Most websites I audit are full of words no customer would ever type into Google. They aren’t bad words. They’re the words we use in meetings, on invoices and in industry newsletters, and they sound impressive. Google isn’t impressed. It matches what someone searched with what your page says, and nothing more generous or specific than that.
So if your customers search “why is my hot water going cold” while your page talks about “integrated thermal solutions”, you lose. Not because your work is worse, but because the words don’t line up.
I’d rather you rank on Google for one plain question that brings in three enquiries a week than twenty polished phrases nobody searches.
The words you use are not the words your customers use
There’s a gap between how an industry talks about itself and how buyers talk about their problem. The industry describes the solution, whereas the customer describes the problem. Most websites are written entirely in the language of the solution, which means they only get found by people who already know what to ask for.
Think about a physiotherapist. Internally, the conversation is about load management, mobility assessment and rehabilitation programming. Meanwhile, the person on their phone at 11pm is typing “shoulder hurts when I lift my arm”. Two completely different vocabularies pointing at the same appointment.
I see this pattern in nearly every industry. Accountants write about “compliance obligations” while clients search “how much tax do I pay on a side hustle”. Builders write about “turnkey delivery” while homeowners search “cost to knock out a wall”. The searcher isn’t being lazy. They just don’t know the trade word yet, and they don’t need to.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Jargon feels safer – it signals that we know what we’re doing, and it makes us sound like our competitors, which feels like proof we belong. Plain language feels a bit exposed at first. Get over that feeling and you’ll pick up traffic your competitors never see.
Why industry jargon quietly costs you rankings
Jargon hurts in two ways at once. It targets phrases with almost no search volume, so there’s nothing to win. It also reads as vague to Google, because the page on your website never clearly answers a question anyone asked. You end up competing for words that are hard to rank for and worthless when you get there.
Low volume is the obvious problem. A term like “integrated facilities solutions” might get a handful of searches a month across the whole country. A term like “office cleaning cost per hour” gets searched constantly. Same business, wildly different outcomes.
The second problem is relevance. Google works out what a page is about by reading it the way a person would. When a page hedges its language, it reads as a page about nothing in particular. Most jargon-heavy service pages could be about four different industries if you swapped one noun. They are just filler and don’t serve you.
There’s a third cost too, and it shows up after the click. Someone lands on your page, doesn’t recognise their own problem in the first two lines, and leaves. That behaviour tells Google the match was poor, so your position slides. (In technical terms that I just told you not to talk about, it’s called a ‘bounce rate” and it’s how quickly someone leaves your site after arriving – if your bounce rate is above 50%, you’ve got a problem and Google already knows about it). Clear writing keeps people on the page, which supports the ranking you worked for. If you want the wider picture on how that fits together, our SEO Melbourne page walks through the whole approach.
How to find the words your customers actually type
You don’t need expensive software to start. The best keyword research I do comes from words customers have already given us, sitting in inboxes, call notes and review replies. Tools help you check volume later. The raw material comes from real conversations, and it’s usually free.
Read your own enquiries
Open the last fifty emails and contact form submissions. Copy the exact phrases people use to describe what they want. Don’t tidy them up. Those messy phrases are keyword gold, because if one person typed it to you, hundreds typed something similar into Google.
I did this exercise with a client last year and found they’d been calling their main service one thing for a decade while every single customer called it something else. We renamed the page. Enquiries lifted within six weeks.
Use Google to research Google
Start typing your service into the search bar and look at the suggestions. Scroll to the bottom of the results and read the related searches. Open the “People also ask” boxes and note every question. All of that is real search behaviour, handed to you at no cost.
This is also the fastest way to spot the questions your competitors have ignored. If a question keeps appearing and nobody has a decent page answering it, that’s your next blog post.
Ask whoever answers the phone
Your receptionist, your sales rep and your tradie on the tools hear customer language all day. Ask them what people actually say when they ring. Then ask what people get confused about, because confusion is where the search volume hides.
Reviews work the same way. Read your own and your competitors’ reviews and highlight the recurring phrases. Customers describe outcomes in reviews, and outcome language converts well on service pages.
A worked example: pulling customer words out of reviews
Here’s the method run on a real Melbourne business, so you can see the output instead of the theory. We manage content for Proud Mary Stylist, an interior styling and design studio. Her services pages are public and so are her reviews, which makes the vocabulary gap easy to see. Four steps, about thirty minutes of work.
