A speech therapist told me she wrote a whole page on “developmental language delay”. Thorough, professional, precise. Zero visits from Google.

We checked together what parents actually type: “2 year old not talking”. Thousands of searches a month. She rewrote the page around that question, and within a few months it became her main source of inquiries.

That is the whole story of keyword research: discovering the customer’s words, not yours.

The gap between your language and theirs

You think “orthodontics”; the customer types “kids braces cost”. You write “commercial litigation”; the customer searches “client won’t pay what to do”. Every profession suffers this blindness, and it’s natural: you live the trade, they live the problem.

Google connects the two only if your pages are written in the language of the problem. Here is how to find it, free.

4 free sources

1. Google autocomplete

Start typing your service into Google and don’t press Enter. “Garden design…” and Google completes: price, small gardens, private homes, your city. Every completion is a real, common search. Work through variations (add “how much”, “how”, “when”) and write everything down.

2. “People also ask”

Search one of your core phrases and look at the expanding question box mid-results. These are the field’s most common questions, in searchers’ own words. Each is an idea for a paragraph, an FAQ entry, or an entire post.

Scroll to the bottom of the results: Google suggests adjacent phrases people searched. Another layer of real phrasings you may not have considered.

4. Your own customers

The most neglected source: how do customers phrase the problem on the phone and in WhatsApp? Which words do they use in the first conversation? One week of writing these down is worth an expensive research tool. Bonus: if you already have a site, connect it to Google Search Console (free) and see in black and white which searches you appear in.

What to do with the list

After an hour of collecting you’ll have dozens of phrases. Now organize:

  1. Group into topics. “How much does treatment cost”, “treatment price”, “cost” - one topic.
  2. Pick one core phrase per page. One page cannot compete for ten topics. One service = one page = one core phrase.
  3. Prefer specific over broad. “Couples therapy” is a losing war against giant sites. “Couples therapy after childbirth in Ramat Hasharon” is a search you can win - and that searcher is far closer to calling.
  4. Questions become content. Turn the “People also ask” questions into an FAQ page or blog posts. That is exactly the content AI engines quote.

Bottom line

Keyword research is not rocket science and needs no expensive software. It requires replacing guessing with checking: Google’s completions, people’s questions, and your own ears in customer conversations. A business that writes its site in the customer’s problem-language gains an edge money can’t always buy.

Want us to do the research for you and build the site structure around it? It’s part of every project we do ↗