Why a business needs a website, and what it’s worth in reviews and demand
Every stat below comes from a named third-party source: research firms, Google, the U.S. Census Bureau, and peer-reviewed field studies. Click any node on the map to see the case for that channel, then use the scorecard to see exactly where your gaps are and what closing them is worth.
Opportunity map
Eight channels, radiating from the business at the center. Click a node to open the case for that channel.
Select a channel from the map to see its stats, source citations, and why it matters for that category.
Score your business
Set the business type, rate each channel from 0 to 3 based on what you currently have in place, and see where the biggest opportunity sits.
Where to focus first
Key numbers to know
How the model works
Pick the business type
Local service businesses lean on reviews, local search, and Google Business Profile. Retail and product businesses lean more on the website, e-commerce, and email. The weighting behind each node shifts accordingly.
Score what exists today
For each of the 8 channels, rate what you currently have in place, from 0 (nothing) to 3 (fully built and maintained).
Read the gap
The Digital Presence Score weights each channel score by its importance to that business type. The ranked list on the right shows which gaps cost the most, in order.
See what to fix
Open the highest-ranked node on the map for the sourced stats and the explanation behind them, then decide where to start.
Sources & methodology
Every number in this model traces back to a named, independent publisher. Here is the mix of sources behind the 58 data points and why each type holds up.
Census records and first-party platform reporting
The U.S. Census Bureau supplies the e-commerce adoption figures in this model, drawn from official federal business surveys. Google contributes reporting on how complete Business Profiles perform in search and maps compared to incomplete ones.
A peer-reviewed study of live advertising data
Dai, Kim, and Luca’s Harvard Business School paper analyzed Yelp advertising campaigns rather than surveyed opinions, which is why its findings on ad return and review growth carry more weight than a typical marketing blog estimate.
Disclosed sample sizes, repeatable methodology
BrightLocal, Nielsen, PYMNTS Intelligence, Sprout Social, Signs.com, Visual Objects, and Verizon Business with Morning Consult each publish their sample size and survey design alongside their findings, from BrightLocal’s annual review of thousands of consumers to PYMNTS’ direct survey of 540 businesses.
Practitioner data from companies close to the work
Network Solutions, RainPOS, Marketful, Web Tonic, RedLocalSEO, PPC Chief, Moz, HI Agency, and SearchEngineWatch work directly in hosting, point of sale, or local search, and publish the usage patterns they see across their own customer base.
A handful of these figures reached us through a second publisher rather than the original researcher. In the full dataset below, those are marked “via” and still link to where we found them, with the original source named first. Every stat also carries the year it was published, so you can judge how current it is. Every source name in the table below is a live link, so you can check any number against where it came from.
Full sourced dataset
All 58 data points behind this model, with the original source for each.
| Channel | Value | Finding | Source |
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