Houston Business Facts

Houston Small Business Statistics in Detail

-Let’s dive a little deeper into this infographic to put things into perspective. Out of those 119,000 small businesses only 19,000 will be still standing come the five-year mark. After another five years only around 8,500 will still be breathing. Now let’s try to figure out why…

Let’s start this off from the most obvious reasons down to the least.

Now, this is obviously going to be difficult to quantify because of missing variables like brick and mortar locations, traditional advertising (which is very rarely the answer), etc but ill try my best to put this in perspective.

Head over to ‘Point 7” – These stats state that roughly 46% (55,000 businesses) DO NOT have a website.

On “Point 6” you can see that a staggering 92% off local customers research online before purchasing a product or service. That is a ridiculous amount of traffic you are missing out on. If you don’t have a website you seriously need to think about what you can do to get one… and QUICK!

Now out of the 64,000 of you that do have a website, over 20,000 of you don’t have mobile-friendly sites.

You can see on “Point 6” that 87% of people prefer searching on the phone. With googles search algorithm constantly updating, it is becoming harder and harder to find non-mobile friendly sites in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

So chances are you won’t be anywhere near the first page of google and you’ll be missing out on 75% off the clicks. Again, this is HUGE!

So now we’re down to 45,000 (36%) of you doing the right thing so far. Hmmmm, these scary statistics are starting to become easier to digest…

Let’s try to put this in an analogy – you have 100,000 people in your city, and there are 40 Businesses in your industry.

-21.6 of the 40 businesses have a website.

-Over half of the 21.6 track their leads equating to right at 12 businesses.

-Only 6.9 have a solid chance to rank on the first page because of having mobile-first websites.

-A lot of the SERP’s show high authoritative sites (Yelp, Home Advisor, Manta, etc) in that first page also. So honestly it’s more like 3-4 local businesses on the first page considering they’ve done any type of SEO at all. Those 3-4 businesses receive 75% of the clicks (or business). Now we’re sitting at our 3-4 businesses still alive out of our 40 (roughly 10%).

-If you look up a couple of bullets you see that only about 7 have mobile-first websites, pair that with the 55% that track data and you’re sitting around your answer: 3-4 businesses.

-Assuming you do all this right in theory you give yourself the best opportunity for success by doing a couple simple things. The rest is up to you to provide an exceptional product or service to keep them as customers (Bonus for reading this far: It’s 7x easier and cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire one).

I hope this shows people the significance of having a comprehensive digital strategy in 2018 and beyond. Digital marketing is growing by 13% year-over-year and if you don’t keep up it’s going to be hard to catch up.

This almost entirely tells you WHY companies are failing. People are throwing money away by not tracking these very simple metrics. It’s as simple as asking customers how they found you and keeping a log of where your leads are coming from so you can better gauge where to spend your energy and money.

I can promise you that IF you have a good website with at least on-site SEO, a digital strategy, you track your business metrics, and you have a great product or service, you WILL be in the 5% that come out alive. People tend to over complicate things in business. Everybody thinks that there is a “get rich quick way” or a shortcut to success but the sad truth is that anything of value in life takes time to cultivate, effort to maintain, and a little bit of common sense.

Remember why you started your business in the first place. After dissecting the numbers you can see why businesses are failing all over the place. It’s a shame that so many small business owners have a passion for what they do and love the people they work with but will ultimately fail because of things that can be prevented.