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Google ads is good for determining popularity, as it is Ubersuggest (but you only get 3 searches on the free version). I would have thought if the therapy is online then the state you are in is irrelevant and not something people would include in their searches.

@giftsthatsaywow I think you may have replied to a different post to the one you intended.

@lpantell

One thing you can do is look for closely related terms that do have volume. This might help you to understand how people are phrasing this intent.

"online therapy california" seems intuitively like an odd one to me, because if I was looking for an online service, I would not be worried about the location it was provided from. That said, I'm not an expert in this area so I could be off on that.

One thing I do notice is that "san francisco" therapy terms seem to have higher volume than "california" therapy terms, and "therapist" also often seems more used as a term than "therapy", depending on context. Perhaps among the people who are looking for an online therapist that is nonetheless local to them, California is simply too large a search area?

A doorway page is an old school black hat SEO technique. What webmasters would do is buy domains with high PR or buy expired domains that used to be competitors and then 301 redirect them back to their website. This was in essence buying their links, as the links to the old domains now ended up at their domain.

Are your domains all on the same hosting account or same serer c-block? Are they all registered and verified with Google Webmaster Tools? If not, then Google may seem them as being owned by different people. In that case, it would look to them like you just bought a bunch of domains and redirected them all to your domain.

There are so many ways to identify popular search terms are:
Competitor analysis.
Google's search autocomplete feature on their website.
Through Ahref.
or review stats.

@lpantell Yes, leave out "California", nobody searches that. Try it with cities near you that you want to target.

@lpantell The best tool to use would be in SEMrush. It has a lot more information around keywords and also gives you suggestions to similar words being searched for.

@lpantell Quite an interesting question. But I usually rely on suggestions from search engines

@lpantell Hey can i say it's best not to be dependent on a single tool as none tools are perfect for the keyword research purpose i would recommend you the one and only keyword Planner by Google Ads, It's most accurate. To use it you have to make profile on Google ads and it will not cost anything. so go in Google Ads go in tools an then go to keyword planner and put the keywords you are interested in then it will show what are the search volumes on it also it will show similar keyword who are getting searches.