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

0:00 Why Keyword Tools Lie to Local Contractors
Here’s where keyword tool lies for local contractors. Most SEO keyword tools show you the whole country by default. So if you’re a painter in Asheville, North Carolina, you’re not obviously competing with the whole country. You’re just competing for a small portion of the entire country searches. So you’re probably competing for one hundred and fifty searches a month, not three hundred thousand, right? That gap is why your phone isn’t ringing the way an agency told you it would. 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. The number that breaks everything.

0:43 Real Example Cabinet Painting Nine Thousand Searches
Here’s a real example that started this video. There’s a painting company in Asheville, North Carolina, that came into our system, brand new client, and we added them to the dashboard. And what happened was we have our own SEO dashboard, and it first pulled national numbers. So one of the searches, cabinet painting near me, showed nine thousand nine hundred searches per month, right? Sounds great. If you’re a painter and you’re showing up for a search that has ninety-nine hundred searches a month, that sounds awesome. But that number is US-wide. In Asheville, that number gets ten searches a month. That’s right, ten searches. So painters near me showed a hundred and ten thousand nationally, but in Asheville, that’s fifty per month because Asheville, we’re a tertiary market. We’re not Charlotte or Atlanta or a major area. When we looked at all fifty keywords tracked for that business, the national total was three hundred thousand two hundred and seventy searches per month, but the Asheville total was one thousand and fifty per month. So that’s two hundred and eighty-six times different between these two numbers. So one number makes you feel like you’re sitting in a goldmine. The other number tells you what your phone can actually produce.

1:59 Why Tools Default to National Volume
Why keyword tools default to national numbers. So SEO keyword tools are built for everyone, and they serve national brands, e-commerce stores, content marketers, and enterprise SEO teams. And the default location is almost the entire United States. So nobody building the tool is thinking about a painting contractor who’s serving a thirty-mile radius in western North Carolina. And that’s not a criticism of the tools. It’s just how they’re designed. The problem happens when a local contractor or the agency they hired looks at national volume and treats it like a local volume, and that mistake flows downstream into everything. Once you have the wrong numbers at the source, then it goes everywhere, right? Your budget, your traffic estimates, your leads, your ROI projections, all of it.

2:50 How National Numbers Distort Your Budget
What distorts your budget and expectations. When an agency shows you a keyword with nine thousand nine hundred monthly searches, and they promise you a certain percentage of that traffic, the math sounds compelling. But if the real local search volume is ten times smaller, ten searches per month, then no ranking on page one is gonna deliver what they’re projecting. And that’s not that the SEO they’re doing doesn’t work. It’s that the forecast was built on the wrong number. And this is one of the most common ways that agencies inflate numbers to get promises. It’s not always intentional. Sometimes the person building the proposal just never changed the location setting. But either way, you’re the one who ends up frustrated.

3:35 Pulling City-Level Volume the Right Way
How to pull city-level volume the right way. The fix is straightforward. You need to change location settings before you trust any number. In the Google Keyword Planner, after you pull a list of keywords, you can look for the location filter at the top of the results. By default, it’s gonna say United States. Click that, and you can change it to your city. If your city is too small to show the data, you can try your metro area, or you can show the county area, right? But if that’s too sparse, you can also try your state. Then look at the numbers again. So for a city like Asheville, many searches that look enormous with national numbers drop to a single or double digit. So anything, say, a thousand searches nationwide might be fifty people searching for that in Asheville, right? Or even ten. That’s the real market you’re working with.

4:27 What Zero Means in Keyword Planner
What zero actually means in the Keyword Planner. Here’s something important to understand. When the Google Keyword Planner shows zero for a keyword, it does not mean that nobody is ever searching for that term. The Keyword Planner rounds very small numbers down. So when a keyword gets fewer than ten searches a month, it usually shows up as zero when the range is really between zero to ten. Some months it might be zero, some months two to five, maybe eight some months, and some months up to ten, but generally not more than ten. So a keyword like painters Weaverville, NC might show zero in the tool, but real people in Weaverville are still typing that same exact phrase. So if you serve Weaverville and you wanna rank for that term, you just can’t see the exact precise count. But don’t let zero scare you off a keyword that describes exactly what you do and where you do it.

