Who holds page one for tree removal? One tree company per city, and none in most small cities

A tree company owner who searches their own city and finds themselves on page two usually draws one conclusion: the companies above them have bigger websites. The advice that follows is familiar. Add pages, start a blog, build a page for every suburb, and out-build the competition.

We set out to measure how big a page-one tree removal website is. The data answered a different question first, and it is the more useful one: most of page one is not a tree company at all.

On September 25, 2026 we captured the top ten organic Google results for “tree removal” in 24 US cities, 12 large metros and 12 small cities, and opened every result. In the 20 cities where the search returned tree removal results, tree companies held 33 of 167 page-one slots. That is 20 percent. The median city had one.

The number to write down first

Search “tree removal” and your city, count the results that are a company that does tree work, and note the position of the first one. Here is what that count looks like across the sample:

	Large metros	Small cities
Cities where the search worked	9	11
Page-one slots held by a tree company	30 percent	12 percent
Tree companies on page one, median city	2	0
Cities with no tree company on page one	2 of 9	6 of 11
Cities with two or fewer	6 of 9	10 of 11

Across all 20 cities, 8 had no tree company in the organic top ten and 16 had two or fewer. Where a tree company did appear, the first one sat at a median position of 2. A tree company held position one in 2 of 20 cities.

If your city shows one or two, that is the typical market. If it shows none, so do most small cities here.

What holds the other slots

What the result was	Slots	Share of page one
Directory, marketplace or social platform	107	64 percent
Tree company that does the work	33	20 percent
Lead generation or referral site	10	6 percent
Other directory, forum or member listing	10	6 percent
Site with no identifiable local operator	4	2 percent
Government page or off-topic result	3	2 percent

The directories are the familiar names. Yelp appeared 21 times, MapQuest 18, Facebook and the Better Business Bureau 10 each, Reddit 9, Nextdoor 8, and Thumbtack, Angi and HomeAdvisor 5 each. The share is heavier where the market is smaller: directories and platforms held 57 percent of metro page one and 70 percent of small-city page one.

The lead generation sites deserve a sentence of their own, because they look like tree companies. They carry a city in the domain and a phone number in the header. We opened every one, and ten slots went to sites that describe themselves, on their own pages, as a service that connects homeowners with local contractors. One says in plain words that it does not perform tree work. Four more slots went to sites where we could not identify a local operator at all: a toll-free or out-of-state number, a templated city subdomain, or a statewide template. We excluded those under a separate reason rather than call them something we could not verify.

So the belief being tested, that the results above you are other tree companies, holds for one result in five.

How big the page-one tree company sites are

This was the original question. It now describes a small group: 29 tree companies, 23 with a readable sitemap.

The median independent tree company on page one carries 44 pages. The middle half runs from 12 to 120. In large metros the median is 50 pages; in small cities it is 44, and no independent small-city site on page one carried more than 75. Across all 23 readable sites, 48 percent had fewer than 50 pages and 61 percent had fewer than 100.

Five of the 29 companies were national brands, and they are why a pooled metro number misleads. Their sitemaps cover offices across the country, at 2,379 to 6,334 pages, and with them in the sample the metro median reads 330.

For comparison, the top ten HVAC sites we measured earlier this month carried a median of 378 pages. An owner planning from that benchmark would build a site eight times the size of the tree companies actually on page one.

Two more measures, for owners checking their own site:

• Blogs are rare. The median page-one site has 0 pages under a blog path.
• The homepage is short. Median 949 readable words.

What the page-one sites do say is concrete. Of the 23 we could read, 17 mention stump grinding, 16 offer a free estimate, 11 name a certified arborist, and 9 state that they are insured. The median site carries 4 of the 6 features we checked. Only 10 of the 23 had a page for the city they ranked in.

Site size did not sort the list inside page one: the rank correlation between pages and position was -0.322 across 23 sites, which is not significant. At 23 sites the test can only detect a strong relationship, so this is not evidence that size does nothing.

What an owner can do with this

The fight for organic page one in this trade is mostly a fight with directories, not with other tree companies. In most of these cities, the result sitting above an owner is a Yelp page, a MapQuest listing or a Nextdoor thread, and several of those directory results were a single named company’s profile page on that directory. That points to two moves, in order. First, make sure your own listings on the directories that rank in your city are complete and current, because those pages are already on page one. Second, compare your site against the tree companies that are actually there, which in this sample means a few dozen pages that say clearly what you do, where, and how to get an estimate.

What changed in verification

This study was designed to measure site size, and verification is why it became a study of who holds page one.

• The first screen kept pages that are not businesses. In the first pass, the relevance screen kept anything with “tree” in its title. That let through software documentation, a Linux manual page, a tree-of-life science project and a news story, because the word has more meanings than the trade.
• Three cities never returned tree removal results. Columbus and Kansas City returned the same general pages about trees at the same positions, and Jonesboro returned only pages about the state of Arkansas. Google had dropped the service from the query. Counting those 27 slots as “not a tree company” would have inflated every figure above, so the three cities leave the analysis with the reason recorded in the dataset. A fourth search, Las Vegas, failed and returned nothing.
• Twelve kept sites were not operators. Opened by hand, the lead generation and unverifiable sites above had all passed the screen.

Before those corrections the study would have reported 59 subjects. After them it reports 29 companies, and the story is the 134 slots that went elsewhere.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

• Organic results only. Google often shows a map pack above the organic results for a local search. This study did not measure it, and there every listing is a business.
• One capture. Results were read once, on one day, from one location setting per city. Rankings vary by device, personalization and time.
• Small group for site size. 23 readable sitemaps, 19 of them independent. The site size figures are descriptive, and the per-stratum medians rest on 11 and 8 sites.
• Classification is a judgment. We classified lead generation sites by their own description of what they do. Sites we could not verify are reported separately, not counted as either.
• Range restriction. Every company measured already ranks. This cannot say what separates tree companies on page one from those that are not, only what the ones that made it look like.
• Four of 24 cities lost. Three searches lost the service and one failed, so the sample is 20 cities, 9 of them metros.

The number to write down

One tree company on page one in the median city, none in most small cities, and a median site of 44 pages among those that made it. Search your own city, count, and plan against that, not against a metro benchmark built from another trade.