SEO Market Map · Methodology
How we read the forecast.
Every score on the SEO Market Map comes from data we pulled and dated, with one formula for every city and trade. Here is what we measured, where it came from and what it cannot tell you.
What we measured
- Cities and trades. 75 cities in 14 states so far (36 more states join as their data completes) and 12 trades, one search each, the way a customer types it (“plumber in Naples, FL”). In each state we took the five most populous incorporated cities in the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates that Google Ads can target as a city. Hawaii has no incorporated cities, so its five come from the 2020 Census count of its places. Florida has 10: every Florida city we have a city page for.
- Who shows up on the map. For every city and trade, the first 20 businesses Google returns through its Places API (the data behind Google Maps), with their star rating, review count and website, read 2026-10-29. We counted how many reviews the top three hold, how many of the 20 have 100 or more and the average rating of the top ten. Permanently closed businesses are left out.
- What the top sites do. For the top three of those businesses that have their own website, we read the home page, robots.txt and sitemap once, politely, and recorded the website builder, structured data, local business markup, how recently the sitemap changed and how many pages look like location pages. Read 2026-10-29.
- How many businesses compete. U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, and Vintage 2025 county housing unit estimates, read 2026-10-29. Counts are county-wide, so cities in the same county share one (14 of 75 cities do). Pool companies and med spas have no clean industry code. Plumbing and HVAC share one.
- The map. State lines from the Census Bureau’s 2023 cartographic boundary file. City pins from the Census Gazetteer. Two pins, San Francisco and Portland, Maine, sit downtown instead, because those cities’ Census points fall in the water.
How the score is built
Each signal is scaled from 0 to 1 across all 75 cities and 12 trades measured together, then weighted: review strength of the top three 30, established competitors 15, the rating bar 10, what the top websites do 20, businesses per 1,000 homes 10 and market size (city population) 15. Review counts and population are scaled on a logarithm, so one giant city or one business with thousands of reviews does not flatten everyone else. Where a trade has no business count, that weight is left out for that trade only. The result is a Market Competition Index from 0 to 100. A state’s score is the plain average of its cities.
The national map ranks states. Averaging five cities across 12 trades pulls every state toward the middle, so on the weather scale nearly every state would share one or two colors. The national map instead ranks the 14 states against each other and colors them in five equal groups of about three, from the calmest fifth to the stormiest fifth. Choose a trade and it re-ranks for that trade. Every score, the state cards and the city and trade forecasts use the weather scale below.
Clear skies0 to 19
Mostly sunny20 to 34
Clouds building35 to 49
Storms likely50 to 64
Severe65 to 100
The weather names the index band. The advice follows three verdicts: under 35, a well-kept Google Business Profile and steady reviews may be enough; 35 to 65, local SEO is needed to compete; over 65, the market rewards full SEO and usually paid search too.
What it cannot tell you
- Scores are relative to the cities measured together. A low score means calm compared with the other 74, not that no one competes.
- A state score covers its measured cities, not its small towns.
- Google Maps data is read in monthly batches, and a state is published only once every city and trade in it is measured. Each time states join, every score is recalculated across everything measured, so a number can move a little even where nothing local changed.
- This is the map view. We did not count ads, Local Services listings or AI Overviews, which appear only on a Google results page, and Places order can differ a little from the map pack on a given phone.
- Map results change daily and vary with where the searcher stands. We read them once per city and trade, on a set date.
- Website checks read what a site publishes, not how well it converts.
- We report what competitors do in totals and never single out a business.
We plan to refresh every number each quarter and log it here. Dataset built 2026-10-29.
Start with the audit.
About 60 seconds, no email, and you get named findings for your own site, not a score out of a hundred.