I am the online visibility guy. My job is simple and a little strange: I look at real businesses in real towns and check one thing, can a stranger who has never met you actually find you online. Not whether the work is good. Whether the work is findable.
The scan file just crossed 9,032 businesses across Texas and Illinois, towns like Cleburne, Burleson, Fort Worth, Cicero, Berwyn and Chicago. Every number in this post came straight out of that file this morning. Nothing here is a guess.
Most of them still do not own a website
- 7,346 of 9,032 businesses, 81 percent, have no website at all.
- 894, about 10 percent, have a Facebook page and nothing else.
- That leaves 792 businesses, under 9 percent of the whole file, that actually own the page a customer lands on.
Nine out of ten businesses we scan either have nothing or are renting space on somebody else's platform. That has not moved much since the last time I pulled these numbers in August, when the file sat at 8,771. We added 261 more businesses since then and the ratio held almost exactly the same. This is not a fluke. This is just how it is out there.
The work is not the problem
Average Google rating across the 8,352 businesses with a rating is 4.52 stars. That is a serious number. If a stranger walked into a room of business owners averaging 4.52 stars and had to guess which ones cannot be found online, they would guess wrong almost every time. These are good businesses. They just are not showing up.
The phone tells the real story
- Mobile numbers: 5,412, just under 6 in 10.
- VoIP of some flavor: 2,616, close to 3 in 10.
- Landline: 962, about 1 in 10.
Running the business off a cell phone is not a crime, half the good ones in Burleson and Berwyn do it. But it means the number on your listing is tied to a person, not a business. A person switches carriers, drops a phone in a job site puddle, or just gets a new number, and every listing, every truck door and every old customer's saved contact goes stale at the same time.
The number that actually stopped me
Here is the part that matters more than any of the above. We build a free scorecard for most of the businesses in this file, a page showing exactly what a stranger sees when they search for you. Those pages are tracked, so I know who opens them.
Sit with that for a second. Ninety nine out of a hundred owners have never once looked at the free report sitting in their inbox with their own business on it. But the ones who do open it do not open it once and move on. They open it again a few days later. Then again. Nobody reopens a page about their own business three times out of boredom. They reopen it because something on it is bothering them, a competitor sitting above them, a review count that looks thin next to the shop down the road, hours that are wrong. That second and third open is usually the week they finally call somebody.
What this means for you in Cleburne or Cicero
If you are one of the 7,346 with no website, or one of the 894 running everything through a Facebook page, you are not doing anything unusual. You are the majority. But the businesses pulling ahead of you are not working harder or doing better work, the 4.52 average rating proves that. They just stopped being invisible first.
Want to see where you land in this exact data? Get your free scan and scorecard at badhabit.design. Takes a minute, costs nothing, and this time, actually open it more than once.