Canada is harder than America, and other things volume will not tell you

Every figure below was read in Semrush’s own country database — us, uk, ae, au, ca and sg — one keyword per lookup, between 25 and 27 September 2026. Volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click and intent are as displayed.

Difficulty is scored against the competing set inside one database. A 43% in Canada and a 41% in the United States describe two different contests, and comparing a figure from one database with a figure from another produces a number that looks like a finding and is not one. We made exactly that mistake earlier this month and published the correction. Everything here is same-database, market by market.

One consequence worth stating before the tables: this is not a ranking of markets. It is a record of what each one costs, which is a different and less satisfying thing.

The intuition is that a bigger market is a harder market. Measured, it is not reliably true.

Canada has one ninth of the American volume and is measurably harder to rank in. Australia has a quarter of the American volume and is easier than both.

That is not a rounding artefact. A difficulty score reflects how many established sites hold the results page, not how many people type the query. A small English-speaking market with a mature agency sector and few local challengers can be more closed than a large one, because the same handful of incumbents own every position and nobody new is pushing at them.

The practical version: “we will start somewhere smaller” is not a strategy unless you have checked that somewhere smaller is actually easier. Often it is not.

Across every term we measured in more than one market, Australia returned the lowest difficulty at a volume that still means something.

“White label seo” at 8% difficulty in Australia is the lowest figure we recorded in any market for any term with real volume attached. The same phrase measures 28% in the United States.

And it is not cheap traffic. That Australian term carries a $18.23 cost per click against the American $22.38 — within a fifth of the value, at less than a third of the difficulty.

The exception in the set is “saas seo agency”, which runs the other way: 8% in the United States and 17% in Australia. So this is a term-by-term observation, not a discount that applies to the whole country. Measure the phrase you actually want.

Cost per click is the closest public proxy for what a visitor is worth, because it is what advertisers have agreed to pay for one.

The United States and Australia sit at $22.38 and $18.23. The United Kingdom and Canada sit at $6.43 and $6.40 — within four cents of each other, and at roughly a third of the value, for the identical service and a comparable difficulty.

We are not going to pretend to know why. Advertiser competition, agency pricing norms and currency all plausibly contribute, and we have measured none of them. What the number does say is that a visitor is not a visitor: the same ranking effort in two markets returns materially different money, and volume tables never show it.

“White label seo” returns 20 searches a month in the Singapore database, with no difficulty score at all and a cost per click of zero.

Semrush declines to score difficulty for terms below a volume floor, which is itself the finding: there is not enough of a contest to describe. We spent a slot chasing this reading because our own measurement script waited for a difficulty figure that was never going to appear.

Null results are worth publishing. A market that does not exist is cheaper to rule out on a Sunday afternoon than after a quarter of content aimed at it, and the absence of a difficulty score is information, not a failed reading.

The Gulf is the only market in the set where Semrush classifies the head terms as commercial rather than informational. Everywhere else, the big phrases are typed by people learning; here they are typed by people buying.

It is also the market a new site is least likely to enter on organic search. 53% and 39% on the terms with volume, and the one easy term — “seo agency abu dhabi” at 22% — draws more of its searches from India than from the UAE.

Best intent, worst reachability. On this evidence Dubai is a paid-search or relationship market, not an SEO one, for anyone without an established profile.

• Nothing about conversion. Cost per click says what a visitor is worth to an advertiser, not what one is worth to you. A market with a $6 click and a short sales cycle can beat a $22 click and a six-month one.
• Nothing about how long. Difficulty is a snapshot of the current results page. It does not estimate months of work, and we have not tried to convert it into one.
• Nothing about the referring-domain requirement. Semrush reports an estimate of the links needed to compete; we have not yet captured it per market, and it is the missing column in every table above. It will be added when it is measured, not before.
• Nothing about whether you can deliver there. Time zone, contract law, contactability and whether anyone will answer a call at 3am decide more international engagements than difficulty scores do.

Three things, in the order they changed our own plan.

Check the small market before assuming it is the easy one. Canada is harder than the United States on the head term, at a ninth of the volume. Nothing about the size told us that.

Read difficulty and value together. Australia at 8% difficulty and $18.23 a click is a different proposition from the United Kingdom at 23% and $6.43, and a volume table shows them as the same kind of row.

Publish the null results. Singapore at 20 searches a month took one lookup to rule out. The alternative was assuming, and assuming is what a measurement discipline is for avoiding.

We will re-measure all six at ninety days and publish the movement, including wherever it shows nothing.