I built something this year that argues with me. That’s not a bug I’m apologising for — it’s the reason I built it.
Here’s the problem it solves. When I plan a new site, or a migration onto a new platform, the natural thing is to decide what pages it needs from what I already know about the business — what I’ve seen work before, what a competitor’s site looks like, what feels right. That’s the ordinary way a web plan gets made, by me or anyone else. It’s also a guess wearing a strategy’s clothes.
So I built a tool that won’t let me do that. Before a page plan gets signed off, it pulls the real search data — what people actually type into Google around that business, in what volumes, who’s currently winning those searches and with which pages, and where the client already stands. Then it checks the plan against the data, not the other way round.
I ran it properly for the first time on a client mid-migration — an industrial engineering firm moving their site onto a faster platform. Their existing page plan had been built the ordinary way: modelled on a competitor’s navigation, because that’s what “good” looked like in their industry. Reasonable instinct. Wrong foundation.
The term used throughout their industry, on every competitor’s site, on their own — was undercounting real UK search demand by roughly seventy times against the plain-English term their actual customers type.
Seventy times, and not a rounding error. The industry has its own vocabulary — the acronym everyone in the trade uses, on every spec sheet and every trade site — and almost nobody outside the trade searches for it. Their customers, the people actually looking to hire someone, type the plain description of the job instead. The whole page plan had been built to answer a question almost nobody was asking, because nobody had ever pulled the numbers to check.
The same pass found something else, a gap: real search volume, sitting page-one-adjacent, with nobody properly serving it — not because it was hard to find, but because nobody had looked. Every competitor’s site had been built by the same instinct, copy what looks right, so the gap just sat there unclaimed while everyone competed for the same few pages that all the sites already had.
That’s the whole case for the tool in one sentence: the words on your own website are usually the words your industry uses about itself, not the words your customers use to find you. The gap between the two goes unnoticed because checking it never occurs to anyone — the site reads correctly to everyone who already works in the trade, which is exactly the problem.
You don’t need my tool to find out if this is true of your own site. Search Console already tells you what people are actually typing when they land on you, and the report sits there unopened on more sites than not. Pull it this week. Look at the terms bringing people in against the terms on your homepage. If they don’t match, that gap is where your competitors either already are, or haven’t found yet either.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
If I’ve ever done right by your business, a quick Google review would mean a great deal — it helps other small businesses find me. Only if it’s earned: leave one here.
P.S. The tool doesn’t replace judgement — it just stops judgement from opening the conversation before the data’s had its say. You don’t need software to borrow the habit: check what you assume against what’s actually measurable before you commit to it. Costs an afternoon. Finding out afterwards costs a lot more than that.
