What Your Customers Search For vs What You Post About
Your posts and your customers' searches rarely speak the same language — and that mismatch is quietly costing you visibility. Here's how to find the phrases people actually type and turn them into content that meets customers where their questions live.
Dave Smith
# What Your Customers Search For vs What You Post About
Here's a quick experiment. Open your business Instagram or Facebook page. Scroll through the last twenty posts. Note down what they're actually about.
Now think about the last customer who walked in or got in touch. What did they ask? What did they type into Google before they landed on you? What were they trying to figure out?
If you do that honestly, the two lists look almost nothing alike. And that mismatch — between what you post about and what people search for — is doing more damage than most small businesses realise.
What You're Probably Posting
Most SME social media is a steady drip of the same things. New products. Behind-the-scenes shots. The occasional team photo. A "happy Monday" post on a quiet morning. Maybe a quote graphic if you're feeling ambitious.
It's not bad content. It's just self-referential. It's about you. Your wins, your range, your week.
Which would be fine if customers came looking for *you*. But mostly, they don't. They come looking for help.
What They're Actually Searching For
The phrases people type into search bars are weirdly specific. "Near me". "Open Sundays". "How much for a small one". "Without an appointment". "Vs the other one in town". "Reviews". "Does it work on..."
They're not browsing your feed wondering what you'll post next. They're stuck on something. A leaky tap. A wedding gift they've forgotten to buy. A car making a noise it didn't make last week. A skin thing they're hoping isn't serious.
Here's the awkward bit — they often don't know your business name when they start. They're describing a problem in their own clumsy words, hoping someone shows up who seems to understand it.
The Gap That Costs You
When the language you use online doesn't match the language your customers use, two things happen.
First, you become harder to find. Algorithms don't read minds; they read words. If you've never written the phrase "boiler making a banging noise" anywhere on your page, you're invisible to everyone typing exactly that.
Second, even when people do land on your page, they bounce. Because nothing there speaks to the problem they actually arrived with. Your gorgeous product photography, your team's tenth-anniversary post, your new colour range — none of it answers the question they came with.
That's not a content quality problem. It's a translation problem. Your content is in business, and your customers are speaking human.
How to Find the Phrases You're Missing
You don't need keyword research tools or SEO software for this. The phrases you need are already sitting in your inbox.
Look at your DMs. The actual questions people send you before they buy. Not the polite "hi, just enquiring" ones — the messy, half-formed ones. "Sorry to bother you but is it possible to..." or "Hi, do you do the thing where..."
Look at your reviews. People describe what brought them to you in language they'd never see in your marketing. "I'd been putting off sorting my..." or "After three other places couldn't..."
Listen to your phone calls if you take them. The first thirty seconds of any call is usually a customer explaining their problem in their own words. That's pure content gold, and most of it never makes it onto a post.
Even your inbox search history works. If you regularly search "knee pain", "dog rash", "small wedding", "removal van small flat" — those are clues about what your customers ask about most often.
Turning Searches into Posts
Once you've got a list of how customers actually describe their problems, the post format almost writes itself.
A post titled "How much does a small wedding cake cost?" beats "Our new spring range is here" every time, for the simple reason that someone is, right now, typing exactly that question somewhere. Same with "What to do if your boiler is making a banging noise" or "Can you wear trainers to a christening?"
You're not abandoning the pretty product shots. You're adding posts that meet customers where their questions live. The brand stuff is for people who already know you. The question-led stuff is for everyone else.
The bonus: these posts tend to get saved, shared, and remembered. Because they're useful in a way that "Happy Friday from the team" simply isn't.
A Small Weekly Habit
Once a week, write down one question a customer asked you. Phone, email, in-store, DM — doesn't matter. Just one, in their words.
Turn that into one post. Not polished, not a graphic-design event. Just a clear answer to the question, posted in language that matches how they asked it.
Over a year, that's fifty posts that exactly match how real people search for what you do. Most of your competitors won't be doing this. They'll still be posting "TGIF!" with a photo of their dog.
This is honestly one of the things Aunty Social tries to make easier — pulling the questions you actually get asked into FAQ-style and tip-style posts so the answers go out without you having to write each one from scratch. But you don't need any tool to start. You just need to start writing down the questions.