Niche Finder

Summary#

The Niche Finder answers the question that comes before the Niche Scorer: which trade should you look at in this town at all? Pick a location and it measures live search demand for every local trade Metric Vault tracks, then ranks them by monthly searches with the cost per click and the monthly click value beside each one. Clicking any trade opens it in the Niche Scorer for that same location.

Purpose#

The Niche Scorer answers "is roofing in Philipsburg worth it?" but assumes you already picked roofing. Choosing which trade to look at is usually guesswork, and guessing wrong costs a credit and a detour per attempt. This tool measures the whole tracked list in one request, so the shortlist is built from what people in that place actually search for rather than from what came to mind first.

Overview#

One run sends every tracked trade to the Google Ads volume endpoint scoped to the chosen location, in a single bulk request. Trades the provider reports no volume for are dropped rather than shown as zero. What comes back is ranked by monthly searches, with cost per click, an estimated monthly click value (searches times cost per click) and a competition label on each row. The first ten are shown; View all expands the rest and becomes Show top 10 only, which collapses it again.

The trade name is measured on its own, scoped to the location, rather than spelled into the phrase. "plumbing" measured in Austin and "plumbing" measured in Boise are directly comparable; "plumbing austin" and "plumbing boise" measure how often people type the city name, which is a smaller and regionally inconsistent thing.

Benefits#

• A ranked shortlist for any covered city, from one request rather than one run per guess.
• Demand, click price and click value together, so a busy trade and a lucrative one can be told apart.
• One click from any row into the full Niche Scorer report for that trade and location.
• The location can be filled in from your connection instead of typed.

Use Cases#

• Entering a new city and wanting to know which trades have real search demand there.
• Comparing two towns by the shape of their demand rather than by one trade.
• Building a shortlist to run the Niche Scorer against, without paying for dead ends.

Requirements#

• A location picked from the dropdown. Start typing the city on its own — "Cape Coral" is enough, and the state or country is optional — then pick the matching entry. Forty markets are covered, not only the English-speaking ones; the country is part of every entry in the list, so two cities with the same name are told apart there.

Permissions#

Any signed-in user on a paid plan. Free-plan accounts are prompted to upgrade, the same as every credit-metered tool.

Cost#

1 credit per run, because the whole list is measured in a single bulk request.

This tool is not in the shared cross-customer data cache, so every run is a real set of provider calls. Your own previous runs are kept for 90 days, and running the same location again offers the saved copy first: opening it costs nothing, running fresh charges 1 credit. See Saving a result.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Local (sidebar group) → Niche Finder.

Inputs#

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Local → Niche Finder in the sidebar.
2. Start typing a city and pick it from the dropdown, or press Use my location and check what it filled in. The arrow keys move through the list and Enter chooses the highlighted city.
3. Press Find niches. Enter in the city field does the same once the list is closed, and choosing a city never starts the run by itself.
4. Read the top ten, or press View all for the full ranked list. The same control collapses it again.
5. Click any trade to open its full report in the Niche Scorer.

Reading the Results#

Each row carries four numbers and one label:

• Searches/mo — monthly Google searches for that trade in that location. This is the ranking.
• Per click — what advertisers pay for one click. A proxy for what a customer is worth.
• /mo in clicks — searches times cost per click. What the trade's search traffic is worth to advertisers each month, which separates a busy trade from a lucrative one.
• Competition — Google's own advertiser competition figure for the term, as low, medium or high. This is competition for ads, not for organic rankings; the Niche Scorer measures the organic and map pack picture.

Above the list, a line states how many trades had measurable demand out of how many were measured. The ranking is over the trades Metric Vault tracks, which is not every business type that exists.

Examples#

Running Austin, Texas returns plumbing, roofing and HVAC near the top on searches, but the /mo in clicks column can reorder them: a trade with half the searches and triple the click price is often the better market. Clicking HVAC opens the Niche Scorer for HVAC in Austin, which then adds the organic and map pack picture the Finder does not measure.

Screenshots#

None yet.

Tips#

• Sort your own attention by the click value column, not the searches column. Searches tell you how busy a trade is; click value tells you what that traffic is worth.
• Use my location is a starting point, not an answer. It reads the city your connection appears to come from, which a VPN or an office network gets wrong.
• The list is the same in every city. A trade missing from your results had no measurable demand in that location, not a gap in coverage.

Best Practices#

• Use the Finder to build a shortlist, then spend Niche Scorer runs only on the shortlist.
• Compare two towns on the same trade before committing to one, since the click price for the same trade varies widely by market.
• Treat a high competition label as information about the ad auction, not a reason to skip a trade. Organic opportunity is what the Niche Scorer measures.

Common Mistakes#

• Reading the ranking as "the most popular businesses in this town". It is the most-searched of the trades on the tracked list, which is a claim about the list.
• Typing a city and pressing Find without picking it from the dropdown. The run needs the location code behind the entry, so it will refuse.
• Assuming a low competition label means easy organic rankings. It is the advertiser competition figure for the keyword.

Limitations#

• The list is a fixed set of local service trades. It does not cover every business type, and it deliberately excludes categories with no local demand to measure.
• Competition is Google's ad-auction figure, not an organic difficulty score.
• Click value is an estimate built from two provider figures, not measured revenue.
• For a location too small for Google to report volume, the tool falls back to country-wide numbers and says so on screen. Those numbers describe the country, and competition in a small town will be lighter than they suggest.
• Use my location resolves the city of the network connection, which is approximate.

Troubleshooting#

• "Google Ads did not answer just now" — Google Ads refused the live request for both the location and the country-wide fallback. Google allows only a few live requests a minute, shared across the platform. Wait a minute and run it again. Nothing is charged for a run that ends this way.
• "Could not pull live demand for that location" — the provider returned nothing for that location code. Pick the location again from the dropdown, or try the nearest larger city.
• A trade shows searches but no click value — Google reported a search volume for it but no cost per click, so there is nothing to multiply. The tool leaves the value out rather than showing $0.
• "Could not work out your city from this connection" — the edge could not name a city, or named one the data provider does not list, or the country is outside the six covered. Type the city instead.
• Fewer trades than expected — trades with no reported volume in that location are dropped rather than listed as zero. The count above the list gives both numbers.

FAQs#

How many trades does it measure? Over a hundred local service trades, measured in one bulk request. The exact count is shown above every result.

Why does the top of the list look the same in different cities? Demand for the big trades is broadly similar between towns of similar size. The columns that separate markets are cost per click and click value, not the search count.

Can I add a trade to the list? Not from the app today. The list ships with the product.

Why does this cost less than the Niche Scorer? One bulk request instead of three separate live pulls. The Scorer also fetches the organic top 10 and the map pack for its niche, which the Finder does not.