Why does my keyword tool say 9,900 people search for my service when I only get a few calls?

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Why your keyword tool lies to local contractors. Most SEO keyword tools show you the whole country

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by default. So if you are a painter in Asheville, North Carolina, you’re not obviously competing

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with the whole country. You’re just competing for a small portion of the entire country’s

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searches. So you’re probably competing for 150 searches a month, not 300,000, right?

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Right. That gap is why your phone isn’t ringing the way an agency told you it would.

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So let me tell you exactly what this looks like, how to fix it and what to ask any agency before you hand them a dollar.

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The number that breaks everything. Here’s a real example that started this video.

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There’s a painting company in Asheville, North Carolina, that came into our system, brand new client, and we added them to the dashboard.

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And what happened was we have our own SEO dashboard, and it first pulled national numbers.

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So one of the searches, cabinet painting near me, showed 9,900 searches per month, right?

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Sounds great.

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If you’re a painter and you’re showing up for a search that has 9,900 searches a month, that sounds awesome.

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But that number is U.S. wide.

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In Asheville, that number gets 10 searches a month.

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That’s right, 10 searches.

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so painters near me showed 110,000 nationally but in Asheville that’s 50 per month because Asheville

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we’re a tertiary market we’re not Charlotte or Atlanta or major area when we looked at all 50

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keywords tracked for that business the national total was 300,270 searches per month but the

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The actual total was $1,050 per month.

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So that’s a 286 times difference between these two numbers.

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So one number makes you feel like you’re sitting in a goldmine.

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The other number tells you what your phone can actually produce.

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Why keyword tools default to national numbers.

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So SEO keyword tools are built for everyone.

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And they serve national brands, e-commerce stores, content marketers, and enterprise SEO teams.

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And the default location is almost the entire United States.

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So nobody building the tool is thinking about a paving contractor who’s serving a 30-mile radius in western North Carolina.

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And that’s not a criticism of the tools, it’s just how they’re designed.

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The problem happens when a local contractor or the agency they hired looks at national volume and treats it like a local volume.

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And that mistake flows downstream into everything.

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thing. Once you have the wrong numbers at the source, then it goes everywhere, right? Your

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budget, your traffic estimates, your leads, your ROI projections, all of it. What this does to your

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budget and expectations. When an agency shows you a keyword with 9,900 monthly searches and they

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promise you a certain percentage of that traffic, the math sounds compelling. But if the real local

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local search volume is 10 times smaller, 10 searches per month, then no ranking on page

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one is going to deliver what they’re projecting. And that’s not that the SEO they’re doing doesn’t

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work. It’s that the forecast was built on the wrong number. And this is one of the most common

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ways that agencies inflate numbers to get promises. It’s not always intentional. Sometimes

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the person building the proposal just never changed the location setting. But either way,

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you’re the one who ends up frustrated how to pull city level volume the right

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way the fix is straightforward you need to change the location setting before

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you trust any number in the Google Keyword planner after you pull a list of

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keywords you can look for the location filter at the top of the results by

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default it’s going to say the United States click that and you can change it

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to your city if your city is too small to show the data you can try your metro

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area or you can show the county area right but if that’s too sparse you can

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also try your state then look at the numbers again so for a city like

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Asheville many searches that look enormous with national numbers drop to a

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single or double digits so anything say a thousand searches nationwide might be

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50 people searching for that in Asheville right or even 10 that’s the

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real market you’re working with what zero actually means in the keyword

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planner here’s something important to understand when the Google keyword

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planner shows zero for a keyword it does not mean that nobody is ever searching

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for that term the keyword planner rounds very small numbers and down so when a

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keyword gets fewer than ten searches a month it usually shows up as zero when

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the range is really between zero to ten so some months it might be zero some

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month two to five maybe eight some months and some months up to ten but

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but generally not more than 10.

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A keyword like Painters Weaverville NC

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might show zero in the tool,

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but real people in Weaverville

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are still typing that same exact phrase.

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So if you serve Weaverville

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and you want to rank for that term,

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you just can’t see the exact precise count.

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So don’t let zero scare you off a keyword

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that describes exactly what you do and where you do it.

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The split in Asheville, where the volume actually lives.

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Let me walk you through what the Asheville keyword

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word data actually look like once we switch to the city level reporting. The biggest local keywords

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were the Asheville painters group. The top terms in that group came in at 110 searches per month

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and that’s the biggest pull of local search volume for a painter in that market. About 110 searches a

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month came in for the top local terms such as painters Asheville. Not a hundred thousand, not

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not even 10,000, 110 searches.

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And that’s the real addressable market

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on top of the local search.

