The searches your customers actually type, and which ones you can win

Most local businesses aim at the one search they can name. A roofer wants to rank for "roofers near me". A lawyer wants "lawyer near me". It is the obvious target, and it is almost always the wrong one to start with.

Here is what the numbers say.

The obvious search is the hard one

"Attorney near me" scores 100 out of 100 on keyword difficulty. "Lawyer near me" scores 77. Those are the two phrases every firm names first, and they are held by directories and national brands with twenty years of links behind them.

Now look one step across. "Family lawyer near me" gets 110,000 searches a month at a difficulty of 5. "DUI lawyer near me" gets 60,500 at 8. Same city, same size of firm, completely different fight.

The volume did not go away. The competition did.

The pattern repeats in every trade

It is not a quirk of legal. Once you look at the specific search instead of the general one, the same thing happens:

• Roofers. "Roof leak repair" takes 33,100 searches a month at a difficulty of 2. "Emergency roof repair" takes 8,100 at 0. Both are easier than "roofers near me", and the person typing them needs somebody today rather than next spring.
• Contractors. "Contractor seo" and "seo for contractors" both sit at difficulty 0. The entire category is unclaimed.
• Real estate. "Sell my house" takes 5,400 searches a month at a difficulty of 18, which is reachable, against "homes for sale near me" and the portals that own it.

The searches nobody has a page for

The most consistent finding across every trade we pulled: businesses have a page for what they call themselves, and no page for what they sell.

"Gutter installation near me" takes 33,100 searches a month at a difficulty of 0. If you install gutters and your website says "roofing", those 33,100 searches belong to somebody else. Not because you were outranked. Because you never entered.

Same for inspections. Same for metal roofing. Same for every service sitting inside a business that has one page describing all of it.

The money question

"Roof replacement cost" takes 18,100 searches a month at a difficulty of 25. That is somebody planning the largest job you will quote this year, and they are researching it before they speak to anybody.

Almost nobody answers them. Most sites treat price as something to discuss on a call, so the searches go to forums, aggregators and articles written by people who do not do the work.

A plain answer, with how you actually bill, does two things. It reaches somebody earlier than any "near me" search does, and it is the kind of page an AI assistant quotes when somebody asks it the same question.

It is also harder than the easy wins above, at a difficulty of 25 rather than 0. Worth doing second, not first.

What to do with this

Three things, in order.

1. Stop competing for the category word. "Roofers near me" is not where you start, and possibly not where you finish.
2. Give every service its own page. If you sell it, there is a search for it, and right now there is probably no page of yours attached to it.
3. Answer the money question in public. It is the search your competitors are all avoiding.

None of this is specific to roofing or law. It is how local search works for any business with an area to cover and more than one thing to sell.

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Figures are US monthly search volume and keyword difficulty from DataForSEO, pulled September 2026. Volumes are Google Ads brackets rather than exact counts. The same data, broken out by trade, is on each of our industry pages.