What your customers actually search for, and why it isn’t your job title

Your website has a page for every service you offer. Each one is named after the thing you do. And almost nobody is typing those words into Google.

Not because your work is niche. Because the name of the solution is the last thing a person learns, and the problem is the first.

A real example, with real numbers

We looked this up recently for an allied health practice in Sydney. Here is what Australians actually type each month, checked on the 1st of September 2026.

Ten, against fourteen thousand eight hundred. Same person, same problem, same wallet. The only difference is which one of them has already worked out what to call it.

Swap the words for your own trade and the shape stays the same. Nobody searches for a “pre-purchase timber pest inspection”. They search whether those little holes in the skirting board are termites.

Why every business makes this mistake

You have been doing your job for years. You know what it is called, you know how it is billed, and you have said the words out loud a thousand times. Of course that is what goes on the website.

Your customer has been living with a problem for three weeks and has never once used your industry’s vocabulary. They are not being difficult. They just do not know your word for it yet.

So you end up with a website that reads like a menu written for people who already know what they want to order.

What to do with the answer

The temptation is to rename your services after the big numbers. Do not. That is how you end up with a page called “Bloated Stomach” and a business that sounds like a symptom.

Your service pages keep the buying words. Ten searches a month from someone who has decided they need a dietitian, a bookkeeper or an electrician is worth more than a thousand from someone still reading. Those pages are where people land when they are ready. Their job is to convert, not to attract.

Your blog takes the problem words. That is where the volume lives, and those readers are eight weeks earlier in the same journey. Answer the question properly, and be the business that was useful before anyone paid you anything.

One layer brings people in. The other turns them into enquiries. Businesses that only build the second one wonder why the website is quiet.

The part most people leave out

Here is the honest bit, because you will find it out eventually and it is better coming from us.

Those big problem searches are already answered by enormous health and government websites, or their equivalent in your industry. You are not going to take first place off them by writing a better paragraph. Anyone who promises you page one for a term like that is selling something.

What you can win is narrower and it is worth more. The longer, more specific version of the question. The Australian version, where most of the top results are American. The one where the answer depends on the actual detail your customer is stuck on.

And increasingly, the answer that gets quoted back to someone by ChatGPT or by Google’s AI summary, with your name attached. Those tools lean on people who clearly know the subject. Being genuinely useful in your own field is the whole strategy there. It is the same job it always was.

The quiet version of this problem

There is a version of this that costs more and shows up less. Your service names might be right, and the searches might exist, but you have written them the way your industry says them rather than the way your customer says them.

“Fixed wire testing” instead of “electrical safety check”. “Practice management” instead of “bookkeeping for clinics”. Same service. One of them is searched for.

Read your services page out loud and ask whether a friend outside your industry would use any of those words. If they would not, your customers are not typing them either.

If your website is quiet for reasons that go past wording, we wrote about why small business websites fail separately.