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The words people actually search with, not the ones you'd use

You'll know the words people really use to find you and where to check them every month, instead of the words you'd use to describe your own business.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026

You can have a well-written title, description, and web pages, and all of that is still only worth as much as the words you chose, and you chose them, not the person searching for you. You type your clinic's name into Google and there it is, first on the list. You feel good about that. But nobody searches for your clinic's name if they don't know it yet: they search for "tooth pain at night" or "dentist open today." Showing up when someone types your brand name says nothing about whether you show up when someone types the problem they have.

The question that matters isn't whether people find you. It's which exact words bring them to you, and which words should but don't.

What you'd say, and what the person searching for you types

You know your business from the inside. You know you offer "conservative dentistry" and "state-of-the-art invisible orthodontics." Those are the words you use to think about your clinic, and without realizing it, they end up being the words on your website.

Patients don't think that way. They think about the symptom or the urgency: "my tooth hurts," "I broke a tooth eating," "how much does a filling cost." They rarely type the technical name of a treatment, unless another dentist already told them what it's called.

That gap between how you talk and how they search explains why a well-written website, with good copy and a fair price, never shows up in the search that would have brought in a new client. The problem isn't the quality of the writing. It's the vocabulary.

The screen that answers this without you having to guess

You don't have to guess this. Google has a free tool, Search Console, that shows you which phrases your site showed up for in its results, whether people clicked them or not. It doesn't show all of them: to protect the privacy of the person searching, it leaves out some queries that are searched very rarely. The report is called "Performance" and has four columns worth learning: the query, which is what that person typed; impressions, how many times your site showed up for that phrase; clicks, how many times someone actually came to your site; and average position, where your site usually ranked within that list.

An impression isn't a visit. It means your website was there, in the results list, when someone typed that phrase, whether they clicked or not. A click is the visit. And the gap between those two columns, impressions and clicks, tells you whether the problem is that you don't show up, or you show up but don't convince anyone.

That row holds the answer. "Emergency dentist [your city]" gets almost a thousand impressions: Google shows you to that searcher a lot. But only twelve clicks. You rank reasonably well, second or third, so it's not a ranking problem. It's that the title and description that person sees in the results list don't tell them you handle emergencies today. That gets fixed in that page's title and description: and this is where you check whether the fix worked.

The "complete dental health care" row tells the opposite story. Five impressions over the same period. Almost nobody types that phrase, so it doesn't matter how good it sounds: there's no one on the other end waiting for it. It can stay as an intro line on the homepage. As the goal of an entire page, it's overkill.

Now you have the list of real words for your business, not the ones you'd use to describe it, and you know which screen to check every month. What's left is figuring out what to fix first if, after all this, people still can't find you, and what's better left alone. That's next.

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