Words Your Customers Use and You Do Not

The gap

Every trade develops precise terms for things, because precision matters when you are doing the work.

Customers do not have those terms. They describe the problem, the symptom, or the object as they see it.

So the page says one thing and the search says another, and they never meet. Nobody is at fault and the work goes to somebody else.

Where the mismatch shows up

• Product names that only the trade uses.
• Process names, where the customer knows the outcome and not the method.
• Category names from your supplier's catalogue rather than ordinary speech.
• Symptoms against causes, where they search the symptom and you named the cause.
• Brand names, which customers often use as the generic term.
• Regional differences, where the same thing has different names in different places.

The fourth is the most common and the most costly. A customer searches for the noise their furnace is making. Your page is titled with the name of the component that causes it.

Where to find their words

Cheaper and more accurate than a keyword tool, and available immediately.

Your own enquiries. Read the last thirty and note how people describe what they want. Those are literally your customers' words.

Your phone calls. Write down the phrase people use when they explain the problem, before you translate it.

Reviews, yours and competitors', where customers describe the work in their own terms.

And the questions people ask in local community groups, which is unfiltered customer language about your trade.

A worked example

A company installing ductless heat pumps, with a website using that term throughout.

It is the correct term. It is what the industry calls them and what the manufacturer's literature says.

Reading their own enquiries, customers described them as: those wall units, mini-splits, the air conditioner heater thing, and by two brand names.

Almost nobody wrote ductless heat pump.

They added a page using the customers' terms in the heading and opening, explaining early that these are all the same thing, and kept the correct terminology in the detail below.

That page began attracting traffic the original had never seen, and the enquiries arriving through it were from people who had not previously known what to call the thing they wanted.

Using both, in the right places

Not a choice between accuracy and accessibility.

The customer's word goes in the page title, the main heading and the first paragraph, because that is where matching matters.

Your word goes in the detail, introduced alongside theirs. "Wall-mounted units, properly called ductless heat pumps" does both jobs in five words.

This also teaches the customer the correct term, which they then use when speaking to you, which makes the conversation easier.

The counter-case

Where the trade term is the right one to lead with.

When your customers are other businesses in the same trade, who use the precise vocabulary and would find plain language imprecise or condescending.

Where the term is regulated or has legal meaning, and using a loose equivalent would be inaccurate or non-compliant.

And where the customer segment you want is the informed one. A specialist supplier serving people who know exactly what they need does not benefit from simplifying.

The test is who you want to arrive. If it is somebody who already knows the term, use it. If it is somebody with a problem and no vocabulary, use theirs.

Brand names as generic terms

A specific case worth handling carefully.

Customers frequently use a brand name for a whole category. That is what they search, and matching it exactly can create a false impression that you are that brand or an authorised dealer.

The safe form is descriptive and comparative rather than claiming. Saying you service several makes, naming them, is different from titling a page as though you were the manufacturer, and the distinction matters legally as well as commercially.

If you are an authorised dealer, say so plainly, because that is genuinely valuable and worth being explicit about.

Regional vocabulary

Worth checking rather than assuming.

The same object has different names in different places, and a business serving one region should use that region's word even if the trade standard differs.

Canadian usage differs from American usage in several trades, and a website written from American source material will use terms local customers do not.

The check is simply asking a few customers what they call it, which takes a week of ordinary conversation and no research budget at all.

What to do with what you find

1. List the terms customers actually use for your main services.
2. Compare against your page headings.
3. Change the headings where they differ.
4. Add a line explaining the equivalence early on the page.
5. Keep the trade term in the detail.
6. Repeat when you add a service.

The whole exercise is an hour and mostly consists of reading things you already have, which makes it one of the cheaper improvements on this list.

The search box on your own site

An overlooked source, if you have one.

What people type into your site search is a direct record of the words they use and what they expected to find. It is a shorter list than any keyword tool and considerably more relevant.

Empty results are particularly informative. Somebody searching your site for a term that returns nothing has told you either that you lack a page or that your page uses a different word.

Most small business sites either have no search or have never looked at what it records. Checking takes minutes if the data exists.

The same applies to the questions people ask on your listing, which is another log of customer vocabulary that nobody reads.

Why this is not dumbing down

An objection worth answering, because trades feel it.

Using the customer's word is not pretending the trade term does not exist. It is meeting somebody where they are and then bringing them along.

A page that uses only the technical term is not more professional. It is less useful, and it is invisible to the people it was written for.

The expertise shows in the detail, which is where it belongs, and in getting the work right, which is where it matters rather more.

How that detail should be ordered on the page 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.