5:21 Where Asheville Search Volume Actually Lives
The split in Asheville where the volume actually lives. Let me walk you through what the Asheville keyword data actually looked like once we switched to the city-level reporting. The biggest local keywords were the Asheville painters group. The top term in that group came in at one hundred and ten searches per month, and that’s the biggest pool of local search volume for a painter in that market. About one hundred and ten searches a month came in for the top local terms, such as painters Asheville. Not a hundred thousand, not even ten thousand, one hundred and ten searches. And that’s the real addressable market on top of the local search. Why low-volume local terms are still worth chasing. One hundred and ten searches per month sounds small, but think about what those searches mean. If someone’s typing painters Asheville NC, they’re not browsing. They’re actually looking to hire a painter. So the intent behind that search is as high as it gets. Compare that to someone searching for how to paint kitchen cabinets, which might show thousands of monthly searches nationally, but is going to convert at almost no calls for a painting company, right? Because that’s a DIY term. If someone’s searching how to this or how to that, that’s a DIYer. They’re generally not looking for a painting company. They’re going to be doing it on their own. So volume is not the same as value is our takeaway here. Ten high intent local searches are worth more than ten thousand informational searches from people who have no intention of hiring anyone.

6:55 Near Me Terms and the Map Pack
Near me terms and the map pack. There’s another layer here that makes local volume more valuable. When someone searches for painters near me, Google serves them the local map pack results. So there are three businesses that show in the box above and the regular search results. So if you rank in the map pack for even a handful of local keywords, your map listing can pick up a real share of these local searches. You don’t need to be showing up in a hundred thousand searches. You need to be the most visible business when the right fifty to one hundred and ten people are searching for you in your city. And that’s a completely different goal than what the national volume numbers suggest. The near keyword trap. Here’s one more wrinkle worth explaining. Painters near me shows one hundred and ten thousand searches nationally, but near me searches don’t work like regular GEO-targeted keywords. Google uses the searcher’s device location to determine the near me results. That means that every single person searching for painters near me gets a result based on where they are standing in the city or where they’re positioned. A painter in Asheville only benefits from users who happen to be in or near Asheville when they’re searching. So you cannot rank nationally for painters near me and have it deliver Asheville customers from across the country. The keyword is location agnostic in the term, but hyperlocal at the point of delivery. So that one hundred and ten thousand number is completely irrelevant to any single local business.

8:31 How the Math Plays Out in Practice
A work example, how the math plays out. Let me put some of this together as an illustration. Picture a typical painting company doing about twenty calls a month and trying to grow to about forty calls a month. If an agency shows them a keyword plan built on three hundred thousand monthly searches and projects a one percent click-through rate, that’s three thousand visitors a month. At a one percent conversion rate from visitor to call, that’s thirty calls. So it sounds like the math works on the front end, but if the actual local volume is one thousand fifty per month, the same math produces ten visitors and less than one call. So the problem isn’t SEO. The problem is that the projection was nearly three hundred times too large before the first dollar was spent. The right goal for that business in Asheville is to own the one thousand and fifty monthly searches, convert a meaningful share of them, and grow from there. And that’s honest, achievable, and produces real calls.

9:33 One Question to Ask Any SEO Agency
The one question to ask any agency. Before you sign anything with an SEO agency, ask them this single question. Which location is this keyword volume pulled for? If they say United States, you probably want to just run away, right? Or you could also ask them to rerun the report for your city. But if they’re giving you the national volume, they don’t know what they’re doing. So if they can’t or they won’t, that’s a signal worth taking seriously. They’re probably not really that educated, and they don’t know what they’re doing. Any agency doing real local SEO knows that national volume is irrelevant to a local business. They should be working with city level or metro level numbers from

10:14 Questions That Catch Problems Early
day one. Other questions that catch problems early. Here’s a few more questions worth asking. Are you tracking keywords at the city level or the national level in your reporting? When you show me a traffic forecast, what location is the volume based on? Do you separate map pack rankings from regular search rankings? How do you handle keywords that show zero volume but are still locally relevant? Good answers to these questions sound specific. Vague answers that redirect to case studies or guarantees are worth a lot more scrutiny, and you might want to walk away.

10:50 What to Do with Your Current Keyword List
What you should do with your current keyword list. If you have a current keyword list right now, here’s what to do before anything else. Go to Google Keyword Planner and put your top five to ten keywords in there and change the location to your city and then write down the new numbers and then compare them to whatever else you were shown before. If they’re dramatically lower, that’s not bad news. That’s accurate news. You now know the real size of your market and you can build a strategy around what’s actually there. One thousand and fifty monthly searches in a local market is a winnable game. Three hundred thousand is not yours to win. What to do next. If you want someone to pull your actual local keyword numbers, the ones filtered to your city, not the US wide default, we do that as part of our free SEO audit at pushleaves.com backslash SEO audit. And you’ll see exactly what your real addressable market looks like, which terms have the highest intent in your area and where you stand against local competitors right now. So go to pushleaves.com slash SEO audit or call eight two eight three four eight seven six eight six. The number your keyword tool is showing you is probably not your number. Let’s find out what the number actually is. I’m Jeremy Ashburn with Push Leaves helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk soon.