The shortlist is three names long
Most people compare three or fewer businesses before they decide. If you are not one of the three, you are not in the running.
Here is the number that should change how you think about marketing: 72% of people look at three or fewer businesses before they pick one. Not ten. Not a page of results. Three, and often fewer.
That comes from BrightLocal’s research on how local buying decisions get made, and it lines up with what every owner already knows from the other side of the counter. When your water heater goes, you do not run a procurement process. You search, you look at the first few names that seem real, and you call one.
What “in the running” actually means
Being in the running is not the same as having a website. It means that when someone in your area searches for what you do, your name shows up in the first handful of places they look, and what they see there makes them comfortable enough to call.
In practice that is three things:
- Your Google Business Profile is complete, correct, and has activity from this month, not last year.
- Your recent reviews say what you want them to say, and someone replied to them.
- Your website answers the two questions people actually have: do you do this exact job in my town, and roughly what does it cost.
Miss one and you slide from the shortlist to the long list, and the long list does not get called.
Where the search starts
BrightLocal’s channel research found that 61% of people started their most recent local search on Google Search or Google Maps. A fast-growing share now start with an AI assistant, which gets its own story on this site. Facebook and word of mouth are still in the mix, but they usually end in the same place: a search of your name to see if you are legit.
So the shortlist is built in about thirty seconds, from whatever is visible in a map result, a review snippet, and the first screen of your site. That is the whole game.
What to do this week
- Search your own trade and town on your phone. Open the top three. Be honest about whether you would call yourself.
- Post one photo of a finished job to your Google Business Profile. Recency is a ranking signal and a trust signal.
- Reply to your last five reviews in your own words. Slow or canned replies are now read as a warning sign.
- Make sure the phone number on your site, your Google profile, and Facebook match exactly.
None of that takes money. It takes the twenty minutes you keep meaning to spend, which is its own problem, and the subject of another story here.