The Number Every Houston Owner Knows, and the One Nobody Has

Have you got a five star review printed out and stuck up somewhere in your building?

Loads of my Houston clients do. Taped beside the register, pinned over a desk, and one man had his framed above the coffee machine with the customer’s name highlighted in yellow marker.

I’m no better. There’s an email from a client in 2019 sitting in my desk drawer that I have absolutely no intention of throwing away.

Nobody prints out a traffic report. When did you last look at one?

The number every owner here can quote

Ask a Houston owner how many reviews came in last month and you’ll get an answer inside a second, usually to the exact review.

He’s earned that. 94.3% of Houston’s businesses came through my audit with a Google review attached, where the country manages 88%.

That isn’t a rounding difference either, and nothing else I check about this city sits so far above the national number.

The average listing here carries 205 reviews at 4.6 stars. The habit behind that, which happens to be the one check where Houston finishes first of all 24 cities I graded, costs an owner nothing except ten awkward seconds at a counter.

Whole trades never get near that. The average accountant holds a small fraction of what the average Houston listing does, and their stars look perfectly healthy while the count stays thin.

I’ve watched people do it. A guy hands over a receipt, hesitates, then asks anyway, and half the time he apologizes while he’s asking. Most of asking well turns out to be a question of when, not what you say.

So you know your number. What about the other one?

The number nobody in the room has

Ask that same owner how many people read one of his reviews, tapped through to his website, and left again without calling him.

The room goes quiet. Not because it’s a rude question, but because there’s no way for him to answer it.

57.3% of the Houston sites I opened had analytics on them, which trails the 58% I get nationally by a hair.

Analytics arrives at my screen as a few borrowed lines of code sitting near the top of a page, and my audit either spots them in the first second or never spots them at all. On plenty of Houston homepages, there was nothing there to spot.

Without those lines, nobody counted the visit. Your customer turned up, looked around, made a decision about you, and left no mark anywhere that you could go and read later.

The client who taught me this

A Houston med spa owner called me in January because bookings had slipped and she wanted the website looked at.

She knew her review count without checking. She knew what she had averaged the previous month, the month before that, and what her nearest competitor was sitting on.

Then I asked how many people had visited her homepage in December, and she said she assumed her old designer had that somewhere.

He did not. Nobody did.

So we spent the call guessing together, which is a terrible use of anybody’s afternoon and the honest state of most of the businesses I meet here. Could you answer it about December? Not the reviews, the visits.

She had built the hardest asset a small business can own, one conversation at a time, and she had no idea whether the page underneath it was holding the door open or closed.

Why one number gets loved and the other gets ignored

A review is a real person saying something kind about you in public, with their name attached. Of course you print it out.

A visit is a stranger you will never meet deciding, in about four seconds, that you weren’t quite it.

Nobody frames that. I wouldn’t either, would you?

But your reviews are not what brings the work in. They’re what gets you looked at, which is a different job and an earlier one.

And when nearly every business on the map is wearing stars, something further down the screen has to break the tie.

The page waiting at the end of that link is what turns being looked at into a booking, and it’s the piece almost nobody in this city is keeping any score on.

I rebuilt one of those pages for a cleaning company sitting near the top of its trade on stars, and the rating had been carrying the business by itself for years.

The step before all of it

There’s something underneath both numbers, and it’s the part I find hardest to raise politely.

82.6% of the businesses I sampled in Houston have a website, against 83% nationally.

So the strongest city in my entire file at getting rated is a little below average at owning anywhere to send the person who read the rating.

Sit with what that costs an owner. Years of asking at counters, hundreds of reviews earned one uncomfortable conversation at a time, and then no link under the name for any of it to lead to.

7,099 Houston businesses went into that count, which is a big enough sample that the shortfall isn’t a few strange listings I happened to trip over.

What I’d have you count instead

You can’t count the people who left. Not as individuals, not by name, and anyone promising you otherwise is selling something.

You can count the total, though, and you can watch the total move when you change something. The movement is the useful part.

Google hands the counter over free of charge, so put it on, leave it alone for a month, then change one thing on your homepage and see what happens to the line.

One change at a time is the whole discipline, and it’s the bit owners skip because it feels slow. Change five things and you’ve learned nothing about any of them.

Most of the Houston websites I’m asked to rebuild arrive with no history behind them whatsoever, which means the first month is me guessing alongside the owner instead of knowing.

A month of history is worth more to me than everything the owner remembers about last year, and I say that with real affection for my clients.

Two questions I’d ask before you spend another dollar

How many people landed on your homepage last month?

And how many of them did anything at all once they got there?

If both answers are a shrug, you’re running the best reviewed business on your street with a blindfold on. That’s not a character flaw. It’s an afternoon of setup that nobody ever put in front of you.

Turn the printout over

Go and take that framed review down off the wall for a minute.

Turn it over in your hands. Nothing on the back of it.

That blank side is your complete record of every person who read the front, tapped through to your website, and quietly went somewhere else instead.

Put it back up, because you earned it and this city earned that top spot fairly.

Then go and find out what happened to the ones it convinced. Send me the address if you’d rather I looked first.