Resources / 6 min read
You say retaining wall. Your customer types fix leaning fence.
A homeowner is standing in their backyard looking at a fence that’s leaning like it’s had a big night. They pull out their phone. They do not type “timber retaining solutions”. They type “fence leaning over who do I call”.
If your website only speaks your trade’s language, Google has a harder time matching you to that search, and the job goes to whoever wrote the page that sounds like the customer.
This is one of the most common gaps we find in trade websites, and one of the cheapest to close. You don’t need a keyword tool to start. You need to listen differently.
The language gap
You’ve spent years inside your trade, and your vocabulary shows it. Sparkies write “switchboard upgrades”. Concreters write “exposed aggregate”. Plumbers write “backflow prevention”. All correct, and all nearly invisible to a customer who doesn’t know those words exist.
The customer knows what they can see and what they’re worried about. The powerpoint that smells hot. The driveway that’s cracking. The tap that won’t stop. Their search is made of those words, because those are the only words they have.
Google is good at bridging some of this gap, and getting better. But it still rewards the page that matches the searcher’s intent in the searcher’s own terms, and so does the human who lands on it. A page that reads like their problem gets the enquiry. A page that reads like your invoice doesn’t.
Customers search problems, not services
Most local searches worth money come in three flavours:
The problem search. “Water stain on ceiling”, “garage door won’t open”, “power keeps tripping”. They don’t know what the fix is called. Highest urgency, least trade language.
The solution search. “Reroofing cost nz”, “new driveway timaru”, “bathroom renovation quote”. They know roughly what they need and they’re comparing. This is where honest pricing content earns its keep.
The trade search. “Electrician near me”, “plumber henderson”. Shortest, most competitive, and the one every business already targets because it’s the obvious one.
Most trade websites compete hard on the third flavour and ignore the first two, which is exactly backwards: the problem search has the least competition and reaches the customer earliest, before they’ve started collecting quotes from your competitors.
Finding the actual words
Read your own enquiries. Open your texts, emails and form fills from the last six months and write down the exact phrases customers used to describe the job. Not your tidied-up version. Theirs. “The concrete out the front is all flaky” is a keyword. This is the best keyword research available anywhere, and it’s sitting in your pocket, free.
Let Google finish your sentences. Type the start of a customer-style search into Google and read the suggestions. Then scroll to the related searches at the bottom of the results. Both lists are built from what people genuinely type.
Listen on site visits. The words a customer uses when they walk you round the job are the words they searched the night before. When three customers in a month say “the deck’s gone all grey and slimy”, that’s a page topic, handed to you.
Check what the winners wrote. Search your main jobs the way a customer would and read the sites above you. Notice the language on the pages that win. You’re not copying them. You’re confirming which words the market has already voted for.
Where the words go
One job, one page. A single “Our Services” page listing everything you do can’t compete with a dedicated page for each service written in customer language. If you pour driveways, patios and shed slabs, that’s three pages, each answering the searches for that job: what it involves, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, photos of yours.
Put the problem in the headline. “Driveway cracked or sinking?” beats “Concrete Solutions” as an opening line, because it’s the sentence the searcher just typed. Trade terms can live further down the page for the customers who do know them. You’re adding the customer’s language, not deleting your own.
Answer questions in their words. An FAQ that asks “Why is my hot water running out fast?” meets the search head-on, and it’s exactly the kind of plainly written answer AI assistants pull from when they recommend businesses. Writing for the customer and writing for the machines have quietly become the same job.
Keep listening
This isn’t a one-off exercise. Every enquiry that comes in is another data point about how your market talks, and the phrasing drifts over time. The habit is simple: when a customer describes a job in words that surprise you, write the words down. Once a quarter, check your site still speaks them.
The businesses that win local search long-term aren’t the ones with the cleverest tools. They’re the ones whose websites sound like their customers.
The words are the strategy: get them right and everything built on top works harder. At Latetwenties we get local service businesses found online and chosen by the right customers, and every build starts with exactly this research. To see what the rest of the picture looks like, the six things that decide where you show up is the natural next read.