Does your website decide where you rank? We sell local SEO, so we tested whether the thing we sell actually predicts anything — and published the result that went against us.
We scored ten Vista landscaping businesses against our own Local SEO Standard before looking at where any of them ranked. We wrote down a predicted order and named, in advance, the results that would prove our framework wrong.
Then we ran the search from Vista and compared.
All ten are anonymized here. They are real North County businesses and the point of this study is the pattern, not the names.
A blind study is only blind if you set the rules first.
| Step | What we did |
|---|---|
| 1 | Pulled the ten businesses Google returned for a single query, run from Vista. |
| 2 | Scored every website against our published standard, with the ranking data withheld. |
| 3 | Published the scores and a predicted rank order before seeing any results. |
| 4 | Named three specific outcomes that would prove the framework wrong. |
| 5 | Compared against real map pack and organic positions. |
Scoring covered the parts of a website anyone can verify from the outside: title tags, headings, meta descriptions, keyword density, city mentions, forms, phone links and the technical basics. 54 points in total. We did not score Google Business Profile completeness or review history, because you cannot check those honestly from outside a business, and guessing would have made the study worthless.
Finding one
+0.14
correlation between website score and map pack position
That is no relationship at all. All three of the outcomes we said would disprove us happened.
| What we predicted would disprove us | What happened |
|---|---|
| A business with no website of its own ranks in the top three | One ranked second. Its domain redirects to a national parent company. |
| A business with no website at all outranks our highest scorer | One ranked fifth, with no website whatsoever. |
| Our highest-scoring site ranks outside the top five | It ranked sixth. |
Review count did not explain the order either. The business in first place had the second-fewest reviews in the group. The business with the most reviews ranked seventh.
The likeliest explanation is distance. The businesses ranked first and second have addresses about fifty feet apart, on the same street, close to where the search was run. Proximity is the one ranking factor a website cannot change.
Finding two
Under the map pack are the ordinary blue links. That is where the score mattered, and it mattered sharply.
| Website score | Appeared in organic results |
|---|---|
| 47 / 54 | Yes — and it is not even based in Vista |
| 45 / 54 | Yes |
| 32 / 54 | No |
| 31 / 54 | No |
| 30 / 54 and below | None of them, anywhere on the page |
Two of the ten appeared organically. They were the two highest scorers, with a thirteen-point gap to third place, which was invisible.
And one detail explains most of it. Every single non-directory result on that page had the city in its title tag. Four out of four. Of the ten local businesses we scored, exactly one did — and it was the only one of the ten that ranked.
The page that scored highest belongs to a company that is not in Vista at all. It outranks eight businesses that are, using one dedicated Vista page written for Vista.
Finding three
Yelp, Thumbtack, LawnStarter and MapQuest occupied four of the eight organic slots.
For this kind of business, a complete and accurate Yelp listing wins more space on the results page than the company's own homepage does. That is not an argument against having a good website. It is an argument for treating your listings as part of the same job.
A business two doors closer will beat you in the map pack no matter how good your site is. If that is your situation, the work that moves the needle is your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your listings — not a redesign.
Everything below the map runs on what your website says. In this study, everything scoring under 33 was invisible. A page that names your service and your city, in the title, the headline and the description, was the difference between appearing and not appearing.
We published the result that went against us because a score nobody has tested is just an opinion with a decimal point.
We would rather publish a study with its limits attached than a claim you cannot check. Every finding above can be verified by running the same search yourself.
Tell us what's on your plate. We'll come back with what we'd do first and what it would cost, usually same day.
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