We checked 14 search terms

What we did

Fourteen terms, checked one at a time in two search engines with country and language filters applied, and cross-checked against a free keyword tool that reports exact volumes. August 2026.

Not modelled, not estimated from a subscription tool's index. Somebody typed each one and wrote down what came back.

The method has a clear limit: it is a snapshot, results vary by location and personalisation, and any of it could shift. What does not shift as easily is the pattern, which was consistent enough across all fourteen to be worth publishing.

The generic terms belong to the platforms

The result was blunter than we expected. For the broad terms — the ones an agency is most likely to promise you — the first page is occupied by companies that are not agencies at all.

Reference sites and encyclopaedias. Site-builder platforms. Design-tool companies. Large marketing software vendors publishing educational content. Between them they hold the top of the page across every broad term we checked, in every language we checked it in.

This is not a gap you compete your way into. Those pages have years of accumulated authority and the companies behind them have content teams. A studio ranking on page one for a term like that is not a realistic objective, and a proposal that includes it as a deliverable is describing an outcome nobody can commit to.

And the people searching them are not buying

This was the more useful finding, and it is the one that should change what you ask for.

Look at what people search alongside the broad terms and the intent gives itself away. Around the main term sit the variants: create, make, free, how to build it yourself, and the names of site-builder tools.

One number makes the point. The phrase meaning "create a web page" carries roughly 2.7 times the search volume of "web design". The busiest term in the category is being typed by people intending to do it themselves and pay nobody.

So the high-volume terms are not merely difficult. They are difficult and they are full of an audience that will never become a client. Buying visibility there means paying for traffic that bounces.

The terms that are genuinely open

Seven of the fourteen were open, and they have one thing in common that explains why.

They are all questions asked by somebody who already has a website and already paid somebody for it. Whether to hire an agency or a freelancer. What to do when the site does not appear in search. Why it is slow. When to redesign. How to handle more than one language. What this kind of work actually costs.

On every one of those, the platforms are absent, and the reason is structural: a site-builder cannot write honestly about the limits of a site-builder. The gap exists because occupying it would contradict their product.

What is left competing there is studios and agencies of roughly the same size as each other. That is a fight with an outcome, unlike the first group.

The two questions, side by side

The whole finding compresses into a comparison worth keeping.

Somebody typing how do I make a free web page will not pay anybody, ever. That is the intent of the phrase.

Somebody typing my website does not show up on Google has a website, has a business, and has a recent disappointment. Far fewer of them, and every one is a potential client.

Which is why volume is close to useless as a way of choosing what to chase, and why a proposal built on volume figures should be read carefully.

What this means if you are buying

Four things worth taking into a conversation with anybody offering to improve your visibility.

• Ask who currently holds the terms they are promising. If the answer is a reference site or a platform, ask what realistically changes.
• Ask what the people typing that term want. The related searches are public and take a minute to look at. If they are full of free and how to, that audience is not yours.
• Prefer fewer, more specific terms. A term with a hundred searches a month from people with a budget beats one with ten thousand from people with none.
• Be suspicious of volume as the headline metric. A proposal that leads with total search volume and never mentions intent has skipped the part that determines whether any of it is worth doing.

What we concluded about ourselves

Since the exercise was ours, it is fair to say where it left us.

We are not chasing the broad terms, in any language. Not out of principle, but because the arithmetic does not work and pretending otherwise would be the same promise we are advising you to question.

We write for the seven open ones instead, and we accept that means a smaller audience. It also means that when somebody arrives, they have a website, a business, and a specific problem, which is a better conversation than a hundred visitors who wanted a free template.

And one uncomfortable corollary we had to sit with: this arithmetic means search is a slow channel for a studio our size, not a fast one. Anybody telling you otherwise about their own business is either much larger or not counting carefully.