What your customers actually type into Google (and how to find out for free)
Most websites are written in the language of the business rather than the language of the customer. A plumber writes "hydronic heating solutions" while the person searching types "why is my radiator cold". Both describe the same job, but only one of them gets found, and only one of them sounds like a human being. Here are four free ways to find the words your customers actually use, and what to do once you have them.
Start with the searches you already appear for
If your site is connected to Google Search Console, which is free, it will show you the actual queries people typed before your page appeared. This is the only list on this page that is real data about your own site rather than an educated guess, so start here. Look past the searches for your business name and read the rest closely: the phrasing people use, the questions they ask, the problems they describe. Those are your customers talking, in their own words, unprompted.
If your site is not connected to Search Console yet, that is a half-hour job worth doing before anything else in this list. You cannot improve what you cannot see.
Let Google finish your sentence
Open a private browsing window, type the start of a phrase a customer might use, and read what Google suggests. Those suggestions are built from what people really search. Then run the search and scroll to the bottom of the results for the related searches, and look at the "People also ask" box in the middle. Ten minutes of this gives you a page of genuine customer phrasing, and it costs nothing.
Two habits make this more useful: use a private window so your own history does not skew the suggestions, and type the way a frustrated customer would rather than the way your industry would.
Read your own inbox and call notes
The best keyword research most businesses own is already sitting in their enquiry emails, their text messages and the notes they scribble during phone calls. How does a customer describe the problem before they know the technical name for it? Which three questions come up on nearly every job? Which words do they get wrong in the same way every time? That vocabulary belongs on your website, because it is what the next customer will type.
Look at what the results are already rewarding
Search the phrase you want to be found for and read the top handful of results properly. Not to copy them, but to understand what Google currently thinks a good answer looks like: is it a service page, a guide, a list of prices, a comparison? If every result is a detailed guide and your plan is a two-line paragraph, the gap is not your keywords, it is the depth of the answer.
One page, one question
Once you have the phrases, resist the urge to sprinkle them all over your homepage. A page can only answer one search properly. If you have found five distinct things customers ask about, that is five pages, each with a title that says plainly what it covers, and each answering that one question fully. That is also why crowded homepages underperform: they gesture at everything and answer nothing.
Then write like a person. Use the customer's words in your headings and your opening lines, because that is where both readers and search engines look first, but never at the cost of the sentence making sense. Stuffing a phrase in six times does not help you and it reads badly, which costs you the enquiry you were chasing.
Where this fits
Knowing what your customers type is the content layer, and it sits on top of the technical one. If you have not checked the foundations yet, our 20-minute website health check comes first, and if you serve a local area, your Google Business Profile is the other half of the picture.
If you would rather have someone do this properly for your business, tell us the situation and we will give you a straight answer on where your site should start. No page-one promises, because nobody honest can make them.