How to Choose Search Phrases

The short version

A search phrase is the question someone asks an AI engine before they know your business exists. indextr asks each engine your phrases on a schedule and records whether you get named, how prominently, and who gets named instead of you.

That means your phrases are not a description of your business. They are a guess about the words a stranger uses when they have a problem and no idea who to call.

The mistake nearly everyone makes first

Businesses describe themselves in the language of their industry. Customers describe their problem in the language of the problem. Those are rarely the same sentence, and the gap between them is where visibility is lost.

If a phrase reads like something you would put on your own website, it is probably the wrong phrase. Read it back and ask whether a person who has never heard of you would type those words.

Never use your own name

indextr will not suggest a phrase containing your business name, and you should not add one. Asking an engine about your business by name tests whether it can describe you once it has been told who you are. It does not test whether anybody finds you.

Nearly every business scores well on its own name, which is precisely why that number carries no information. The customer you are worried about is the one who has never typed your name in their life.

A phrase has to be able to name somebody

This is the rule that matters most, and it is the one that is least obvious. Before you add a phrase, ask: could the answer to this name a specific business? If not, the phrase cannot help you — no matter how relevant it looks.

Cost questions, advice questions and how-to questions all fail this test. They are excellent blog topics. They are useless as measurements.

If you are local, name your city

Every phrase for a local business should contain its city. Not because it reads better, but because the engine has to put you somewhere — and if you do not say where, it chooses for you.

When we ran business coach near me with no location attached, the results came back for Venice and Fort Myers, Florida. Nobody asked for Florida. Left to itself, the search simply landed somewhere, and everything measured after that was measured about the wrong place.

A national or online business is the opposite case: it should never use a city, and never use near me either, because it has no near. Those businesses compete on category and comparison phrases instead.

The three kinds worth tracking

Most businesses arrive with nothing but category phrases, because those are the ones that feel like marketing. Problem phrases are usually where the quickest gains are: fewer businesses have written anything that answers them.

How many to track

Fewer than you would think. indextr includes 15 phrases on Starter and 30 on Pro, and most businesses do not need the ceiling.

The list is not a net to catch everything a customer might conceivably say. It is the set of questions you would genuinely change your website to win. Twelve phrases you would act on beat thirty you would not — because every phrase counts toward your score whether or not you ever intend to do anything about it.

Changing your phrases later

You should. The first list is a guess, and the first few scans tell you which guesses were wrong. Phrases that never name anybody are the first to go.

One thing to know before you do: your score is calculated across whichever phrases were active at the time of each scan, so changing the list changes the measurement as well as the result. indextr records which phrases every scan covered and marks the change on your trend chart, so that a step in the line is labelled as your own edit — rather than being mistaken, three months later, for something that happened in the market.

What about tools that generate a page for every phrase?

There are a growing number of tools that will produce hundreds of pages, each written to answer one specific search. The pitch is straightforward: answer every question and you will be found for all of them.

Two of Google's spam policies apply, and the wording matters. Scaled content abuseis “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users” — with “using generative AI tools… to generate many pages without adding value” given as an example. Doorway abuseis “when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries”, and one of Google's own examples is pages targeting particular cities that funnel everyone to the same destination.

Google Search Central — spam policies · checked 29 August 2026

Note what the test actually is: value, not volume. Generated pages are not banned. A site with genuinely different information on each page — real listings, real inventory, real data — is doing something useful at scale, and that is fine. The problem is pages that differ only by a swapped town name and funnel to the same contact form.

Which is where a local business runs out of road. It does not have hundreds of genuinely different questions to answer — it has perhaps twenty. Past that you are producing the pattern the policy describes, whether a tool wrote them or you did.

But the more useful point is that those tools sit downstream of this page. Whatever you use to write the answers, you still have to know which questions are worth answering, and whether answering them changed anything. Volume is what you reach for when you do not know which twenty questions matter. Knowing them is what makes the work finite.

A short checklist

indextr proposes a starting set from your website when you sign up, and suggests new ones later based on what the engines actually said in your own scans. You can edit any of them at any time — the suggestions are a starting point, not the answer.