When Every Houston Business Has Stars, Something Breaks the Tie
94.3% of the Houston businesses I sampled hold at least one Google review, the strongest showing of the 24 cities I graded. So I put two rated companies side by side to find what actually split them.
I once opened a meeting in Houston by telling a man his biggest problem was Google reviews.
He said nothing at all. He just turned the phone around and let me scroll, and I kept scrolling for a while, past hundreds of five star write-ups going back the better part of a decade.
I charged him for the hour anyway.
That opener’s retired now, and my own audit is what retired it. When did you last worry about your star rating? If you’re in this city, I’d guess it isn’t what’s keeping you up.
94.3% of Houston’s businesses turn up in my audit with a Google review attached, where 88% do across the country. I started at the top of the 24 cities and read down, and the name below Houston was Denver, with nothing printed above either of them. Keep going all the way to the bottom and you reach Bismarck, which is a very different sort of place to run a business.
So the stars are no longer what separates you from the competitor three miles down the road. Nearly everybody around you is carrying them.
Every owner here can quote the rating off the top of his head. The count sitting underneath it is the number nobody can.
Which leaves a much more awkward question behind. If the reviews aren’t the difference between you and the next name on the list, what is?
Two companies I still think about
Two foundation repair outfits hired me last year, about four months apart.
I’ve never had a pair of clients look so alike on paper. Family run, each of them fifteen years into the business, each sitting on more four and five star write-ups than either owner had ever sat down and read.
One was booked into the following season and wanted to talk about a second crew.
The other watched February go quiet, then March, and arrived at his own diagnosis before he ever called me: the website had stopped working.
He was right, though not about which bit of it. Working that out took me most of an evening with two browser windows open.
What the busy one had
I tapped through from his Google listing on my phone, the way a customer does, and I could message him from the first screen without scrolling.
Name, number, a box for what your house is doing. Send. Ten seconds, at nine at night, one thumb.
The quiet one’s homepage was a photo of a truck and a phone number in the header.
His form existed. It lived on a Contact page, behind a menu, two taps and one decision away from where I was standing. Where does yours live, and when did you last try to reach it with a thumb?
Nobody quotes for that part. I read three quotes written for an owner in this city last year, and not one of them mentioned the phone at all.
Do you know what a woman with a new crack in her living room wall does at nine at night? She isn’t holding your number in her head until morning.
She returns to the map and tries whoever sits below you in the list. Nobody reports that to you. There’s no missed call waiting in the morning to tip you off.
29.8% of Houston homepages carry a contact form, a hair over the national 28%.
That figure bothers me more here than it would anywhere else I audit. Houston owners spend years talking strangers into trusting them, and then leave the front page of the website with no way of answering the person they convinced.
You did the impossible bit already. Why hand the easy bit back to her to solve?
The difference I saw before clicking
Both companies came back in the results with the same blue link and the same sentence underneath. The busy one had extra lines beneath his: hours, and a price range.
Labels in the code called schema markup are what put them there. Take those labels out and Google has nothing left to print except your title and your sentence, because nothing on the page ever told it which line was a price and which was an opening time. Google keeps a full list of what those labels can earn you, and none of it costs money.
71.4% of Houston sites use them, which is more than I expected, and it still wasn’t the thing filling the busy man’s calendar.
Two results, same trade, same town, and one of them was already answering a customer’s question before anybody had clicked on anything.
Why this city collects stars in the first place
I don’t think Houston got to the top of that column by trying harder than Denver did.
Think about who’s actually here. People arrive from somewhere else, live half an hour from where they work, and hire strangers recommended by nobody they’ve ever met.
Who vouches for you here? There’s no shopkeeper who’s known your family since your father was a boy, quietly doing that job in the background.
So the stars have to carry that weight instead, and asking a customer for one gets less mortifying once every business around you is asking too. If it still makes you squirm, I’ve written up how I ask customers for reviews.
Lovely, right up to the moment it stops setting you apart. A habit everybody shares isn’t an advantage. It’s the cost of being looked at.
Plenty of trades never picked the habit up at all. Accountants hold a fraction of the reviews everyone else does, and their stars look fine while the count underneath them doesn’t.
The gap underneath all of it
Not every business here has anywhere to send that customer.
Across the country 83% of the businesses I sample keep a website. Houston comes to rest just underneath that, on 82.6%.
So the best city I audit at getting rated is a little under average at owning a page to send the reader of that rating to. I find that harder to stomach here than anywhere, because these owners already did the hard half of the job.
What happens when a stranger finishes reading your reviews and wants your prices?
One citywide average squashes forty odd trades into a single line, and yours will read differently, which is why I leave the working out in the open. Choose Houston in the report’s explorer, touch nothing else, and each check appears with the number of sites it was counted from. The whole thing was built from 7,099 sampled Houston businesses.
What actually fixed the quiet one
It wasn’t a rebuild, and I wish it had been, because I’d have made more money.
We moved his form onto the homepage where a thumb could reach it, cut it from seven boxes to three, and made the phone number a link instead of a picture of some digits.
One afternoon, start to finish. A fair share of the Houston websites I get asked to fix need that afternoon and nothing else, though the owner has usually been quoted for a full rebuild by the time he reaches me.
His February this year was not quiet. I’d love to tell you I did something clever.
One thing to do tonight
Pull up your own listing the way a customer would find it, then tap the website link and start a stopwatch in your head.
From that first screen, without scrolling and without opening a menu, try to send yourself a message using one thumb.
Count the taps it takes. If the answer is more than one, you’ve just found the thing standing between you and the outfit down the road, and I’ll happily run my remaining checks over the page for free.
