The words you use to describe your business aren’t always the words your customers type into Google. A joiner might describe their work as “bespoke joinery”, which is accurate and sounds professional, while the person searching types “fitted wardrobes Cheltenham” or “built-in bookshelves near me”. If the website only ever says “bespoke joinery”, it can miss many of the people looking for exactly that service.
Keyword research closes that gap. For a local service business it doesn’t need expensive software: most of what you need comes from free Google tools and from your own customers.
Start with how customers describe the problem
Write down every way a customer might describe what they need, rather than the name of your service. Someone with a leaking roof rarely searches “roofing maintenance solutions”; they search “roof leak repair” or “emergency roofer Stroud”. Someone who needs a logo types “logo design for small business”, not “brand identity development”.
Two good places to find those phrases:
- the words customers use on the phone and in emails, before you translate them into trade terms
- the question “if I didn’t know what this was called, how would I ask a friend to find someone who does it?”
Knowing your own industry well makes this harder than it sounds, because the jargon stops feeling like jargon.
Use Google’s own suggestions
Type a phrase into Google and note the autocomplete suggestions. Google says these predictions are based on real searches made on Google, shaped by factors such as location, trending interest and your own past searches. They don’t tell you how many people search each phrase, but they’re a good guide to how people word things. A private browsing window reduces the influence of your own search history.
Further down the results, “People also ask” boxes show questions people have around the topic, and the related searches near the bottom of the page suggest more variations. Questions that keep appearing are good candidates for a section on a service page or a blog post of their own.
Check what your Business Profile already knows
If you have a Google Business Profile, its performance section shows the search terms people used to find your profile on Search and Maps. For a local business this is some of the most relevant data available, because it reflects local searches that led to you. If a service keeps appearing there but has no page on your website, that’s a gap worth filling. Keeping the profile itself in good shape matters too, and our list of Google Business Profile mistakes covers the basics.
Use Search Console for quick wins
If your website has been live for a while, Google Search Console is free, and its Performance report shows the searches your site already appears for, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for each. Look for searches with plenty of impressions and an average position of roughly 8 to 20. Google already sees your page as relevant, so improving it (a clearer heading, a section that answers the search directly, links to it from related pages) is often quicker than chasing a brand-new term.
Two caveats. Search Console leaves out very rare searches to protect privacy, so on a small local site a fair share of searches won’t be listed individually. And AI Overviews now answer some informational searches on the results page itself, so judge pages by enquiries as well as clicks. Our guide to Google AI Overviews explains what that means for you.
Keyword Planner: useful, with limits
Google Keyword Planner is free, but it sits inside Google Ads, so you need an account, and Google’s Keyword Planner help page says you must complete the account setup, including billing information, before you can use it.
It’s good for two things: finding related keyword ideas from a phrase or a competitor’s website, and comparing the relative size of different phrasings. Set the location to the area you cover rather than the whole UK.
Treat the numbers with care. Accounts with little or no ad spend often see broad ranges (such as 100 to 1K searches a month) rather than exact figures, and many local phrases have so few searches that they barely register. A low number doesn’t make a term worthless: five searches a month for “garage door repair Tewkesbury” could mean five paying jobs. The top-of-page bid estimates are a useful hint too, because advertisers tend to pay more for searches that lead to sales.
Local terms and “near me”
“Kitchen fitter” and “kitchen fitter Cheltenham” are effectively different searches, and the local version is usually easier to rank for while bringing exactly the customers you want. Some people search a town, some a district or postcode, and many simply type “near me” and let Google use their location.
You don’t need to repeat “near me” throughout your pages. Google works out where the searcher is, so what matters is that your Business Profile is accurate and your website makes clear which areas you cover and what you do there.
Give each service its own page
A common mistake is to push every keyword onto the homepage. Google generally does better with pages that are clearly about one thing, so if you offer five distinct services, five focused pages, each built around its own service and the phrases customers use for it, will usually outperform one page trying to cover everything.
The same goes for questions. If customers keep asking the same thing before booking, a page or post that answers it in their words is often easier to rank than an answer squeezed into a service page where it doesn’t quite fit.
Don’t chase volume for its own sake
The biggest keywords are usually the most competitive, and many people searching them aren’t your customers. “Website design” gets far more searches than “website design for tradesmen”, but the second is much closer to a real enquiry and much easier to rank for. Longer, more specific phrases (often called long-tail keywords) tend to bring people who already know what they want.
If you run Google Ads, the search terms report shows the exact searches that triggered your ads and which of them led to enquiries. That’s some of the best keyword evidence you can get for your website content too, and it’s also where you spot irrelevant searches to block, as covered in our guide to negative keywords.
Our local self-storage case study shows this approach in practice: the SEO work went after the local search terms potential customers were using, alongside a Google Ads account built around the company’s key services and areas.
A simple routine to start with
- List every service you offer, with the plain-English phrase a customer would use for each.
- Add the towns and areas you cover.
- Check autocomplete, “People also ask” and related searches for each phrase.
- Look at the searches in your Business Profile performance and the queries in Search Console.
- Match each group of phrases to one page, and note where no suitable page exists yet.
- Repeat every six months or so, because search habits, competitors and Google’s results all change.
If you’d like help building that keyword list and checking it against your current pages, our SEO consultancy starts with exactly this. Call 0330 223 0847 or drop us a line.
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