What people google when they look for a carpenter

The Finding in Three Sentences

In Switzerland, a lot of people search for a carpentry business by its name rather than for the trade in a place: one single company name draws around 1,000 searches a month, as many as the town search for the entire city of Zurich. The largest connected search field around the word Schreiner is not the customer side at all, but pay, jobs, the collective labour agreement and apprenticeships. And in the classic near-me search, the leading places in the ordinary results list belong to portals, not to businesses.

I am writing this up even though it argues against my own offering. Anyone who takes these numbers seriously does not buy an SEO package, but first tidies up their home page and their Google profile.

How I Measured

Tool: Ubersuggest. Location: Switzerland. Language: German. Retrieved on 9 August 2026. The search results data comes from the same source, there dated 4 July 2026 for the carpentry search and 5 July 2026 for the cross-check.

The search terms stay in German throughout. That is the point: these are the queries Swiss people actually type, and translating them would destroy the measurement. Schreiner means carpenter or joiner, Schreinerei is the workshop, GAV is the collective labour agreement, and Lehrstelle is an apprenticeship position.

Search volumes are estimates, not counts. They swing from month to month, sometimes by a factor of two, and the tool works with a rolling average whose window is more current for some terms than for others. Anyone who recalculates these tables in six months will see different numbers. The orders of magnitude, and above all the ratios between them, are what matter here.

I set myself one rule beforehand and kept to it, because otherwise every number can be bent in the desired direction: I count two spellings separately only when the tool treats them as two separate pots, with their own cost per click and their own monthly series. If two terms return the same value, the same cost per click and month for month the same series, it is one pot, and I count it once. This rule applies to both tables, and to company names exactly as it does to town searches.

Table A: How Customers Search

Ubersuggest, Switzerland, German, retrieved 9 August 2026.

Two terms are missing from this table on purpose. schreinerei in meiner nähe returns the same value as schreiner in meiner nähe, the same cost per click and month for month the same series; that is one pot, not a second one. The same goes for schreinerei zürich next to schreiner zürich. Under the rule above, I count them once.

With Bern and with the company name it is the other way round. schreiner bern and schreinerei bern have different values, different costs per click and different monthly series, so they are two pots: 1,310 together. The company name also splits into two pots, 720 and 320, together 1,040.

That leaves the finding more sober than it first felt, and it still holds. One single business collects 1,040 searches a month from its name alone. That is more than the town search for the city of Zurich at 1,000 and less than Bern at 1,310. A company name therefore moves in the range of an entire city. Four further company names land between 390 and 720, above everything the canton of Aargau produces in town searches. Anyone searching for a carpentry workshop in Brugg by typing the town name does so 90 times a month, split across every business in the region.

Table B: How Applicants Search

Ubersuggest, Switzerland, German, retrieved 9 August 2026.

This field is larger than any town search for a carpenter in Aargau, and by more than tenfold: around 3,500 against 170 for the whole canton. It is also larger than the town searches for Zurich, Bern and Basel combined. What is remarkable is not the size as such, but who answers these searches. The question about the collective labour agreement is answered by the association, the question about pay by salary calculators and career portals, the question about apprenticeships by berufsberatung.ch. Almost never by a business.

The Finding on the Results Page

For schreiner in meiner nähe, the results list looks like this. This is an extract, and the tool’s estimated clicks are in brackets. By ordinary results list I mean everything below the map panel, that is the normal results without map and without ads:

Ubersuggest, Switzerland, German, data as of 4 July 2026.

The portal at position 5 is the Schreinersuche of the VSSM, the Swiss association of master carpenters and furniture manufacturers, based in Wallisellen. You can search there by postal code or place, by field of work such as kitchens, interior fit-out, windows, doors and bathrooms, or directly by company name. That the association portal itself offers a search by company name fits the finding from Table A.

The precise reading matters, because this is where people tend to overstate things. It is not true that single businesses have no chance in this search: they are very much in the list, from position 9 onwards, and I count nine of them down to position 26. It is true that little is left at the top. Adding up the estimated clicks of every portal and directory result across the whole list down to position 26, including repeat hits from the same domain, I get around 1,307. All single businesses together come to around 94. That is a ratio of roughly 14 to 1, and the first genuine company result reaches three percent of what the association portal takes. Incidentally, position 21 holds berufsberatung.ch with its page on the carpentry profession, a career page in the middle of a customer search.

Cross-Check: Landscape Gardening

Same phrasing, different trade. gartenbau in meiner nähe draws 1,600 searches a month. The first place in the ordinary results list is held not by a portal but by a single business, with an estimated 477 clicks. search.ch follows with 92, and from there the list down to position 20 is filled almost entirely with individual landscaping businesses, each in the range of 3 to 22 clicks. A dominant association portal like schreiner.ch does not appear in those results.

Two trades, the same search phrasing, different prospects. In landscaping, a single business can hold the first place in the results list. In carpentry, that place is held by an association portal drawing on a database of every member business.

What Follows From This

Three observations, not a set of instructions. Anyone who takes this distribution seriously ends up at the home page, because the route there runs mostly through the name and not through the service. They end up at the Google Business Profile, because the map panel sits above the entire row of portals. And they end up at recruiting, because that is where the largest search field lies that no business has claimed.

I will not say more than that here. If you want to hold your own numbers against these, write to me.

What the Numbers Do Not Say

Search volumes are estimates from models, not counted searches. I saw this while measuring: schreiner jobs and schreinerei jobs both return 590, and month for month the exact same series. Those are clearly not two independent measurements but the same pot. That is why only one of the two appears in Table B, and why totals across similar-sounding terms should be read with care in general.

Searches for company names say nothing about who is searching. They contain existing customers, suppliers, applicants, neighbours, and people who already know the business and just want the phone number. These are not 1,040 prospective buyers a month. What they do prove is something else: that the route to the website runs through the name, not through the service.

The click figures for the results list are the tool’s model values, not measured visits. Nobody counted 901 people clicking through to the Schreinersuche. They follow position roughly, but not strictly: in the table above, position 10 with 35 clicks sits ahead of position 9 with 28. On top of that, the column does not reconcile with the search volume, since all results together come to roughly half of the 2,900 searches, and that below a map panel which takes the largest share. What holds up is therefore only the ratio between portals and businesses, not the individual number.

Finally, this analysis covers German-language Swiss search terms. I did not measure menuisier or falegname. What follows for an individual business depends on whether it lives off regulars or wants to grow, whether it is hiring, and how far its catchment area reaches. For a rough sense of when effort on search pays off at all, I wrote that up in When GEO is not worth it, and for the recruiting side in The apprenticeship page for a trade business.