What America Searches For When It Decorates

The finding: almost nobody has claimed this ground

Eighty-three per cent of the terms we measured score under 15 out of 100 for difficulty. That is not a long tail of oddities — it includes curtains for kitchen at 33,100 searches a month with a difficulty of zero, and lighting for kitchen at 27,100, also zero. The home decor category looks crowded from the outside because the head terms are owned by five enormous brands. One layer down, the results thin out fast.

The practical reading: demand in this category is not scarce and competition is not uniform. What is scarce is anyone answering the specific question properly. The twenty terms below each carry at least 5,000 searches a month and score 15 or under.

Twenty unclaimed terms

Rooms: four of them are the category

The living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom account for 64% of everything measured here. After the bathroom there is a cliff, and the order below it is not what most editorial calendars assume: the laundry room outsearches the dining room. So does the front porch, on a third as many terms.

Styles: coastal is three times mediterranean

Twenty-five named styles, eight to nine terms each, measured the same way. Coastal leads at 39,550 searches a month; mid-century modern and boho follow. The style people write about most confidently is not the one they search for most.

One warning, because we would rather flag it than let someone quote it wrongly: industrial is inflated in this table. It ranks third, but a large share of industrial kitchen traffic is people shopping for commercial catering equipment, not decorating a home. Treat that row as an artefact of the language, not as demand for a look.

What advertisers pay

The median click in this category costs $0.94. That is the number worth carrying around: home decor is not an expensive category to advertise in, which is why so much of it is monetised by affiliate links rather than by ads.

The expensive corners are the ones with a contractor at the other end. Below are the priciest clicks among terms with at least 1,000 searches a month — the floor is there deliberately, because cost-per-click figures on a few dozen searches are noise. Bathrooms and sunrooms cost real money because the person searching may be about to renovate.

Seasons, with a caveat that matters

These are annual averages divided by twelve, so they understate every holiday dramatically. Christmas does not draw 48,000 searches in March; it draws almost none for nine months and then an avalanche. What the table below is good for is the relative size of the holidays — Christmas is roughly twice autumn, autumn is roughly twice Halloween, and Easter, spring and summer barely register as decorating occasions at all.

What people are actually doing

Search intent splits the demand into people reading and people buying. 31% of the volume here is transactional — someone looking for a rug for a bedroom is closer to a checkout than to an article. That share is higher than the category's reputation for idle browsing suggests, and it is concentrated in the furnishing terms rather than the style ones.

Method, and what these numbers cannot tell you

We picked the 381 terms by hand rather than accepting a tool's suggestions: every room in a house, twenty-five named styles crossed with the four main rooms, twenty furnishings crossed with the rooms they belong in, eight seasons, and the sizing and how-to questions people type in full. Metrics were pulled through DataForSEO on 2026-09-09 for the United States in English, in batches of fifteen. Of the 381, 376 returned a volume; the 5 that returned nothing are in the file as empty rows rather than as zeroes, because "not measured" and "nobody searches this" are different claims.

Four limits, stated plainly. The volumes are buckets — 37 distinct values across 381 terms — so a single figure is a bracket, and the comparisons between groups are the trustworthy part. There is no month-by-month data in this pull, so nothing here describes timing. Difficulty is an estimate of how strong the current first page is, not a forecast. And language is ambiguous: the industrial row above is the clearest case, where a decorating word collides with a commercial-kitchen one. We have flagged the one we found; there will be others.

Why publish it at all: we run a decorating site with a weak domain, and we would rather be the place that shows its numbers than the place that repeats someone else's. If a figure here is wrong, we would like to know — the file is right there.

Questions people ask

Where does this data come from?

Google search volumes, cost per click and competition figures pulled through DataForSEO on 9 September 2026, for the United States in English. We chose the 381 terms ourselves — rooms, named styles, furnishings, seasons and the questions people ask out loud — rather than scraping whatever a tool suggested, so the set is a deliberate cross-section rather than a keyword dump.

Can I use these numbers?

Yes, and we would rather you did. Cite them, chart them, quote them in a pitch. The only thing we ask is a link back to this page so the next person can check the workings and download the file themselves. The raw CSV is on this page.

Why are the search volumes such round numbers?

Because Google reports them in buckets, not as exact counts. Across 381 terms there are only 37 distinct volume values — 33,100 and 27,100 and 22,200 recur again and again. Treat any single figure as a bracket rather than a measurement, and treat the comparisons between groups as the reliable part.

Is this seasonal demand or annual?

Annual, averaged per month, which is exactly why the seasonal numbers here look smaller than they feel. Christmas terms do not average 48,000 a month — they sit near nothing for nine months and spike enormously in November. Month-by-month figures were not available for this pull, so the seasonal table below tells you the relative size of each holiday and nothing about its timing.

What does keyword difficulty mean here?

A 0-to-100 estimate of how hard the first page is to reach, based on the strength of the sites already ranking. Under 15 means the current results are weak enough that a genuinely good page has a real chance. It is an estimate, not a promise, and it says nothing about whether the traffic is worth having.

We also build the free tools that come out of these questions: the rug size calculator, the hanging height calculator and the decorating style quiz. The style worlds are where the writing lives.