What the keyword data showed (June 2026 update)
An earlier version of this post argued state overtime was the core SEO moat. Real Google Keyword Planner data corrected that. Across roughly 715 state-overtime terms the combined demand is only about 196,000 a month, and the head term for an individual state sits near 5,000 — high-intent, but firmly long-tail.
The actual traffic engine is the time and hours cluster — time card, hours, timesheet, decimal hours — at roughly 26 million in monthly demand with near-zero competition, followed by the salary-to-hourly cluster at about 3.7 million. Those are the pages a new site can rank for and the ones that should get the most build and internal-link weight.
So where state overtime fits
The matrix still earns its place. California daily overtime and double time, Colorado COMPS, and the seventh-day rules are genuinely different from the federal baseline, so the 51-state pages are real topical authority and they capture long-tail intent — not thin state-name swapping.
The decision that changed is expansion. The state matrix is complete and should be maintained, not grown with more thin variants. New build effort and exact-anchor internal links should flow into the time/hours and salary tools, with blog and guide content funneling readers from informational queries into those calculators.