Market report · Olathe, Kansas
Olathe market report
Olathe has the metro’s highest household income and homeownership, and when people here search for a plumber, Yelp holds six of the top eight results.
Most marketing advice runs on borrowed numbers: a national average, an agency rule of thumb, a cost per click someone read about once. Olathe isn’t average, and the numbers in this report are its own.
We measured Olathe the same way we measured its neighbors: searches for 48 kinds of business, what a click costs, who holds the first page of Google, and how the top local businesses look on Maps and on a phone. Everything was read on the same day, November 7, 2026.
Read it as a guide to where your next dollar and your next hour will go furthest. Each section takes one question in turn: what people here search for, what it costs to be seen when they do, who else holds the page, and how the businesses already on it hold up. Section six puts the answers together as three moves, in the order we’d make them.
Olathe at a glance
Olathe is a city of homeowners. It’s home to 150,025 people, up 6.2% since 2020, and 74.8% of its homes are owner-occupied, the highest share of the six cities we measured. Its median household income, $114,009, is the highest of the six too.
Searches that name the city add up to about 4,700 a month across those 48 trades, and ranking for them is cheap. Google’s first page for “plumber olathe” scores 12 out of 100 on Semrush’s difficulty scale, the lowest of the six cities, while the same search in Kansas City scores 63. A plumbing company that ranks still shares the page with Yelp, though. The rest of this report takes those findings one at a time.
What people here search for
Garage door repair leads: more people type it next to the city’s name than any other trade we checked. Pest control, dermatologist, plumber and auto repair tie for second, so home services hold three of the top six in the city with the most homeowners we measured.
Treat every one of these counts as a floor. They only include searches that type “Olathe”, and plenty of people don’t. Across the US, “plumber near me” alone draws 550,000 searches a month, so a trade with a modest count here can still have real local demand.
Marketing help follows the same pattern. “SEO olathe” draws 50 searches a month, and the same search with Kansas City’s name draws 1,000. Most of the metro’s searches for marketing help name Kansas City.
Searches a month that name Olathe, top six trades
- Garage door repair: 320 searches a month.
- Pest control: 260 searches a month.
- Dermatologist: 260 searches a month.
- Plumber: 260 searches a month.
- Auto repair: 260 searches a month.
- Dentist: 210 searches a month.
What a click costs here
Clicks in Olathe cost more than the same clicks in Kansas City. A plumber click searched from inside the city costs about $52, against about $36 from inside Kansas City.
The suburb auctions are thinner and more contested: fewer searches, with businesses still competing for each one. HVAC shows it too. With the city’s name in the search, an HVAC click costs about $46 in Olathe and $29 in Kansas City.
So in Olathe, a click you earn by ranking saves more than the same click would in Kansas City.
What a plumber click costs, searched from inside each city
- Kansas City: $36 for a plumber click.
- Overland Park: $47 for a plumber click.
- Olathe: $52 for a plumber click.
- Lee’s Summit: $56 for a plumber click.
- Independence: $52 for a plumber click.
- Blue Springs: $39 for a plumber click.
Who shows up when people search
Depending on the trade, your competition on Google’s first page is either other businesses or the directories that list them. Dentists and med spas hold most of their own pages here. Plumbers don’t: Yelp pages take six of the top eight results, which leaves two for plumbing companies.
Where directories hold the page, your directory profile is part of your marketing. For a plumbing company in Olathe, it’s often the first version of the business a customer sees, so it deserves the same care as the website.
| Trade | Local businesses | Most of the rest |
|---|---|---|
| Dentist | 5 of 8 | directories |
| Med spa | 5 of 9 | directories |
| Plumber | 2 of 8 | directories |
| Landscaping | 2 of 7 | directories |
| Pest control | 1 of 9 | national chains |
| HVAC | 0 of 10 | reference sites |
Source: Semrush location metrics, organic results, November 7, 2026. Sorted by hand.
How local businesses hold up
On Google Maps, the businesses at the top of most Olathe trades are well established. The top 20 plumbers have a median of 434 reviews, and the top 20 chiropractors 208. House cleaning is the open field: the top 20 have a median of 47 reviews, and 6 of them have fewer than 25.
Their websites are weaker than their reviews. We loaded the site behind each of those listings on a phone, five trades in all. 57 of the 90 that loaded took more than 4 seconds to show their main content, and 25 took more than 10. Nine of 90 tell Google not to list them in search at all, the most of any city we checked.
It isn’t only an Olathe problem. More than half the sites run over 4 seconds in every one of the six cities, which makes a fast site stand out in any of them.
- Kansas City: 44 of 74
- Overland Park: 56 of 89
- Olathe: 57 of 90
- Lee’s Summit: 53 of 83
- Independence: 44 of 79
- Blue Springs: 43 of 70
Our phone check, Nov 7, 2026. Read in bands.
What we’d do first here
Put together, the numbers point to three moves, in the order we’d make them.
Own your Yelp page first. When people in Olathe search for a plumber, Yelp holds six of the top eight results, so for a plumbing company here that page does the job a homepage would. Make it complete and current, with photos and recent reviews.
Rank on the city’s name. “Plumber olathe” has a difficulty of 12, and garage door repair and gutter cleaning 7 each. Buying those clicks costs about $40, $48 and $30, so every one you rank for is one you don’t pay for.
Check that Google can see your site. Nine of the 90 sites we loaded tell Google not to index them, which keeps them out of search entirely. Ask whoever built your site to check for a noindex tag.
A client from Appleton City, Missouri
Hamilton Solutions is a roof-coating and exterior-painting crew in Appleton City, Missouri, with years of before-and-after photos and a site the owner had built himself. We rebuilt it as a Static site so it looks as professional as the work does.
“They took the website I had pieced together myself and turned it into something polished and professional that represents Hamilton Solutions exactly the way I wanted!”
How this report was built
Every figure in this report was read on November 7, 2026. Search counts and click costs come from Semrush’s US database, and searches from inside each city are Semrush’s own model. The Maps figures come from the first 20 non-sponsored listings for each search, a sample drawn around the city.
A few limits are worth knowing. City-named counts miss “near me” searches, so they’re a floor. Modeled volumes are best compared city to city. Census figures run a year or more behind, and our phone check loaded each site once, so read it in bands.
Wabbit wrote this report. We’re based in Blue Springs, and we refresh the figures every quarter.
- Semrush keyword data
- Semrush location metrics
- U.S. Census QuickFacts
- Google Maps listings
- Our own phone check
Questions
- Q.01
How often is this report updated?
Every quarter. The date at the top changes when we re-pull the figures, and each one is re-checked then.
- Q.02
Why does Yelp outrank plumbers in Olathe?
Google doesn’t publish why one page outranks another, so we can only report what it shows. From inside Olathe, six of the top eight results for “plumber” are Yelp pages. With the city’s name in the search, the difficulty is just 12 out of 100, so a page built for “plumber olathe” is the easier way onto the first page.
- Q.03
Why don’t the counts include “near me” searches?
A near-me search doesn’t name a city, so there’s no clean way to split it by town. Across the US, “plumber near me” draws 550,000 searches a month, which is why the city-named counts here are a floor.
What does this mean for you? That’s what the call is for.
Fifteen minutes about your business and where your customers search. We’ll tell you which of these moves fits, or whether you don’t need us yet.
Book the call