We Analyzed 117 Local Service Businesses. The Average Scores 39/100 Online.

Over the spring of 2026, our platform scanned 4,430 local service business websites for basic quality problems and ran a complete seven-category online-presence audit on 117 of them. The average business scored 39 out of 100. Not 39 on one weak category — 39 overall. This post is the full breakdown: what we measured, how we measured it, where local businesses lose the most ground, and what the small group at the top of the distribution does differently from everyone else.

The methodology

The data comes from Anchord's Local Visibility audit, run on our own platform in June 2026. Each audit examines a business across seven categories — website quality and technical health, local search visibility, Google Business Profile completeness, reputation, directory listings consistency, contact responsiveness, and content — and produces a score from 0 to 100, where 100 means a customer can find you, judge you, and reach you without friction at every step.

Two numbers matter here, and they are different sizes. The wide scan covered 4,430 businesses and looked only at website quality — things like whether the site loads quickly and works on a phone. The full seven-category audit covered 117 businesses. Every statistic in this post about category scores comes from those 117 full audits.

The 117 businesses span seven trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, cleaning, and locksmith. The mix is weighted toward the Midwest, where we do most of our work, with national businesses included as well. We want to be straight about what this sample is and is not. It is 117 businesses, not 117,000 — large enough to show clear patterns, small enough that you should treat the percentages as strong signals rather than precise industry-wide figures. We did not cherry-pick struggling businesses; these are working companies with real customers, pulled from licensing records and public directories the same way a customer would find them.

The headline finding: a 39/100 average

The average overall score across all 117 businesses was 39 out of 100.

To make that concrete: a score of 39 typically means a customer searching for your trade in your town has trouble finding you, and when they do find you, what they see gives them reasons to keep scrolling. The site is slow or broken on a phone. The Google listing is half-filled-out. The most recent review is from two years ago. The phone rings through to voicemail after 5 p.m.

What does that cost? Here is the arithmetic, framed honestly as interpretation rather than a measured result from this dataset. Say you run a plumbing company and your average job is worth $350. Every weak point in the 39-score profile is a place a ready-to-buy customer can leak out: they search and you don't appear, or your site won't load on their phone, or they call after hours and nobody answers. If those gaps cost you even two jobs a week — a conservative guess for a business invisible in search and unreachable after 5 p.m. — that's roughly $36,000 a year walking to a competitor. We can't measure each business's exact loss from the outside. But a 39 means the leaks exist at nearly every step, and they compound: the customer you lose to a slow website never gets far enough to discover your work is excellent.

The other thing a 39 average tells you: your competitors are probably just as weak. That cuts both ways. It means you're not far behind the pack — and it means modest, boring fixes can put you ahead of most of it.

The full breakdown

We set 70 out of 100 as the line for "competent" in each category — below that, the gaps are big enough that customers notice. Here is how often the 117 businesses fell below that line in the major categories:

Read the table bottom-up and a pattern appears. The things Google nags owners about directly — claiming the Business Profile, collecting reviews — are in comparatively decent shape. Roughly three quarters of businesses clear the bar on those. The things nobody nags you about — your website's technical condition, whether you actually rank for your services — are where almost everyone is weak. Our interpretation: owners fix what's visible to them, and a slow website looks fine on the office desktop where it's cached and loading on fast wifi.

Why websites are the weakest link (97%)

Ninety-seven percent of the 117 businesses scored below 70 on website and technical health. That's nearly all of them, and it matched what we saw in the wider 4,430-business website scan. Three problems came up over and over.

• Mobile experience. Mobile responsiveness means a website rearranges itself to stay readable and tappable on a phone screen. Most local service customers are searching from a phone — often standing next to the broken thing — and many of the sites we audited were built desktop-first years ago: tiny text, buttons too small to tap, menus that don't open. The customer doesn't file a complaint about this. They hit the back button and call the next result.
• Speed. Page speed is how long a site takes to become usable after someone taps the link. We found sites hauling oversized photos and a decade of accumulated plugins, taking many seconds to load on a phone connection. Every second is another chance for the customer to give up before they ever see your name.
• No after-hours capture. Pipes burst and furnaces die at night. Most of the sites we audited offered exactly one way to reach the business — a phone number that goes to voicemail at 5 p.m. No contact form that confirms receipt, no text option, no chat, no booking. The site exists, but after hours it's a brochure for a closed store.

This is why we report website health as the weakest link rather than just one weak category: it sits at the end of every other funnel. Win the search ranking, earn the reviews, perfect the Google listing — and a site that won't load on a phone still drops the customer at the last step.

The local search gap (69%)

Local SEO — search engine optimization — is the work of making your business show up when nearby customers search for what you sell. Sixty-nine percent of the businesses we audited scored below 70 here.

The gap has a specific shape. Customers don't search for business names; they search for problems and services: "water heater replacement near me," "emergency electrician," "roof leak repair." The weak scorers in our sample generally rank for one thing — their own company name — which only helps with people who already know they exist. Their websites had no individual pages describing each service in each city they serve, so search engines had nothing to match those problem-shaped searches against.

This connects to the directory finding: 48% of businesses scored below 70 on listings consistency, meaning their name, address, or phone number differs across the directories that list them. In our reading of the data, those two weaknesses feed each other — search engines cross-check those listings, and conflicting information erodes their confidence in showing you at all. A business can be the best plumber in the county and be functionally invisible at the exact moment someone in their service area needs a plumber. That's the 69%.

What the top 10% do differently

The most useful part of the dataset isn't the failures — it's the dozen or so businesses at the top of the distribution. None of them were doing anything exotic. Four patterns showed up consistently among the high scorers:

• A claimed, completely filled-out Google Business Profile. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears in Google Maps and in the panel beside search results. The top scorers had every field done: hours, services, service area, photos, posts. Not impressive — just finished.
• Steady review velocity. Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews arrive, as opposed to the lifetime total. High scorers had recent reviews — a sign they ask every customer, every job, rather than running one collection push years ago and coasting.
• Fast contact paths. Their websites offered more than one way in — call, text, form, booking — and those paths worked on a phone, above the fold, after hours.
• Answered phones. The simplest one. When we tested contact responsiveness, the top businesses picked up or responded quickly. The customer who calls a local service business usually buys from whoever answers first.

Notice what's not on that list: big ad budgets, social media followings, fancy branding. The top 10% mostly just removed friction. That's our honest takeaway from the whole exercise — the bar in local services is low, and clearing it is a matter of finishing unglamorous work, not outspending anyone.

Check your own score

Every number above describes other people's businesses. The only score that matters to you is yours, and it takes about a minute to find out. Run the same seven-category audit we used in this study — free — at anchord.co/audit/. You'll get your 0–100 score and the specific gaps, category by category, with no obligation attached.

And if "answered phones" is the item nagging at you: that's the exact problem our AI receptionist exists to fix, and you can judge it the honest way — by talking to it. Call our live AI demo line and have the conversation your after-hours customers would have. The average business is at 39. Finding out where you stand is the easy part.