How to find the searches your customers actually type

What keyword research is for a local business

Keyword research is finding out which words people type when they want what you sell, and how many of them type each one. For a local business it is a small job. A dentist in Pocatello does not need ten thousand phrases. The practice needs the twenty or thirty that patients in Bannock County type, matched one each to a page on the site, so that each page is built to answer one of them.

The phrases come from three places. The first is the practice’s own front desk, because the words a patient uses on the phone are the words they typed ten minutes earlier. The second is Google’s data, in Search Console for the phrases the site already shows for and in Keyword Planner for the ones it does not. The third is Google itself, the suggestions that drop down as you type and the People Also Ask questions under the results.

The output is a table with a phrase, a rough monthly count, and the page that will carry it. Every page gets one phrase, following the rule of one topic per page. The phrase goes in the title tag and H1. Whether the page then matches what the searcher wanted is covered under search intent.

What a site built on the wrong words looks like for a dentist

The navigation reads General Dentistry, Restorative Dentistry, Cosmetic Dentistry, Endodontics, Periodontics, and Prosthodontics. These are the words a dentist learned in school. They are correct and nobody in Pocatello types them. The patient with a cracked molar types “emergency dentist Pocatello.” The parent types “kids dentist near me.” The person with the ache types “root canal cost” and “does a root canal hurt.” The site has a page for each of the dental terms and no page a patient would find.

Search Console shows the shape of it. The site gets 1,900 impressions a month, and 1,650 are the practice name and the dentist’s name. The remaining 250 are scattered across 90 phrases, none with more than a handful. The page called Endodontics has 12 impressions in three months. The search “root canal Pocatello” gets about 110 searches a month, and the practice does not appear for it, though it does four root canals a week.

The second symptom is the homepage trying to carry every phrase at once. Its title tag lists six services and the town, so it shows weakly for all of them and strongly for none. Each service page has the practice name as its title, so Google sees the same title on nine pages.

A worked example: the phrase list for a family dentist in Pocatello

Bannock Creek Dental is a two-dentist family practice in Pocatello seeing about 45 patients a day. Here is the phrase list after checking the front desk’s words against Keyword Planner and Search Console. Counts are monthly searches for Idaho, rounded, and the page column shows which page carries each phrase.

The phrases are short and plain. “Emergency dentist Pocatello” is the largest service search in the county and the practice had no page for it, even though it holds two slots a day for walk-ins. The Medicaid phrase was not on the site anywhere and came straight from the front desk, which answers that question six times a day. Here is the title tag and opening line of the old Endodontics page against the new root canal page.

Endodontics | Bannock Creek Dental. Our endodontic services address the diseased or injured pulp of the tooth using state-of-the-art techniques and technology.

Root Canal in Pocatello, Idaho | Bannock Creek Dental. A root canal at our Pocatello office takes one visit of about 90 minutes, is done under local anesthetic so it feels like a filling, and costs $900 to $1,300 before insurance. We hold same-week appointments for tooth pain.

How to check your own keywords

1. Ask your front desk to write down, for one week, the words callers use to describe what they want. This list is the most accurate keyword tool you will ever have, and it is free.
2. Open Google Search Console, go to Performance, and set the date to the last three months. Filter out queries containing your business name. What is left is every phrase your site already shows for, with clicks and impressions.
3. Type each phrase from the front desk list into Google slowly and note the suggestions that drop down. Then scroll to People Also Ask and note the questions.
4. Open Google Keyword Planner, which is free inside a Google Ads account, enter the phrases, and set the location to your state. Note the monthly counts. The numbers are ranges, and they are good enough to sort phrases by size.
5. Match each phrase to one page on your site. Any phrase with no page is a page you need. Any page with no phrase is a page to rethink.
6. Read the title tag of every page. Each should carry its one phrase and the town, and no two pages should share a title.

What we do about keyword research

We build your phrase list from your own front desk, your Search Console data, and Google’s suggestions, then check the counts and pick the phrase each page will carry. Every phrase gets one page, and every page gets one phrase, with the title tag and H1 rewritten to match. Phrases with no page become a short list of pages to build, ordered by how many people type them. The list is kept with your monthly report and updated as the searches shift. If your site speaks your trade’s language and not your customers’, this is the first fix.

Questions people ask about SEO: how to find the searches your customers actually type