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We're a marketing agency, and we run our own research on how search competition actually works. It kept turning up things that surprised us — including things that make our own product look less impressive. We're publishing all of it here, with the real numbers and how we got them, because we'd rather be the people who showed their work.
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The simplest way to measure how hard a keyword is to rank for: count how many other websites link to the pages already at the top. More links pointing at the leaders = harder to beat them. Here's what we found when we compared near-identical phrases:
| The phrase | People searching/mo | Websites linking to the leaders | Can a normal business rank? |
|---|---|---|---|
| "restaurant marketing agency" | 720 | 217 | Yes |
| "restaurant marketing" | 880 | 1,661,720 | No chance |
| "seo audit services" | 2,400 | 1,057 | Yes |
| "seo audit tool" | 2,900 | 15,702 | No chance |
Look at the first two rows. Almost the same number of people search for them every month. But the pages ranking for "restaurant marketing" have over 1.6 million websites linking to them, versus 217 for "restaurant marketing agency." That's the difference between a fight you can't win and one you can — and it comes down to a single word.
"The phrasing we'd have picked on instinct was twenty-six times harder than one sitting right next to it, at the exact same search demand. Twenty years in, and I'd never checked."
— Jared Braverman, AgencyFixSource: DataForSEO, a standard SEO data provider. We looked at 203 keywords across the industries we work in (US, English), most recently on July 18, 2026. For each pair, both phrases are about the same topic, have search demand within 40% of each other, and differ by 10× or more in how many websites link to the top-ranking pages. "People searching/mo" is Google's own monthly search estimate. One honest caveat, explained fully in Finding 2: the "websites linking" number moves depending on exactly who's ranking the moment you check, so treat it as a strong signal, not a fixed figure.
Every SEO tool gives you a tidy "keyword difficulty" score and presents it like a fact. But when we measured the same keywords more than once, the numbers jumped around a lot — because they depend on whichever handful of websites happen to be ranking at the exact moment you look.
| Keyword | Lowest reading | Highest reading | How far apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| "seo local" | 3,528 | 137,406 | 38.9× |
| "restaurant marketing" | 91,590 | 1,661,720 | 18.2× |
| "seo agency near me" | 532 | 9,183 | 17.3× |
| "law firm marketing" | 5,282 | 85,202 | 16.1× |
"We scanned the same keyword twice and got 532 and 9,183. That's the difficulty number the whole industry quotes like it's fixed. It moved seventeen times over."
— Jared Braverman, AgencyFixSource: DataForSEO (US, English), 203 keywords, re-scanned on multiple dates through July 18, 2026. We counted how many websites link to the top-ranking pages, then re-counted later. The figure is the median for whichever three pages rank at the top at that moment — so when one big website enters or leaves the top three, the number can swing by a lot. That's not a data error; it's what "keyword difficulty" actually is underneath.
"CPC" is what businesses pay Google for one click on an ad for that word — a clean market price for how valuable the term is. We lined up the priciest keywords against whether a normal business could actually rank for them for free. The pattern was blunt:
| Keyword | Value per click | Can a normal business rank? |
|---|---|---|
| "reputation management for dentists" | $219 | No chance |
| "google ads agency" | $185 | No chance |
| "law firm marketing" | $132 | No chance |
| "ctv advertising" | $123 | No chance |
The keywords worth the most money are guarded by the biggest players. Chasing them for free is a losing game for a small business. The winnable terms are the plainer, less glamorous phrases nobody's fighting over — which is the whole point of Finding 1.
"The keywords everyone wants are the ones nobody can win. The money's in the boring phrasing nobody's fighting over."
— Jared Braverman, AgencyFixSource: DataForSEO (US, English), 203 keywords, July 18, 2026. "Value per click" is Google Ads cost-per-click — the going rate to advertise on that term. "Can a normal business rank?" is our own grade, based on how many websites link to the current top pages versus how many people search. Same caveat as Finding 2 applies to the link counts.
Reach out through our contact page — a real person, usually same-day. We'll send the underlying data, build you a chart, or get on a call. And to say it once more: you don't need permission to use anything on this page. Just attribute it to AgencyFix with a link here.