Module 5 of 13

Keywords and customer intent

How to find the words your customers actually use, without buying a tool or guessing.

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Your words are not their words

Trades develop internal vocabulary. You say "domestic EICR"; the customer types "landlord electrical certificate". You say "aesthetic treatments"; they type "lip filler near me". Optimising for your vocabulary is optimising for nobody.

Four free sources of real phrasing

Your own enquiries: the exact words in emails and texts customers send you. This is the highest-quality source you will ever have, and you already own it.

Search autocomplete and the "people also ask" and "related searches" blocks — these are aggregated real queries.

Your Google Business Profile and Search Console reports, which show the queries that actually reached you.

Competitor page titles, read for vocabulary rather than copied — if three rivals all say "emergency" and you say "24-hour", that is worth knowing before you decide which is right for you.

Sort by intent, not volume

Group the phrases into: emergency, ready to buy, comparing, and researching. Build pages for the first two before you write a single blog post for the last one.

A phrase that ten people a month search and two of them hire you is worth more than one a thousand people search to read.

In practice — A Manchester accountancy practice

They had a services page titled "Statutory compliance and advisory". Their inbox was full of people asking "do I need to file a self assessment if I earn under £1,000".

They kept the formal page and added plainly titled ones answering the questions people were actually asking. The formal page still exists; it simply stopped being the only door.

Action checklist

  • Copy the subject line and first sentence of your last 20 enquiries into a document.
  • Highlight every phrase a customer used that you would not have written.
  • Type each into a search box and record the autocomplete suggestions.
  • Sort everything into emergency, buying, comparing and researching.
  • Map each buying phrase to a page you already have, or note that it needs one.

Free tool for this lesson

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Exercise

Produce a keyword-to-page map: one row per buying phrase, the page that should answer it, and whether that page exists. Anything unmapped is either a page to write or a phrase to drop.

Time needed: 1 hour

Read the source

Primary documentation, so you can check anything here rather than take our word for it.

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