terms you are not competing for, which is useful to know before spending more effort on them.

That report is the difference between guessing at your customers' vocabulary and actually knowing it, and it costs nothing at all.

Turning a list into pages

1. Group the phrases by the problem behind them.
2. One page per problem, not per phrase.
3. Use the customer's words in the heading.
4. Answer the question the phrase implies.
5. Include the price question, because it is always there.
6. Link to the technical page for anybody who wants detail.

The second matters a great deal. Twenty near-identical pages for twenty phrasings of the same problem makes a worse site and performs worse than one good page covering all of them.

How to check what is actually working is covered in searching for yourself and learning nothing.

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.