Why the map matters more than your website

Ask a local owner where the next customer will come from, and you will hear about the website, the social page, the ad budget, the sign on the door. Ask a customer how they found the place, and the answer is usually shorter. They searched on a phone, looked at a map, tapped one of the first names, and called or walked in.

This book makes one argument, and it is worth stating at the start: for most local businesses, the map matters more than the website. The website still has its uses. The map is where the choice is made, though, and for a growing number of businesses it is the only page a customer ever sees.

Online markets narrow

Digital markets have a habit of narrowing to a few winners, and there are three plain reasons.

A copy costs almost nothing. Once a piece of software, a song or a design has been made, selling the second copy costs close to zero, so the maker who sells the most can spread the cost across more buyers and charge less than anyone else.

Users attract users. A marketplace, a social network or a booking site is worth more when the people you know are already there. The biggest one gets bigger because it is biggest.

Distance disappears. A shop in another country is as close as a browser tab. Nobody has to be near anything to buy from it.

Each of these pushes the same way. The market splits into a handful of names everyone knows and a long, quiet remainder. That is why so many online categories end up with two or three winners and very little in between.

Local business resists this

A salon has a few chairs. A jeweler has one counter and one pair of hands. A dentist can see only so many patients in a day. No local business can physically serve a whole city, and no customer will cross the city for a ring resizing.

When supply cannot scale and demand will not travel, the market stays split among many businesses, and often none of them holds a clear lead. That is the ordinary shape of a local trade.

Our measurements show it plainly. Across New York City we profile 23,349 businesses of 12 types in 18 market areas. In South Brooklyn alone, 89 different clinics are first in at least one of 312 treatment searches. The map itself splits the area into separate micro-markets a few blocks wide, each with its own leaders (chapter 2). There is no king of South Brooklyn. There are local leaders who own a few blocks each, and a great deal of map held loosely.

The window does not

Now the twist that gives this book its subject. The market on the ground stays split, but the customer no longer walks the street to see it. They choose through an online storefront, the map, and the map works by the rules of the internet.

It shows about three places at a time. The first few take most of the calls and the visits. A business shown first gets more customers, those customers write more reviews, and the reviews help keep it first. That is the narrowing of an online market applied to a market that shows no sign of narrowing on the ground: a split market seen through a winner-takes-most window.

The market on the ground stays split. The window customers look through does not.

Look at what the window shows. Three names on a map, each with a rating, a review count, a category, a photo and a distance. Under them, a list that continues down the screen. Almost everything a stranger needs in order to decide is inside that one small frame, and very little of it comes from your website.

Where that window has already picked its favorites, the contest is expensive. On the head terms, the short general phrases like med spa, jewelry store or dentist, the leader has been collecting customers and reviews for years, and the lead feeds itself. Where the window has not picked a favorite, there is room: the smaller searches for one service, and the micro-markets a few blocks from the leader's door.

Chapter 4 takes the two halves of that picture apart with our own numbers. For now, keep the shape in mind, because everything else in the book follows from it.

The profile is the storefront

Think about what a customer actually sees before they call or walk in. A card with a name, a few photos, a rating, a phone number, an address, and a button to call. Some people tap through to a website. Many do not.

For a large share of independent businesses there is no website to tap through to. In open map data, only 42% of independent nail salons and 44% of auto repair shops list a website of their own. Those figures come from open data, which is incomplete, so treat them as approximate shares rather than exact counts. The direction is what matters: for a great many businesses, the profile is the website, and every field on it does the work a home page would do elsewhere.

Even where a good site exists, the map usually comes first. A customer picks a name from the three on the screen and opens the site afterward, to check the hours or to book. The site confirms a choice the map has already made.

A website still has a job. It answers the questions the profile has no room for, and it is the only page in the whole chain that you own. But the order has changed. The profile does the introducing, and the site does the confirming, and a business that treats the profile as a formality is leaving the introduction to chance.

That is why the three opening chapters are about the map and the profile rather than about web design. Chapter 2 sets out what Google says it ranks local results on. Chapter 3 walks through the profile field by field, and what each field does for a stranger.

The ground is moving too

One honest correction before the argument gets too comfortable. Local markets are not frozen in their split, small-business form.

Chains and groups buy clinics, practices and studios. In the markets we profile, chains account for 33% of gyms, 24% of nail salons and 24% of veterinarians, with 2% among immigration lawyers. Booking platforms push the same way, gathering customers into one place to compare and book, which tends to favor the businesses that appear everywhere and can pay for attention.

Consolidation is real, and it makes the map harder for an independent over time. But the physical limit has not moved. A group with a dozen locations still cannot serve a city from one door, and the customer in Brighton Beach still wants someone nearby. For as long as that is true, the local market stays split, however much the window above it narrows.

There is one more caveat, about what a place on the list means: being visible in the map results is not the same as being chosen, and chapter 4 shows how wide that gap can be.

What the book offers

This book is for the owner who has a profile, maybe a website, and the feeling that something is happening online that they cannot quite see. There is no secret setting behind the map. What the book offers is a way to find the parts of the map where a small business can win, and a monthly method for working them.

Nobody controls who Google shows first, and nothing here promises a ranking or a number of customers. What it offers is a fair attempt: choose a few searches where the odds are reasonable, make each one easy to find and easy to trust, watch from the same spots on the same day each month, keep what works and drop what does not.

The method is small on purpose. It is built for a team of three or four people who have a business to run, and it fits into an hour or so a week. It also assumes you will keep at it, because a local market takes time to show you anything.

How the book is organized

The book has three parts.

Part I, How the map works. These three chapters. What the map does to a local market, how Google decides who to show, and how to read your own profile field by field. Nothing here asks you to change anything yet.

Part II, Manage your long tail. The method, in six chapters. The head term is crowded shows why the biggest search is the worst place to start. Collecting your long tail shows how to find the smaller searches of a trade. Choosing your seeds picks five. Plant, watch and deepen and drop run the monthly cycle.

Part III, What supports the method. Reviews and photos, competitors and their ads, seasons and click prices, and a schedule for one hour a week.