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Why low volume local terms are still worth chasing.

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110 searches per month sounds small,

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but think about what those searches mean.

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If someone’s typing painters Asheville NC,

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they’re not browsing,

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they’re actually looking to hire a painter.

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So the intent behind that search is as high as it gets.

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Compare that to someone searching for

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how to paint kitchen cabinets which might show thousands of monthly searches nationally but is

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going to convert at almost no calls for a painting company right because that’s a DIY term if someone

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searching how to this or how to that that’s a DIYer they’re generally not looking for a painting

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company they’re going to be doing it on their own so volume is not the same as value is our

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takeaway here 10 high intent local searches are worth more than 10,000 informational searches

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from people who have no intention of hiring anyone near me terms and the Mac

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pack there’s another layer here that makes local volume more valuable when

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someone searches for painters near me Google serves them the local map pack

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results so there are three businesses that show in the box above and the

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regular search results so if you rank in the map pack for even a handful of local

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keywords your map listing can pick up a real share of these local searches you

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don’t need to be showing up in a hundred thousand searches you need to be the

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most visible business when the right 50 to 110 people are searching for you in

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your city and that’s a completely different goal than when the national

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volume numbers suggest the near keyword trap here’s one more wrinkle worth

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worth explaining. Painters Near Me shows 110,000 searches nationally, but Near Me searches don’t

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work like regular geo-targeted keywords. Google uses the searcher’s device location to determine

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the Near Me results. That means that every single person searching for Painters Near Me

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gets a result based on where they are standing in the city or where they’re positioned. A painter

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Painter in Asheville only benefits from users who happen to be in or near Asheville when they’re

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searching. So you cannot rank nationally for painters near me and have it deliver Asheville

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customers from across the country. The keyword is location agnostic in the term but hyperlocal

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at the point of delivery. So that 110,000 number is completely irrelevant to any single local

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business a work example how the math plays out let me put some of this

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together as an illustration picture a typical painting company doing about 20

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calls a month and trying to grow to about 40 calls a month if an agency

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shows them a keyword plan built on 300,000 monthly searches and projects a

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1% click-through rate that’s 3,000 visitors a month at a 1% conversion rate

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from visitor to call, that’s 30 calls. So it sounds like the math works on the front end,

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but if the actual local volume is $1,050 per month, the same math produces 10 visitors

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and less than one call. So the problem isn’t SEO. The problem is that the projection was

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nearly 300 times too large before the first dollar was spent. The right goal for that

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business in asheville is to own the 1050 monthly searches convert a meaningful share of them and

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grow from there and that’s honest achievable and produces real calls the one question to ask any

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agency before you sign anything with an seo agency ask them this single question which location is

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this keyword volume pulled for if they say united states you probably want to just run away right or

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Or you could also ask them to rerun the report for your city.

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But if they’re giving you the national volumes, they don’t know what they’re doing, right?

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So if they can’t or they won’t, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.

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They’re probably not really that educated and they don’t know what they’re doing.

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Any agency doing real local SEO knows that national volume is irrelevant to a local business.

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They should be working with city-level or metro-level numbers from day one.

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Other questions that catch problems early.

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here’s a few more questions worth asking are you tracking keywords at the city

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level or the national level in your reporting when you show me a traffic

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forecast what location is the volume based on do you separate Mac pack

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rankings from regular search rankings how do you handle keywords that show

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zero volume but are still locally relevant good answers to these questions

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sound specific vague answers that redirect to case studies or guarantees

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expertise are worth a lot more scrutiny and you might want to walk away. What you should do with

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your current keyword list. If you have a current keyword list right now, here’s what to do before

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anything else. Go to Google Keyword Planner and put your top five to ten keywords in there and

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change the location to your city and then write down the new numbers and then compare them to

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whatever else you were shown before. If they’re dramatically lower, that’s not bad news. That’s

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accurate news. You now know the real size of your market and you can build a strategy around what’s

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actually there. 1,050 monthly searches in a local market is a winnable game. 300,000 is not yours to

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win. What to do next? If you want someone to pull your actual local keyword numbers, the ones

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filtered to your city, not the US-wide default, we do that as part of our free SEO audit at

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pushleads.com backslash SEO audit. And you’ll see exactly what your real addressable market looks

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like, which terms have the highest intent in your area, and where you stand against local

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competitors right now. So go to pushleads.com slash SEO audit or call 828-348-7686. The number

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your keyword tool is showing you is probably not your number. Let’s find out what your number

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actually is. I’m Jeremy Ashburn with Pushleads, helping small businesses get more leads without

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struggle and frustration. Talk soon.