Thread by @adamdoppelt

1/ Today I’m nervously hitting the publish button on a big project. For the past month I’ve been obsessively analyzing over 150,000 small business websites to find out what makes them tick. That’s roughly 1% of all small businesses in the US.
freshchalk.com/blog/150k-smal…

2/ I call it the 150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019. A lot of folks helped out with this gigantic project. Special thanks to @danaditomaso, @darrenshaw_, @davidmihm, @JoyanneHawkins, @lauratroyani, @randfish and @RobOusbey for putting up with my questions.

3/ To complement the crawl I ran hundreds of Google searches to see how these websites stack up in the rankings. I fetched #PageSpeed scores to see which sites were speedy and which were slow. Ultimately I collected over 300 data points for each website.

4/ This project leveraged every bit of technical skill I’ve picked up throughout my career. What began as a loose set of scripts and a bloated sqlite file quickly evolved into a full blown app with a beefy db and a significant disk cache for the crawl.

5/ I’m now in a position to answer virtually every hairy question you have about small business websites, search rankings, hosting, speed, and Wordpress.

6/ My report was so gargantuan I had to break it up into six chapters. I published the first chapter today. It focuses on #SMB #SEO, including #GoogleMyBiz and #Yelp.

7/ Useful fact from the report - small business websites that mention the #BBB outrank those without a mention by a median 18%.

8/ Novelty stat from the report - small business websites that mention faith outrank those that don’t mention faith by a median 12%.

9/ Oh, and I can tell you that Yelp ranks in the top five results for 92% of Google web queries for small business categories. They suck in Indianapolis, though.

10/ Anyway, you should read the first chapter. I’m hard at work writing the second chapter, which will analyze hosting, speed, and the lumbering digital marketing agencies that rule the small business world.

11/ Which gives you the best SEO out of the box - #Squarespace, #Wix or #Wordpress? There is an answer to this question and I sleuthed it out.

12/ Chapter three will dig deep into the wild world of #Wordpress. For example, I discovered one amazing Wordpress plugin that correlates with a 19% boost in Google rankings... Stay tuned!

13/ By request - I had no idea Indy would be on top of this chart. My guess would've been Houston. Bottom of the chart is no surprise.