SEO for the United States

Every figure on this page was read in Semrush’s United States database on 27 September 2026. Difficulty is scored against the sites competing inside that one database, so none of these numbers can be compared with a difficulty from another country.

The national term is the largest agency search market in the world and, at 41% difficulty against a domain with no authority, it is not a target. The city terms are smaller and, in four cases out of five, no easier.

This is the finding that decides where American work actually starts, and it runs against instinct.

The same buyer, described by what they want done rather than by where they are, is between 12 and 42 difficulty points cheaper to reach. “SaaS seo agency” measures 8% against New York’s 50% — and carries a $27.80 cost per click against the $13.92 we could read for Miami. Semrush estimates 63 referring domains are needed to compete for New York. It gives no such requirement for the service terms, because there is no wall there to climb.

So a new agency that spends its first year chasing “seo agency new york” is paying more to reach a less valuable visitor. We publish this because it is what our own plan is built on: SaaS SEO, Shopify SEO and technical SEO audits are the American pages we expect to be found for first, and the city pages are a longer game we are honest about.

We measured the sites holding page one for “saas seo agency” in the United States on 27 September 2026. The result is the most encouraging number in this whole exercise.

The site in fifth place holds a page-one slot in the United States with 85 referring domains — fewer than this domain has. The bar on that term is Authority Score 5 to 10, not 50. What separates us from it is not the number of links but their quality: ours arrived from a link-selling network we have been disavowing since 22 September.

One more thing the same search showed: six of the nine page-one results are third-party roundups, directories or a Reddit thread, not agency pages. A service page is competing for three slots, not nine. Any agency promising you page one on that term without mentioning that is not reading the same results page.

We have no office in the United States and this page will not imply one. The work is done from Ahmedabad, in whatever overlap with your working day the engagement needs. For search work that is a smaller constraint than it sounds — crawling, schema, content architecture and measurement do not require the same room — and where it does matter, such as interviewing your own sales team for real subject-matter content, we say so at scoping rather than after.

What you get instead of a local address: every recommendation carries the measurement behind it and the date it was taken, and every number on this site can be checked in the same tool we used. We publish our mistakes too — including a methodology error we found in our own analysis and corrected in public.