Study
What we found in 141 contractor profiles
Nine in ten had obvious gaps. One in eight had no website. And the median small-town business needs twenty reviews, not two hundred, which nobody tells them because the advice is written for cities.
Short answer: nine in ten local trade businesses have obvious, fixable gaps in how they appear online, one in eight has no website at all, and the review bar in a town under 5,000 people is a median of 12 rather than the 203 it takes in a city.
Why we counted
Every agency tells contractors their online presence is a mess. Almost none of them have counted. We wanted to know what an ordinary trade business actually looks like on the internet, not what a sales deck says it looks like, so in August 2026 we went through 141 of them one at a time.
What follows is what we found, what we could not measure, and where the method is weaker than we would like. That last part is the bit most studies leave out, which is exactly why most studies are worth nothing.
How we did it
141 independent local contractors and home-service trades. Twelve trades. Nineteen towns across Canada and the United States, deliberately mixed: some under 5,000 people, some proper cities. We looked at each one the way a customer would, from outside, using only what is public.
For each business we recorded what was on the Google Business Profile, whether a website existed and what was on it, and how the details lined up across the places a customer might check. No surveys, nobody was contacted, and nothing here comes from a client of ours.
Everything below is measured from the outside, which means it is what a customer can see. It is not what the owner knows, and it is certainly not what the business is worth. A brilliant plumber with an empty profile is still a brilliant plumber.
What we found
- Nine in ten had obvious gaps. Not subtle ones, not things you need a tool to spot. Missing services, a category that describes a different business, no photos since a phone that no longer exists
- One in eight had no website at all, and almost all of those were in towns under 5,000 people
- Businesses in the smallest towns scored 42% lower overall than those in cities
- The median review count in towns under 5,000 people was 12. In cities it was 203
- 97% of the sites we could check already had Google Analytics installed. As far as we could tell, almost nobody had ever opened it
The last one is the most useful thing in this study. Most local businesses are not missing tools. They are missing twenty minutes, and somebody to tell them which twenty minutes matter.
The number that changes how you feel about reviews
A median of 12 reviews in a small town, against 203 in a city. If you are in a town of 4,000 and you have nine reviews, you are not behind. You are normal, and you are about three good weeks of asking away from being the most reviewed business in your trade in your town.
The reason that matters: prominence is one of the three things Google names as ranking factors, and reviews feed it. In a city, catching up means hundreds. Where most contractors actually work, it means twenty. Nobody tells small-town operators this, because the advice is written for cities.
What this study cannot tell you
Four things we either could not measure or measured badly. We are publishing them because a study that only reports its wins is an advert.
- Services section completeness: not collected. We believe this is one of the highest-impact fields on a profile, and we did not gather it systematically. That is a genuine hole and the first thing we would add
- Review reply rates: not collected. Same story. We think replying matters more than most owners believe, and we cannot prove it from this data
- Directory counts: undercounted, badly. We found an average of 0.2 directory listings per business, which is obviously wrong. Our method looked for links back to the website, which misses every listing that does not link. The real figure is probably ten times higher. Treat that number as broken
- Facebook presence: a floor, not a figure. We could confirm at least 39% had a page. Facebook blocks the lookup routinely, so the real number is likely between 60 and 70%. We are not going to pretend 39% is the answer
None of the numbers in the findings section depend on those four. We have kept them separate on purpose.
What to do with it
If you are in a small town, your bar is far lower than it feels, and the gap between you and the top of the map is smaller than any agency will tell you. Fill in the services section, pick a specific category, put twelve photos up, and get to twenty reviews. That is most of it.
If you are in a city, none of that stops being true, it just stops being enough on its own. The work is the same work, and there is more of it.
See where you sit against it
We will check your listing, your reviews, your directory details and your website setup, and tell you the two things worth fixing first. Free, before you pay us anything. If it comes back saying you are doing fine, we will tell you that too.