Keyword Research for a Small Business Starts With Their Words

Most small business websites are written in the wrong language. Not the wrong tone, the wrong vocabulary. Keyword research for a small business is not really a software problem, it is a translation problem: the words an owner uses all day are not the words a customer types into Google.

A roofer in Thirsk writes about fascias, soffits and dry verge systems. The person who needs him types “gutter leaking down the wall” or “roof tiles blown off in the wind”. Both are describing the same job. Only one of them is describing it the way the search actually happens.

That gap is why a decent looking site can sit there for a year and bring in almost nothing.

The customer describes a problem, you describe a service

Owners name things by the work. Customers name things by the symptom, because the symptom is all they have.

Nobody standing in their kitchen looking at a wet patch on the ceiling knows whether it is a slipped tile, a failed flashing or a blocked valley. They know there is a wet patch. So they search the wet patch.

It runs the same way across every trade. An electrician sells consumer unit upgrades, the customer searches “fuse box keeps tripping”. A plumber sells a system flush, the customer searches “radiators cold at the bottom”. A vet in Malton offers a puppy vaccination course, the owner searches “when do puppies need their jabs”. Same job, two vocabularies, and only one of them ever gets typed into a search bar.

Keyword research for a small business is mostly listening

You do not need a paid tool to start. You need your last twenty enquiries.

Read the actual wording in the emails, the texts and the voicemails. Write down the phrase the customer used before you translated it into trade language on the phone. That list is what customers search for, in their own handwriting, and for a town of nine thousand people it is more reliable than anything a keyword tool will estimate.

Then three free checks to widen it. Type the customer phrase into Google and read the autocomplete suggestions. Read the “people also ask” box underneath. Then open Search Console and look at the queries you already appear for, because some of them will be phrases you would never have thought of yourself.

That is how people search for trades, and it is all sitting there for free.

Write the phrase once, plainly, on the page that answers it

The fix is smaller than it sounds. You are not rewriting the site in customer-speak and dropping your trade vocabulary. You are making sure the customer phrase appears once, in plain words, on the page that deals with it.

A page titled “Roof Repairs” can open with a line about leaks, missing tiles and water coming through a ceiling, then carry on in proper terms. The page title still needs to say what the page is, and the homepage still should not try to say everything at once. One phrase, in the right place, is enough for Google to connect the two vocabularies.

The temptation is to list every variant. Resist it. A page stuffed with twelve ways of saying the same thing reads like it was written for a machine, and customers can tell.

So the useful exercise this week is not a tool. It is a sheet of paper with two columns: what you call it, and what they called it when they rang. Where those columns differ, you have found a page worth a sentence.