How Do I Find Out What Questions Customers Search?

#Start with the words people already use, not the words your team prefers

The fastest way to find what customers are searching for is not a bigger keyword list. It is the exact phrasing people use when they are annoyed, stuck, or one click away from leaving your trial.

That matters because SaaS trial users search questions are usually not clean marketing questions. They look more like, “why is this not syncing to HubSpot”, “can I change the billing email”, or “how do I invite a teammate without paying yet”. Those are customer search questions with pressure in them. If you only chase broad keyword research, you miss the moments that decide whether someone converts or disappears.

I see the same pattern across trial funnels: the questions that convert are rarely the questions with the highest volume. They are the questions that show a person is trying to finish a setup, compare a plan, or fix something that broke in the first 10 minutes.

#The best source is your own trial friction

If you want the exact wording, start where the friction already exists.

Pull these five sources first:

1. On-site search logs from your help centre or docs.
2. Chat transcripts from live chat, Intercom, Drift, HubSpot, Zendesk, Crisp, whatever you use.
3. Trial cancellation reasons and exit survey text.
4. Sales call notes from demos and follow-up calls.
5. Support tickets from the first 7 days of the trial, because that is where onboarding pain shows up fastest.

The wording in those places is better than keyword tools because it is messy. Real people do not say “workflow automation for onboarding”. They say, “I can’t get the invite email to send”, or “why is this asking for a credit card”, or “where do I see the invoice after I connect Stripe”. That language is what you want to build around.

If you have enough volume, tag each question by moment:

• before signup
• during onboarding
• just before activation
• right after first value
• just before churn

That split matters. A question about “how to import contacts” is not the same as “why did my import fail at 87%”. One is research. The other is a blocked trial user who needs a fix now.

Key takeaway: If the wording only appears once in a polished keyword tool, it is probably not the phrasing your trial users actually use.

#Search behaviour tells you intent before the form fill does

When you are trying to work out what customers are searching for, search behaviour gives you a better read than demographics ever will.

A trial user searching “how to connect X to Y” is usually close to using the product. A user searching “best X alternatives” is still comparing. A user searching “what is X” is earlier again, and probably not ready for a trial-specific page.

That is the basic split, but the useful part is the modifiers.

#Queries that usually mean high intent

These often show up when someone is trying to get the product working:

• login
• connect
• sync
• import
• invite
• setup
• pricing
• invoice
• cancel
• export
• webhook
• API
• SSO
• permission
• billing

If a query includes a product name plus one of those words, it usually signals a real task. “How to invite users in product” is a different animal from “what is user management”. The first one is someone already inside the trial. The second is someone still deciding whether the category matters.

#Queries that are usually browsing or comparison

These tend to be earlier, broader, or less urgent:

• alternatives
• comparison
• review
• vs
• best
• top tools
• examples
• template
• definition

Those can still be useful, but they do not behave like onboarding questions. They usually belong in comparison pages, category pages, or a broader topic cluster. If you are building around SaaS trial users search questions, do not mix the two without thinking. It blurs the page’s job.

If you want a clean way to sort them, use a simple rule:

Signal	Likely intent	What to do with it
Product name + setup word	Trial user trying to activate	Build onboarding help, in-product prompts, support content
Product name + pricing/billing word	Conversion blocker or plan check	Write pricing, plan, and billing pages that answer the objection
Category term + alternatives	Comparison shopper	Build comparison content and alternatives pages
How to + task word	Task completion	Create practical how-to content with screenshots or short clips
What is + category term	Early research	Use educational content, not hard conversion copy

This is where keyword research gets useful again. Not as a hunt for volume, but as a sorting exercise. You are looking for search intent, not just keywords.

#The exact wording is usually hiding in the complaints

The best customer search questions often come from people trying to describe a problem badly.

A trial user rarely knows the feature name. They know the symptom.

They search things like:

• “email not sending”
• “why is my dashboard blank”
• “can’t add team member”
• “stripe not connecting”
• “where is the export”
• “why did my page disappear”
• “how to stop duplicate contacts”

Those are gold because they tell you the customer pain points in plain language. They also show you what the user believes the product should already be doing.

That belief is important. If a user expects their invoice to appear after a Stripe connection, and it does not, the search query tells you the gap between expectation and reality. That gap is usually where churn starts.

I would not overcomplicate this with AI summaries alone. AI is fine for clustering 200 support tickets into themes, but it will flatten the wording if you let it. Keep the raw queries beside the cluster. The raw line is often the one you should publish.

For example, if you find:

• “I can’t find the booking link”
• “where do I get the booking page”
• “how to send my booking link”

those are three versions of the same problem, but only one may be the phrase people actually type into Google. The exact wording matters because it tells you whether the user is searching inside your help docs, on Google, or in your product itself.

#Onboarding searches are different from pre-signup searches

Trial users ask different questions before and after they create an account.

Before signup, they want to know whether the product fits the job:

• does it integrate with X
• can I use it with my current stack
• how much does it cost
• does it support my team size
• can I migrate data from the old tool

After signup, the questions get operational:

• where do I start
• why is this field required
• how do I change the default
• can I undo this
• why did that automation trigger
• where is the data I just imported

That shift is the clue. If you are seeing SaaS trial users search questions that are all operational, your content should stop acting like a brochure and start acting like a guide.

