How to find out what people actually typed to find you
There is a report sitting inside your Google Business Profile that lists the actual phrases people typed before your business appeared in front of them. Not an estimate. The real words, with a count next to each one.
It costs nothing, it takes fifteen minutes to read, and in my experience almost no small business owner has ever opened it.
Most people guess at this. They assume customers find them by name, or through word of mouth, or from the sign outside. Some do. But the list will tell you exactly how many, and the answer is usually not the one you expected.
Getting to it
Search for your own business on Google while signed in as the owner. Your management panel appears above the results. Find Performance, then open the searches breakdown.
Set the date range as wide as it will go, which is around six months. A single month is too small a sample for a business that has quiet weeks, and you will end up drawing conclusions from noise.
You will get a list of search terms with a number beside each one, showing how many times that phrase brought your profile up.
Sort the list into three piles
This is the whole method. Read down the list and put every term into one of three groups.
The first pile is your own name, including misspellings of it. These are people who already knew you existed. Somebody recommended you, or they saw your van, or they have been before. This pile measures your reputation, not your reach.
The second pile is what you do. "Barber near me", "emergency plumber", "dog groomer open sunday". These are strangers with a need and no particular business in mind, and your profile got itself in front of them. This pile is the one that grows a business.
The third pile is things you do not do. Terms that brought you up for something you do not actually offer.
Now work out roughly what share of your total is pile two. That single number tells you whether Google is bringing you new customers or just helping the ones you already had to find your phone number. Both are useful. They are not the same thing and most owners cannot tell you which one is happening.
What to do with each pile
Pile one, your name. If this is almost everything, you are relying entirely on word of mouth and you are invisible to anybody who has not heard of you. That is fixable, and it is largely what your categories and services do, which is the audit from the last guide.
Pile two, what you do. Take the top five terms and go and look at your own profile. Is each of those things listed as a service? Very often it is not. Somebody searched "gel nails", your profile appeared, and the word "gel" does not appear anywhere on it. Adding it takes about a minute and makes the next appearance more likely.
Pile three, the things you do not do. Do not dismiss this pile. It is free market research that a business would normally have to pay for. If forty people a month reach you searching for something you have never offered, you have just been told there is demand near you with nobody serving it well. You might decide to offer it. You might decide not to. But you should decide, rather than never knowing.
The part that connects to your reviews
Here is the bit that surprises people, and it is the reason this matters more than a normal analytics report.
The words in your reviews influence the words you appear for. When a customer writes "they sorted my gluten free order without any fuss", that phrase is now attached to your business. You did not write it, you cannot control it, and it is doing work for you.
Which means the search terms list is partly a readout of what your customers have been saying about you. If pile two is full of terms you never advertised, look at your reviews and you will usually find where they came from.
It also means you can nudge it. Not by scripting anyone, which is both dishonest and against Google's rules, but by asking a better question. "Would you mind mentioning what you came in for?" is a perfectly fair thing to say to somebody who has just told you they are delighted. It gets you a review that is more useful to the next person reading it and more useful to you.
Make it repeatable
Write down your top ten terms and the rough split between the three piles. Put the date on it. Do it again in three months.
The list on its own is interesting. The change between two lists is where the information actually is, because it tells you whether what you did in between made any difference. A term that appears out of nowhere usually has a cause, and it is worth ten minutes finding out what it was.
Fifteen minutes, twice a year, and you stop guessing how people find you. There are not many things in a small business with that ratio.