How the scores are made

The markets

A market is a county whose largest city has 50,000 to 300,000 people, from the Census Bureau's 2024 population estimates. That leaves out big cities, where competition is fierce, and avoids counting many suburbs that share one county's numbers.

Demand

Monthly Google searches for each business, across the 5 or 6 ways people phrase it, with and without the town name, measured for the whole county. Phrasings Google reports with identical numbers count once.

Customer value

The average cost per click local companies pay Google for those searches, weighted by search volume and capped at $75 per phrase so one outlier cannot skew it.

Competition

From live Google searches in the town: how many established businesses show on Google Maps, the median review count of the top three, how much of the top results local companies hold (directories like Yelp count as weak), and whether a site with the service and town in its name already ranks.

The score

Demand times customer value, divided by competition, scaled 0 to 100. Points come off when paid "Google Guaranteed" ads crowd the page (15), when demand is under 150 searches a month (25), or when fewer than three local companies work in the trade (10). Under 50 searches a month, a pairing is not scored. 50 or higher is roughly the top 1.5% of all pairings.

What it cannot tell you

Licensing, startup cost, your skills, or whether you will win customers. It shows where demand is strong and competition is beatable, so you know where to look first.