This is also where a lot of SaaS content misses. It ranks for top-of-funnel questions, gets backlinks, and still fails to move trials because it never answers the “I am in the product right now and something is off” question. That split is worth reading more deeply in Why SaaS Content Gets Backlinks but Not Trial Conversions.

#Use your own search surface before you buy more tools

Most teams go straight to Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Keyword Planner and stop there. That is backwards if you already have users.

Start with the search surfaces you own:

• your help centre search
• your website search
• your chatbot logs
• your trial onboarding emails and replies
• your sales call transcripts
• your cancellation form text

Then compare those phrases against external keyword tools.

If the same question appears in both places, you have a strong signal. If it only appears in your internal logs, it may still be valuable, especially if it is tied to onboarding. If it only appears in a keyword tool, but never in your own support channels, treat it carefully. It might be a research query, not a conversion problem.

That is the difference between audience research and guessing.

For teams publishing at scale, I like the discipline of capping the number of topic pillars. Six is usually enough if they are chosen well. More than that and you start diluting the work across too many half-finished angles. If you want the logic behind that, Reorganize Scattered Blog Posts Into a Topical Cluster is the right companion piece.

#A simple way to separate high-intent from curiosity

You do not need a fancy model to sort 500 queries. You need a filter that reflects how buyers behave.

Use these four tests:

#1. Is there a task attached?

“how to connect Stripe” has a task. “Stripe integration” is looser. Task queries usually convert better because the user is already trying to do something.

#2. Is the query tied to a product state?

Words like trial, login, dashboard, invite, invoice, export, and settings usually mean the user is inside the product journey. That is stronger than generic category interest.

#3. Does the query include a blocker?

“not working”, “failed”, “missing”, “can’t”, “won’t”, “error”, and “stuck” are pain language. These queries deserve fast answers, not fluffy educational copy.

#4. Is the user comparing options?

“alternatives”, “vs”, “best”, “reviews”, and “pricing” often signal evaluation. Those are still high value, but they need a different page type.

If a query passes tests 1 and 3, it is usually high intent. If it passes tests 2 and 4, it may be close to conversion but still needs reassurance. If it only passes test 4, it is probably research.

That distinction saves a lot of wasted content. It also keeps you from writing one page that tries to satisfy everyone and ends up helping no one.

#What to do with onboarding questions once you find them

Once you have the real questions, do not bury them in a generic FAQ.

Put them where the user is already looking:

• in onboarding emails
• in the help centre
• in tooltips or empty states
• in trial nurture sequences
• in comparison pages
• in short how-to articles with screenshots
• in sales follow-up notes and templates

The point is to reduce the distance between the question and the answer.

If your trial users keep asking, “how do I invite my team”, that should not live in a 2,000-word help article nobody reads. It should appear in the onboarding flow, the support docs, and the relevant page copy. If your trial users keep asking, “can I send invoices from here”, that question belongs near the pricing and billing path, not hidden in a general feature page.

This is where a system beats one-off content. DiscoverWorthy’s Content workspace is built for exactly this kind of work, blog articles aimed at what customers actually search for, then social posts and newsletters built from the same published work. That matters because the question is never just “what should we publish”, it is “how do we keep publishing the answers users are already looking for”.

#The trap most teams fall into

They collect the questions, then write around them instead of through them.

That usually looks like this:

• a blog post with the right keyword but the wrong wording
• a help article that explains the concept but not the fix
• a comparison page that never answers the objection
• a trial email that repeats product benefits but ignores the actual blocker

The result is traffic without movement.

If your content is ranking but trial users are still dropping off, the problem is often not volume. It is mismatch. The page answers the marketer’s question, not the user’s question. That is why How to Separate Buyer Questions by Sales Call Stage is useful here too, because the same stage logic applies to trial search behaviour. People ask different things before they trust you, during setup, and right before they commit.

#Build the list from real language, then publish it fast

Here is the workflow I would use this week:

1. Export your last 90 days of support chats, help searches, and cancellation reasons.
2. Pull every question sentence, exactly as written.
3. Group them by moment, onboarding, pricing, comparison, blocker, or activation.
4. Mark the ones that include task words, product-state words, or pain words.
5. Compare those against keyword data from Ahrefs, Semrush, Search Console, and your own site search.
6. Write the top 10 into pages that match the moment, not just the keyword.

Do that once and you will see patterns. Do it monthly and you will stop guessing.

If you want the content side handled without turning it into a second job, Blog Content Creation is built around this exact problem, SEO-optimised posts written in your voice and grounded in the questions your customers already search for. The useful part is not the writing for its own sake, it is that the work starts from actual customer language and ends in something you can publish.

#The sharpest signal is the question that repeats in three places

When the same question shows up in search logs, support chats, and sales calls, do not ignore it. That is not noise. That is a gap in the customer journey.

Those repeated SaaS trial users search questions are the ones worth turning into pages, snippets, onboarding steps, and internal prompts. They are also the ones most likely to move a user from confused to activated.

If you only have time to do one thing, pull the last 30 days of trial support and search data, then highlight every repeated phrase with a marker. You will find the real questions in about 20 minutes. The hard part is not collecting them. It is resisting the urge to rewrite them into prettier language.

Use the customer’s wording. Not your brand’s wording. Not the product team’s wording. The customer’s.

That is how you find what they are already searching for, and how you stop publishing around the problem instead of into it.