The Local Market: The Easiest LA Keywords Are the Most Valuable
We pulled live numbers on one trade across the county. Read the two right-hand columns top to bottom and watch them move in opposite directions.
| What someone types | Searches a month | How hard to rank | What a click costs |
|---|
| los angeles plumber | 600 | 61 out of 100 | $3.00 |
| plumber los angeles | 1,700 | 57 out of 100 | $3.50 |
| burbank plumber | 50 | 26 out of 100 | $25.00 |
| long beach plumber | 150 | 23 out of 100 | $30.00 |
| pasadena plumber | 100 | 22 out of 100 | $20.00 |
| glendale plumber | 100 | 15 out of 100 | $20.00 |
| culver city plumber | 100 | 2 out of 100 | $30.00 |
| santa monica plumber | 100 | 0 out of 100 | $30.00 |
| sherman oaks plumber | 80 | 0 out of 100 | $55.00 |
Difficulty falls from 61 to zero. Click value climbs from $3.00 to $55. The hardest keyword on this list is worth the least money and the easiest one is worth the most. That is not a quirk in one trade, it is the Los Angeles market in a single column, and it is the opposite of how ranking difficulty works almost everywhere else.
The volumes look small until you do the arithmetic. "Sherman oaks plumber" gets 80 searches a month against 1,700 for "plumber los angeles." But the Sherman Oaks click is worth sixteen times more and sits at a difficulty of zero instead of 57. Ten neighborhood pages at difficulty zero will out-earn one city page you are never going to rank, and they will do it in a fraction of the time.
It repeats in every category we checked. "Ac repair los angeles" is a difficulty 0 with a $9.00 click, but "pasadena ac repair" is also a 0 with a $25.00 click and "burbank ac repair" is a 0 at $20.00. Even in our own category the pattern holds: "seo los angeles" is a 44, while "santa monica seo" and "glendale seo" are both zeros.
We check this before we take the work, not after.
Why Los Angeles Businesses Choose Imprint for SEO
- We build the neighborhood pages that actually rank. Each page targets one neighborhood and one service, with local schema and a Google Business Profile tuned to match, so you show up when someone in that ZIP code is ready to buy.
- We prove the map before we build it. Every engagement starts with a live keyword, difficulty, and CPC pull for your trade across your neighborhoods, so you see exactly which pages will earn and which are dead ends.
- We have moved these numbers before. Organic traffic up 1,038% for Three Crowns Electric came from this exact discipline: winnable local terms, built out page by page. Our office is in Loveland, Colorado; the rankings we build are in your LA neighborhoods.
Local Industries We Serve in Los Angeles: Entertainment and Media, Tech (Silicon Beach), Fashion, E-commerce/DTC, Real Estate, Aerospace.