Lesson 2.1: Input 1 — Buyer Language
By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to extract seed keywords from your own first-party sources — the most reliable, zero-cost, highest-intent research input available to you.
The best keywords aren't in any tool. They're in the words your buyers used before they became buyers.
Every business that has existed for longer than a month has first-party language data. It's just not usually thought of that way. Here's where to find it:
Intake forms and contact form submissions. How did people describe their problem or what they need in their own words? What exact phrases did they use? These are often verbatim search-query candidates.
Sales call notes or recordings. What do prospects say in the first five minutes? How do they describe what they're looking for before you've had a chance to educate them on your terminology? Buyer language before a sales conversation is often closer to what they'd type into Google than anything after.
CRM notes and deal descriptions. How did your team summarize why someone came in? The quick-and-dirty description of a lead's situation before it gets polished into pipeline language is often highly useful.
Support tickets and customer emails. How do people describe the problem they're trying to solve? The language of frustration is often very close to the language of search.
Reviews and testimonials. What words do happy customers use to describe the outcome they got? These are dream-state keywords — useful for understanding intent even if they're not direct bids.
What you're doing in this step is building a list of seed keywords: the core phrases that represent how your buyers think about their problem in their own terms. These become the input for every subsequent step.
You're not looking for hundreds of seeds. Ten to twenty clear, intent-loaded phrases is enough to work from.
A note on your own vocabulary vs. your buyers'
There is almost always a gap between the words your industry uses and the words your buyers use to describe what they need. Your buyers don't know your jargon. They know their problem.
A legal services firm might call its service "estate planning." Its buyers might search "how to protect my assets when I die." A B2B software company might call its product a "revenue operations platform." Its buyers might search "sales and marketing alignment software" or "CRM for agencies."
If your seed keywords are all internal terminology, you've started in the wrong place. The test: would a buyer who has never heard of your company or industry use these words?