Picking the trade and the town

This is the highest-leverage hour in the course and it costs nothing. A site aimed at the wrong trade in the wrong town cannot be rescued by effort later; a mediocre site aimed well still produces calls. A call is worth a fraction of a job, so the ceiling on what anyone can pay you is set by their ticket — you will ask the buyer for that figure directly later. Sort your candidates against five filters.

• Urgency. Searched at the moment of need, or researched over three weeks? Urgent searches become phone calls.
• Ticket. Is one completed job worth real money to the business doing it? If not, there is nothing for you at the end of the chain.
• Physical. Someone has to show up. If the work travels, you compete with the whole internet instead of one town.
• Repeatable. Searched more than a handful of times a week in a town this size? A trade needed once a decade will not fill a month.
• A buyer exists. Businesses in that town doing this work, small enough to want the phone to ring more.

It feels clever to pick a service nobody in the town appears to offer. But you are not the one doing the work. If there is no established business in the trade, there is nobody to rent the calls to, and you have built a very good sign pointing at an empty lot.

In a large metro the top of local results is held by businesses with a decade of reviews and staff whose whole job is this. You will not displace them with a new domain and a weekend. In a village of eight hundred, the searches you need are not happening. You want the band in between, and you find it by looking rather than by rule.

• Does the town have a name people use when they search? Some suburbs do not — everyone types the bigger city, and you are back in the metro fight.
• In the map results for your phrase, are the profiles carrying three reviews or four hundred? That number is your difficulty score.
• Do several businesses in that trade have no website, or one untouched in years? That is both the ranking bar and your likely buyer.
• Can you get there? Pages about a town you have driven through beat pages about one you have only seen on a map.

Scoutway compares how many businesses in an industry exist in your county against the national rate per resident, using two US Census datasets — County Business Patterns for firms with paid employees and Nonemployer Statistics for sole proprietors — and returns one verdict: underserved, average or saturated. Sole proprietors are the larger half in most of these trades, and a one-truck operator is precisely the kind of business that buys leads.

• It measures supply. It counts businesses per resident. It has never observed one person wanting the service, and neither has anything else in this product.
• The categories are coarser than your trade. One Census code can cover several unrelated jobs, so the count is of a category your trade sits inside.
• It is a county. Your town is a fraction of it, and the count cannot be broken below the county line.
• Very small counties are excluded on purpose: a ratio built on two businesses is noise.
• Where the sole-proprietor half cannot be measured, the product shows no verdict rather than an employer-only one.

Saturated means a lot of that category per resident: a longer list of possible buyers, and probably more established sites to outrank. Underserved means fewer on the books — a thinner buyer list, and not a promise that the results will be empty, because a county count says nothing about who built a website in the one town you picked. Neither verdict is a green light or a red one.

Do this for three candidate pairs, not one.