Step one: write down how the business describes itself
Mary’s site presents a curator, stylist and designer creating bespoke solutions for Australian homes. Her social profiles carry three job titles: interior designer, decorator and stylist. All of it is accurate. All of it is industry language.
Step two: write down how customers describe her
Now read the reviews. Mary’s clients almost always call her an interior designer, even though the business trades as a stylist. Several mention working with a designer for the first time. Others simply say they needed design help for one room. Nobody writes “bespoke solutions”.
Step three: pull out the outcomes, not the services
Customers describe results in plain terms. Mood boards that helped them picture the finished room. A plan broken into stages that suited the budget. Trades coordinated so the job kept moving. Those phrases map straight onto searches like “interior designer for one room” and “how to plan a renovation in stages”.
Step four: turn the gaps into pages
You now have a brief built from evidence. “Interior designer” earns a place beside “stylist” in titles and headings. “Working with an interior designer for the first time” becomes a blog post. Room-by-room questions get their own pages.
Mary also does one thing most of her competitors avoid. Her FAQ page publishes real prices, starting from $175 an hour for styling and $450 for a two-hour design consultation. Cost is one of the highest-intent searches in her category, and she answers it with a number while everyone else writes “investment starts from”.
Run this on your own reviews. Two columns in a document, thirty minutes, and you’ll have a keyword list based on evidence rather than guesswork.
What to do with the words once you have them
A list of keywords does nothing on its own. The words need a home, and that means one clear page for each real question, written in the language the question was asked in. Structure first, then writing, then the technical basics that let Google read what you’ve made. Review your site today and see if you have a page for each main service you offer.
Give each question its own page
Resist the urge to stuff eight keywords onto your homepage. One page, one main question, one clear answer. If you offer six services, you need six service pages, each written for the way customers describe that specific job. Our website design work almost always starts here, because the page structure decides what you can realistically rank for.
Answer the question in the first paragraph
Put the answer up top, then explain. Most people write like they’re building to a conclusion, which loses readers and search engines alike. State the price range, the timeframe or the fix in the opening lines, then earn trust with the detail underneath.
Use the customer’s words in your headings too. A heading that reads “How much does a bathroom renovation cost in Melbourne?” beats “Investment considerations” every time, and it isn’t a close contest.
Sort out the unglamorous basics
Your page titles need the plain phrase in them. Your images need alt text. Your site needs to load fast on a phone, because that’s where most of your traffic is. Claim and fill out your Google Business Profile as well, with real photos, correct hours and your service areas. For a lot of local businesses, that profile is doing more work than the website is.
None of this is hard, but it is rarely done properly, which is exactly why plain-language pages still win so easily in 2026.
Plain language also wins in AI search
AI search has changed how answers get surfaced, but not what gets rewarded. Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI summaries pull from pages that answer a question directly and cleanly. Vague, jargon-padded copy gives them nothing quotable, so they skip it and cite someone clearer instead.
When someone asks an AI assistant “what does a small business website cost in Australia”, it looks for a page that says a number and explains what changes it. A page promising “bespoke digital transformation partnerships” gets ignored completely.
The practical advice hasn’t changed much. Write the question as a heading. Answer it in a sentence or two. Add the detail, the caveats and the local context underneath. We’ve written more on the difference between traditional SEO and AI-driven search on the Pop Media blog if you want to go deeper.
An honest answer on how long this takes
Nobody ranks on Google overnight, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something. For most small businesses, useful movement shows up somewhere between three and six months, with the fast wins coming from local searches and long-tail questions. Established competitors in crowded categories take longer.
The order matters more than the speed. Fix your Google Business Profile first, because it’s free and it moves quickly, then rewrite your main service pages next, using the customer language you collected. Then start answering the questions nobody else has answered properly, one post at a time. You can do this with blog posts and also on social media – this makes coming up with content ideas easy!
Then keep going. The businesses that rank on Google year after year aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who kept publishing clear answers while everyone else redesigned their homepage for the third time.
Start with the enquiry exercise. Twenty minutes in your inbox, a list of the words your customers actually use, and you’ll already know what your next page needs to say. If you’d like a hand turning that list into pages that rank, get in touch with us and we’ll take a look at your site together.
