Finding the Search Terms Your Customers Actually Use

Businesses describe their work in the language they use to cost and invoice it. The website then reads „sanitary installation, pipe rehabilitation, drinking water hygiene“, because that is exactly how the line items in the quotation are named. The person standing at half past eight in the evening with a bucket under the trap types „water won't drain bathroom old building“ into their phone instead. There is no misunderstanding between those two phrasings, only a change of perspective: one describes a service, the other describes a problem. A website that accommodates both language worlds loses nothing in professional precision and gains the enquiries that would otherwise land somewhere else.

Google's documentation makes exactly this difference the starting point of any research: it suggests asking what words someone would search for in order to find your content, and taking into account that prior knowledge changes the choice of words (Google Search Central). That is not a footnote for advanced practitioners; it is the actual work. Everything that follows — headings, addresses, menu labels — comes out of it.

Those words are usually chosen under time pressure and on a small display. Around 82 percent (Statista) of people aged 16 and over in Germany use a smartphone, and 93 percent (Federal Statistical Office of Germany) of people aged ten and over are online at all. Anyone searching on the move phrases things briefly, imprecisely and in their own everyday language. Technical terms rarely appear in such queries — unless someone has read them on an invoice, in a survey report or in a funding decision beforehand. That exception is valuable, by the way: whoever uses the technical term is usually further along in the decision.

Nearly every small business is affected by this. The German chambers of commerce and industry represent more than three million companies (DIHK) in Germany, organised in 79 chambers (DIHK). The vast majority of those companies have neither a marketing department nor a budget for research tools, and the person looking after the website does it somewhere between a quotation and a building site. That is why the method in this article is deliberately built to work with a sheet of paper, your own phone and a free Search Console account.

The second source is the search box itself. Type a phrase from the four-week list without submitting it and you get completion suggestions. Those suggestions are not estimates; they are phrasings people genuinely enter. Add to that the boxes with related questions between the results and the related searches at the bottom of the page. Together that quickly yields fifteen to thirty variants per starting term — enough to see patterns.

The return on this step is twofold. First, you get variants nobody in the business would have thought of, because they come from a different level of knowledge. Second, the related questions hand you ready-made headings: put the question „How long does a bathroom renovation take?“ on the relevant page as a subheading and answer it in two sentences, and you have the customer's phrasing and the answer in the same place. How to write such answers concisely and verifiably without slipping into advertising language is shown in the article on website copy people actually read.

At this point you have an unsorted list: sentences from the phone, variants from the search box, terms from the performance report. The next step is the most important one in the whole procedure, and it costs nothing but half an hour of thinking. Every term is assigned one of three intents: inform, compare, hire. That assignment decides which page the term lands on and which next step is offered there.

The middle intent is the one most often underestimated, even though it causes the most work. In a representative survey of internet users in Germany, 54 percent (Bitkom) of online shoppers said they look at customer reviews before buying; 42 percent (Bitkom) use price comparison sites and 39 percent (Bitkom) talk to friends, family and acquaintances. Translated to a trade business, that means there is a comparison phase between first interest and the phone call, in which price ranges, process and evidence are being sought. A website that skips that phase and leads straight to the form loses enquiries at exactly that point.

This sorting has a side effect that reaches beyond classic search. 50 percent (Bitkom) of internet users in Germany at least occasionally use AI chats instead of a classic search engine, while 47 percent (Bitkom) stay exclusively with classic search. Answer systems prefer pages that answer exactly one question completely — that is, pages cut along intent. What that means for structure and wording is set out in the article on visibility in AI search.

Two additions decide between a hit and a miss for regionally active businesses. The first is the place: town, district, county, neighbouring municipality, plus phrasings such as „near me“ or „round the corner“. The second is the regional word for the same thing. A business that professionally says „butchery“ has customers typing „butcher“ — and the other way round. Both variants belong in the text, but not in the same heading and certainly not as a list.

The most common mistake here is the enumeration: „butcher, butchery, meat counter, butcher's shop in Hildesheim and the surrounding area“. Such chains read badly and look to people like a fault in the text. It works better to run the main term in the heading and to place the variants where they occur naturally anyway — in a sentence about the history of the business, in an answer to a frequently asked question, in an image caption. Which regional details should additionally be kept consistent is covered in the article on local visibility for small businesses.

A fifth mistake concerns the routes to the page. When a term gets its own page, the menu label, the link and the address should name it as well. Google's documentation describes how suitable anchor text makes the content of a linked page recognisable before the visit (Google Search Central), and that parts of the address can appear in search results as a navigation path (Google Search Central). A page living at „/service-3/“ gives away exactly that hint. If an existing address is changed, a redirect belongs with it — how that works without losing visibility is described in the article on relaunching without losing rankings. And anyone wanting to mark up the finished structure in machine-readable form will find the basics in the article on structured data in search results.

The effort rarely lies in the research but in the implementation: creating pages, naming them, assigning addresses, filing them into the menu, linking them to each other — and repeating all of that for every new service. This is exactly where the work stalls in small businesses, and exactly where XICflow comes in. The briefing produces a page structure in which every service gets its own page instead of disappearing into one long list of services.

What that process looks like from briefing to published website is described on the page how XICflow works. Which building blocks are available is shown in the overview of features; what the setup costs is set out in the plan overview. How finished page structures look in practice can be seen in the example websites, and how this route compares with other ways to get a website is set out in the comparison of implementation routes.