Carl, 2026-08-07: *"if you're gonna say something like this answer, like, what people search for
before they ring, blah blah blah, you need to actually have evidence for that. And I'm not sure
that's the top searched queries."*
He was right. The owner box claimed the articles answered what people search for, and I had not
checked. These are the figures I found, with sources, and the article list is now built from them
rather than from what I found interesting to write.
| Term | Volume | Source |
|---|---|---|
| hedge trimming | 40,500 | Landscape Marketers |
| tree surgeon / tree surgeon near me | 18,100 each | One Base Media |
| stump grinding | 8,100 to 9,900 | both sources |
| apple tree pruning | 5,400 | One Base Media |
| tree pollarding | 4,400 | Landscape Marketers |
| tree lopping | 4,400 | One Base Media |
| pear tree surgery | 4,400 | One Base Media |
| tree stump removal | 3,600 | One Base Media |
| tree pruning | 2,400 | both |
| tree removal | 1,600 to 1,900 | both |
| crown reduction | 590 | Landscape Marketers |
| cost cluster combined | ~1,400 | tree removal cost 720, tree surgeon prices 260, tree felling cost 210, cost of stump grinding 210 |
The finding that mattered. Hedge trimming outranks every tree term including "tree surgeon",
and I had written nothing about hedges at all. My five original articles were chosen because they
were interesting to me, not because anyone searches for them.
Published lists for fencing are almost entirely service and "near me" terms, which a blog cannot
win and does not need to: those are jobs for the service pages.
| Term | Volume | Source |
|---|---|---|
| fencing contractors near me | 9,900 | Landscape Marketers |
| fence company near me | 2,900 | same |
| fence repair near me | 1,900 | same |
| fence installation near me | 1,600 | same |
| fencing contractor | 1,300 | same |
Informational demand here is dominated by cost. The whole price-guide industry
MyJobQuote) exists because of it. UK market range: roughly £60 to £150 per metre installed,
£80 to £130 per metre for a full replacement including posts and concrete, and £30 to £60 a
panel in materials for a panel-only swap.
Same pattern: cost is the informational query.
Paving Shopper), with a 40 to 50 sq m patio landing around £2,000 to £6,000.
The article lists were rebuilt around demand. Out went "how to tell whether a tree is dangerous"
and "what happens to the wood", which nobody searches for. In came hedge trimming, stump
grinding, fruit tree pruning and a cost guide.
On writing about cost. Carl killed claims about what a specific firm charges, and that stands.
A published UK market range is a different thing: it is sourced, checkable, and explicitly not
this firm's price. Every cost article says so in the first paragraph and points the reader at a
quote for their own number. It is also, by a distance, the most-wanted information in all three
niches, so refusing to touch it was leaving the single biggest topic unwritten.
These volumes come from SEO agencies publishing their own keyword research, not from Google
Keyword Planner or Ahrefs directly, because we have no paid tool connected. Two independent
sources agree closely on the tree surgery figures, which is reassuring, but treat them as
indicative rather than exact. National volume is also not local volume: a term searched 40,500
times across the UK is a small fraction of that in one county.