Customer Journey

The steps, and where an assistant sits

The usual division is awareness, consideration, decision and what follows the purchase. The names matter less than the questions attached to them. Early on the question is open: what does this problem even involve, who does this kind of work. In the middle it narrows to a shortlist: who near me, what does it cost, which of these is better. At the end it is practical: hours, availability, how to book. After the purchase it turns into a review or a referral.

An assistant can be asked any of those. What changes with the step is what the answer needs from a business’s site. An awareness question wants a page that explains the service in plain terms. A shortlist question wants a business that can be identified and compared: one name, one address, one phone number, a stated price range, reviews the machine can read. A booking question wants opening hours the crawler received. A site that serves only the first of these is visible for the step where nobody is yet choosing.

How the journey shapes a question panel

The visibility measurement on this site starts from the journey rather than from keywords. The panel, put to one assistant, Claude with live web search, is twelve questions a buyer of one trade in one place actually asks, spread across the steps above, and each answer is recorded for whether the business was named and whether it came first. That is why the score moves when a site fixes its identity or adds a page that answers a shortlist question: the panel contains that question. The methodology page describes how the panel is built.