Headstone Cleaning
Keyword Field

31,880 searches a month, worth about $43,000 in equivalent ad spend

That is the honest number for everything a cemetery-cleaning business could actually sell against, nationally, after collapsing Google's close-variant duplicates. The naive version of this number — the one you get by summing a keyword export's volume column — is 3.8× larger, and it is wrong.

The collapse rule is deliberately conservative in the other direction too: identical volume/CPC pairs are merged only above 50/mo. Below that, 55 unrelated long-tails all report exactly 10/mo at $0.00 — that is Google's rounding floor, not a variant group, and merging them would under-count the tail as badly as the naive sum over-counts the head.

Two thirds of the discovered pool is not this market

Seeded with ten cemetery-cleaning terms, DataForSEO's keyword_ideas endpoint returned the whole cleaning services and funeral home categories, plus indeed (13.6M/mo) and business name generator. It associates by category, not by topic. Relevance had to be decided on two axes, not one.

Ten clusters, and the money is concentrated in three

Note the inversion between the top two rows. Product/DIY carries more raw searches than core service (49,940 vs 47,730) at less than half the CPC. People researching D/2 Biological Solution outnumber people looking to hire — and they are the same people, earlier. That is the content wedge, not a distraction from it.

The commercial head, priced

Restoration is the premium line: headstone restoration services costs $10.54 a click against $0.77 for the generic cleaning head. Same customer, later in the decision, worth 13× more per click.

The metros are real but thin — and city-name searches don't exist

DataForSEO Labs is country-only, so metro demand came from Google Ads search_volume at DMA and city codes — the same instrument at every level, so the ratios mean something.

City-level demand, all 355 addressable keywords per city

Top 15 of 30 cities priced. Renton is the outlier worth noticing — only 420 searches a month, but at $4.76 a click it carries more measured value than Everett, Tacoma and Bellevue combined.

May is 5.5× February. Everything else is a rounding error.

Twelve months of history came down with every keyword and had not been looked at. It turns out to be the largest single effect in this dataset — bigger than the gap between the two metros, bigger than any cluster.

No cleaning company owns this SERP. Google does.

Across 110 live SERPs in three geographies, the most common domains are not competitors — they are platforms. This niche has never been properly contested.

Every dedicated cleaning operator Google Maps will show, in all 51 states

The competitor table earlier was drawn from three geographies, so it could only ever see firms that rank nationally, in LA or in Seattle. This asked Google Maps once per state per head term — 153 searches — and it is the only instrument used here that returns a street address, so a firm's state is read off its own listing rather than inferred. Monument dealers, funeral homes, florists, cemeteries and landscapers were filtered out; what remains sells the cleaning.

States = how many state-level searches the firm surfaced in, a reach signal: 1 means a purely local business, double digits means a service-area operator bidding for the whole country. ~ marks a firm with no published street address, where the state comes from its own telephone area code, or failing that the state it ranks best in.

120 People Also Ask questions, and one of them is the business

Harvested from the same 110 SERPs. The count is how many separate SERPs each question appeared on — a proxy for how central Google thinks it is.

Five moves, in this order

Ordered by evidence, not by convention. Each one names the finding it rests on.

Limits

• No client, no domain. This survey was run without a target site, so there is no ranked-keyword baseline, no backlink profile, and no gap analysis against a specific competitor. Pointing it at a domain adds ranked_keywords and competitors_domain for about $0.25.
• Volume is Google's estimate, not observed traffic. Search volumes are 12-month averages from Google Ads, rounded hard at the low end — the 10/mo floor covers anything from 1 to 49.
• The value column is a proxy. Volume × CPC is what the clicks would cost to buy, not revenue. It ranks opportunities; it does not forecast a P&L.
• 15 cities per metro, not every city. Bothell, Lynnwood and Shoreline all returned demand once measured; the tail of smaller suburbs is unpriced.
• The directory is what Maps shows, not a business registry. A firm with no Google Business Profile does not exist to this method, and three head terms at 20 results per state is a wide net but not an exhaustive one. Read "12 states with no operator" as "nobody is visible there", which is the thing that matters commercially, not as proof that nobody is trading.
• 21 of 77 operators have no published street address. Their state comes from the firm's own telephone area code, which is good evidence but not proof — a business can keep a number after moving. Two firms had neither address nor a geographic area code and are placed by where they rank best.
• Seasonality is national and category-wide. The monthly shape is summed across the whole addressable pool; individual keywords will have their own curves, and the two metros were not broken out separately.