The three calculators we built are pulling in steady search traffic, so we went looking to see what else exists in the same space. Here's what we found — the tools people are actually searching for, roughly what each could be worth, and what came up when we checked quizzes. Nothing here is decided; it's a set of options we thought were worth putting in front of you.
In the last month alone, the three calculators brought in about 1,200 visits from Google on their own — and were shown in search results around 176,000 times. That's the benchmark everything below is measured against.
| Calculator | Times shown in Google | Visits | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gravel calculator | 95,177 | 585 | 6.1 |
| Soil calculator | 60,975 | 486 | 6.3 |
| Grass seed calculator | 19,506 | 145 | 5.7 |
Google Search Console, 6 July – 5 August 2026. 84% of Eartheasy's search traffic comes from the US, 8% from Canada — so all the search volumes in this document are US figures, with Canada adding roughly another 10% on top.
There's room for at least nine more tools along the same lines. Four are essentially bigger versions of what already works. Five bring smaller audiences but sit much closer to what Eartheasy actually sells. And one — a planting zone finder — is a different scale of project altogether. Below is what each one looks like, so you can weigh up which, if any, are worth pursuing.
These are close relatives of the gravel and soil calculators: someone has an area to cover and needs to know how much material to order. Same build, same page structure, larger audiences.
| Tool | Main search / mo | All related searches / mo | Competition (0–100) |
Est. visits / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mulch calculator | 60,500 | 131,500 | 24 | 150–250 |
| Topsoil calculator | 22,200 | 23,700 | 0 | 80–150 |
| Sand calculator | 12,100 | 58,400 | 0 | 50–100 |
| Landscape rock calculator | 5,400 | 5,700 | 0 | 30–60 |
"Competition" is an industry score from 0 to 100 for how hard it is to reach the first page. Anything under 25 is comfortably within reach for a site of Eartheasy's strength.
It gets the same monthly search volume as the gravel calculator (60,500), and the pages currently ranking for it look beatable — a couple of generic calculator sites, Home Depot, and a handful of local mulch yards. Google also already trusts Eartheasy on the subject: the site ranks in positions 2–5 for around twenty mulch questions, including "best mulch for raised garden beds" and "mulch for raised beds". A calculator would sit naturally alongside content that's already performing.
22,200 searches a month with very little competition standing in the way. One thing to be aware of: it would need to be kept clearly separate from the existing soil calculator, otherwise the two pages end up competing with each other in Google. The cleanest split we can see is topsoil = bulk delivery by the yard or ton for lawns and levelling, with the soil calculator staying focused on bags and raised beds.
The sand searches include paver sand (3,600/mo), sandbox sand (720/mo — relevant, since Eartheasy sells sandboxes) and even aquarium sand. Landscape rock is essentially a variation on the gravel calculator, which makes it the least expensive item on this list to put together.
These would bring fewer visitors, but the people arriving are already shopping for something Eartheasy stocks — so a larger share of them are likely to buy.
| Tool | Main search / mo | All related searches / mo | Competition | Leads to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sod & sod cost calculator | 9,900 | 75,600 | 2 | Eco-lawn grass seed |
| Compost calculator | 4,400 | 6,800 | 17 | Composters, worm bins |
| Plant spacing calculator | 1,900 | 1,900 | 0 | Seeding Square |
| Rainwater harvesting calculator | 1,000 | 1,000 | 3 | Rain barrels |
| Chicken coop size calculator | 1,000 | 2,810 | 0 | Chicken coops |
The tool itself gets 9,900 searches a month against almost no competition — the current results are mostly regional sod farms. Sitting right next to it, though, is a much larger set of cost questions: "how much does sod cost", "how much is a pallet of sod", "sod installation cost calculator" and similar, together worth 75,600 searches a month, all of them easy to rank for.
The audience is a good match, too. Eartheasy already appears in Google for "sod vs seed" — 2,342 impressions in three months. A calculator that prices out sod versus eco-lawn seed for someone's actual lawn size would answer the question they arrived with, and put the case for seed in front of them at the same time.
Not a calculator, but the same principle: a visitor enters their postcode and gets their growing zone, their last frost date, and when to start each seed.
| What people search | Searches / mo | Competition |
|---|---|---|
| usda hardiness zone map | 165,000 | 48 |
| what hardiness zone am i in | 33,100 | 28 |
| hardiness zone by zip code | 14,800 | 27 |
| last frost date by zip | 4,400 | 36 |
| seed starting calculator | 1,000 | 7 |
Across every related phrasing, this subject is worth more than 800,000 searches a month.
The USDA's own map holds the top spot, as you'd expect. But everything behind it is commercial garden sites — Proven Winners, The Old Farmer's Almanac, Arbor Day, Monrovia, Garden In Minutes. So there is clearly room for a retailer here.
It's also the most involved thing on this list to build, and the slowest of the group to pay off. What it would buy is a tool gardeners come back to every spring, with a natural path from "here's your zone and your frost date" to the seeds and plants that suit it. We've included it as something to consider for a future cycle rather than a near-term option.
The demand isn't there. "Gardening quiz", "composting quiz", "sustainability quiz", "which raised bed" — all effectively zero searches in the US. We checked "test" as well, since both wordings are common: it turns out to mean a physical kit rather than an online quiz — soil test kit (33,100/mo), pH test kit (22,200/mo). The only quiz-like tools with real demand are photo identifiers, and those are app territory: they'd mean building AI image recognition.
Worth building only as shopping aids — "find the right coop for your flock" — where they help a visitor narrow down a choice. Judge them on conversion, not traffic: they won't bring anyone in from Google. Eartheasy already has one in the "Find Your Shed" section.
One genuine finding did come out of that check, though: those soil test kit searches are a product opportunity, not a quiz one. Eartheasy stocks Luster Leaf but sits around positions 11–25 for them, picking up only a handful of visits a month. A separate conversation from calculators, but a real one.
The existing calculators are shown in Google constantly — around 176,000 times last month — but only about 0.7% of those people click through, because the pages sit around sixth place. Moving them up to third would multiply their traffic several times over without building anything new, so that work is already under way: strengthening the content on each page and building out the cluster of related articles around them.
If some of these are of interest, this is the order we'd suggest looking at them in — though it's entirely open to reshuffling depending on what fits your plans for the coming months.
Happy to go deeper on any of these — competitor detail, or what each page would actually contain. Just let us know which of them, if any, you'd like to explore.