Where demand for agency services actually sits: six markets, measured

On 24 September 2026 we read 38 agency-service search terms in Semrush and recorded, for each, the monthly volume in every country Semrush breaks out. The terms are the ones a business types when it is looking to hire: “web development company”, “google ads agency”, “cro agency”, “ppc services” and their variants.

Every figure below is a direct Semrush reading with its date. Nothing is modelled, averaged or estimated by us. Where we do not have a number, we say so rather than filling the gap.

We did this because we are an Indian agency deciding which markets to compete in. Publishing it seemed more useful than keeping it, and the method is checkable by anyone with a Semrush seat.

The gap is not marginal. On the three largest build-side terms, the US market is several times India's, and the UK alone is comparable to India.

Australia is the surprise in that table. On “google ads agency” it draws 8,100 searches a month — two thirds of the United States, from a population an order of magnitude smaller, and six times India's 1,300.

The starkest contrast in the whole dataset: “cro agency” draws 30 searches a month in India. In the UK it draws 2,900, in the US 2,900, in Australia 1,900 — roughly a hundredfold difference on the same three letters.

The related Indian term “conversion rate optimization services” reads 260 a month at difficulty 17. That is a real but very small market, and it tells a service business something concrete: a CRO practice built for Indian demand has almost nothing to sell to, while the same practice aimed at the UK or Australia has a category that already knows what it is buying.

One caution on the same subject, reported because it is in our notes and we do not hide inconvenient readings: the bare phrase “conversion rate optimization” returned 301,000 a month for India and 4.6 million globally, with Indonesia alone at 3.4 million. Those figures are not credible as agency demand for that phrase, and we have not used them for anything.

“Google Ads” and “PPC” describe the same service, and the markets do not weight them equally. In India, “ppc services in india” (1,000 a month) and “ppc management services india” (880) carry more demand than “google ads services” variants, while “google ads agency” is the soft commercial term at difficulty 22. In the United States the agency phrasing dominates at 12,100.

The same effect shows up inside a single country. In Vadodara, India, “seo agency in vadodara” draws 3,600 searches a month against 480 for “seo company in vadodara” — the reverse of every other Indian city we measured. Whatever page you build, build it around the word the buyer in that market actually types, not the word your industry prefers.

This is where most market-size articles stop, and where the useful part starts.

Volume is not winnability. The difficulty scores in our dataset were read in the India database. We have not yet measured per-country difficulty, so we are not going to publish an opinion on how hard “web design company” is in the United States. It will be harder than the Indian figure, not easier; by how much, we do not yet know.

Semrush states a referring-domain requirement, and it is sobering. For “website development company” it estimates roughly 114 referring domains; for “web development company”, about 35. A young domain does not have those, and no amount of content substitutes for them.

Our own profile, since we are asking you to trust the data. This domain has 71 referring domains and an Authority Score of 2. Forty-five of the domains pointing at it were link-selling sites that arrived before the website existed; we disavowed them in September and wrote up why. We are not in a position to rank for “web design company” in the United States, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Zero is not proof of absence. A zero reading means demand below Semrush's reporting threshold, not that nobody searches the term.

Three things, stated plainly so they can be judged later.

First, the demand gap is real enough to act on: for several services, the addressable market outside India is three to six times the one inside it.

Second, the head terms in those markets are not reachable from a standing start, so the sensible entry is narrower — a single service where the category is established, a specific industry, or the offshore model where being outside the client's country is the proposition rather than a handicap.

Third, difficulty has to be measured per market before anything is built for it. We are doing that next, and we will publish it the same way: figures with dates, and the gaps named.

Source: Semrush Keyword Overview, read 24 September 2026, desktop. The per-country volumes come from Semrush's own country breakdown for each term.

Difficulty: Semrush's Keyword Difficulty, 0–100, read in the India database. Semrush's own reports can disagree with each other across days and views; where that has happened in our data we have recorded both readings.

Coverage: 38 terms. This is a snapshot of agency-service demand, not of the whole market, and it covers English-language search only.

Use: you may cite or chart any figure on this page with a link back to it.