Flying Blind: 40% of South Coast Business Websites Have No Analytics At All

In July I published the first roll-up of this project: seventeen audits, 182 businesses. Since then the checker has kept running. This is the September board.

Thirty-one category audits. Three hundred and ninety-six businesses. Fall River, New Bedford, Somerset, Swansea, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Westport, Tiverton, Providence. Same checker, same method, every denominator stated so you can argue with it.

The July report was about speed. This one is about something quieter and worse.

The board#

"Live sites measured" is the denominator in each row, and it moves between rows because the earliest audits did not capture every field. Where a field was missing from a brief, that brief is excluded from that row rather than counted as a pass.

Separately, of the 353 businesses where we could establish whether a website existed at all, 46 had none. 13.0%. Not a bad site. None.

A further 39 businesses run sites that refused our checker outright. Those sites exist. We simply could not read them, so they are excluded from every count above rather than counted against anyone.

Speed, for the record#

Median mobile Largest Contentful Paint, taken as the median of the 30 per-audit medians, is 6.7 seconds. The spread across audits runs from 1.4s at the fastest to 22.4s at the slowest. Median Lighthouse performance score: 61.

To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less.

Two and a half seconds is the bar. The regional median is nearly three times it. That is not one bad website. That is the shape of the whole region.

The trades, cut on their own#

Six of the 31 audits cover contractor-adjacent trades: plumbers, electricians, HVAC in two towns, cleaning services and movers. That subset is 78 businesses, 61 with live measurable sites, 9 with no website at all.

Median mobile LCP across those six audits: 9.5 seconds, against 6.7s region-wide.

Read that honestly. The trades beat the region on contact forms and are slightly better on analytics. They lose on two things, and lose badly.

Nearly nine in ten give a customer no way to book anything without picking up a phone during business hours. And nearly a third have a name, address or phone number on their own website that does not match what Google has on file.

That second one is the most expensive cheap mistake in local search, because it is invisible. Nothing looks broken. Your site loads, your phone number is there, your reviews are good. Google just quietly trusts you a little less than the guy down the road, and you never find out why.

If you run a general contracting business in Bristol, you are in the category with the region's worst address hygiene, its worst load times, and the customer who is standing in a half-demolished kitchen holding a phone with two bars.

The free fix, and you can finish it before lunch#

Fifteen minutes. No money. No developer.

Open your Google Business Profile in one tab and your own website's footer or contact page in another. Compare three things character by character:

1. Business name. "Smith & Sons Construction" and "Smith and Sons Construction LLC" are two different businesses to a machine. Pick one and use it everywhere.
2. Street address. "St" against "Street". A suite number present in one place and missing in the other. Both count as a mismatch.
3. Phone number. Including whether the number on your website is an old cell you stopped answering in 2023.

Make the website match the Google profile exactly. Not approximately. Exactly.

Then check that the phone number on your site is a real tap-to-call link and not plain text, because 29.1% of the sites we measured showed a customer a phone number they could not tap.

That is the entire fix. It costs a coffee's worth of time and it puts you ahead of 30.5% of your direct competition.

The one that costs money, and why it comes second#

Analytics.

Four in ten sites in this region have none. Which means four in ten owners cannot answer "where did my last ten jobs come from?" with anything better than a guess, and a guess made in September about a truck wrap bought in March is not a memory, it is a story.

You do not need a dashboard. You need to be able to say at the end of a quarter whether the money went into the truck wrap, the Facebook boost or the lead-gen subscription, and whether any of them turned into a ringing phone. Google Analytics is free. Installing it properly on a contractor site, with phone taps and form submissions counted as actual events rather than left as raw pageviews, is an hour or two of somebody's work.

The order matters:

1. Fix the NAP. Free, today, fifteen minutes.
2. Install measurement. It makes every decision after it cheaper.
3. Then chase speed. A 9.5-second load is worth fixing, and worth nothing at all if you cannot see whether fixing it changed anything.

What we could not measure#

Stated plainly, because a report that only lists its wins is an advertisement.

• Bristol, RI was not audited. Discovery failed with a permissions error on the day of this run.
• 39 businesses blocked our checker. Their sites are excluded, not failed.
• Booking, analytics and NAP fields are absent from six of the earliest briefs, which is why those denominators are 253 and 214 rather than 268.
• We cannot de-duplicate across audits. Businesses are anonymised, so a firm appearing in two neighbouring-town audits is counted twice. Treat 396 as audit records, not 396 guaranteed-distinct companies.
• Facebook and Instagram presence cannot be verified server-side by our tooling, so no social claim appears anywhere in this report.
• This is a census, not a random sample. It is every result Google returns for those searches. That is a specific and useful thing. It is not a statistical sample of all South Coast business.

Every number here can be re-run by anyone with a browser. Paste any local business URL into pagespeed.web.dev and see for yourself.

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If you want to know which of those six rows your own site fails, I will run the same checker against it and send you the raw output, whether or not you ever hire me. Ten minutes of my time, and the numbers are yours either way.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner. 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com