Original research
The Ocala Small Business Web Report
We ran our own audit across 27 real Marion County business websites. They are in better shape than agencies tend to claim — and the gaps that remain are specific, consistent, and mostly cheap to close.
- Marion County business websites audited
- 27Marion County business websites audited
- Median score against 23 checks
- 84%Median score against 23 checks
- Middle half of the sample
- 79–90%Middle half of the sample
- scripts delay the page from rendering
- 78%scripts delay the page from rendering
How this was done
The method, first
Findings are only worth reading if the method is. In July 2026 we took 28 business websites serving Ocala and Marion County across 6 trades — roofing, heating and air conditioning, plumbing and multi-trade home services, pressure washing, legal, garage doors — found the way any customer would find them, through ordinary public search.
Each homepage was requested once, with an identifying user agent, honoring robots.txt, with a pause between requests. Every page was then run through the same twenty-three checks behind the free audit on this site, so these figures and the ones the public tool reports are produced by identical code. One site could not be reached and was excluded, leaving 27.
No business is named, ranked or identified anywhere in this report, and the per-site results were never kept. Publishing a league table of local businesses who did not ask to be audited would be a poor way to behave in a market this size. The aggregate is the interesting part in any case.
27 sites is a small sample and it is stated plainly rather than dressed up: treat the figures below as a strong indication, not a census. The trades are weighted toward home services because that is where Marion County’s search volume is.
What we found
Every fault, and how many sites had it
Ordered by how common it is. The denominator differs on a few rows because some checks only apply to pages that have the thing being inspected.
| Fault | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Scripts delay the page from rendering | 21 of 27 | 78% |
| Images with no alt text | 14 of 27 | 52% |
| No opening hours on the page | 11 of 27 | 41% |
| No social preview image | 11 of 27 | 41% |
| Oversized HTML document | 10 of 27 | 37% |
| No business information a search engine can read | 7 of 27 | 26% |
| No address or ZIP code on the page | 7 of 27 | 26% |
| Page title too long for a search result | 6 of 27 | 22% |
| Meta description missing or too long | 5 of 27 | 19% |
| Not exactly one main heading | 5 of 27 | 19% |
| No local 352 phone number shown | 3 of 27 | 11% |
| Phone number is not tappable | 2 of 27 | 7% |
| Slow server response | 2 of 27 | 7% |
| No XML sitemap | 2 of 27 | 7% |
| Page does not name its service area | 1 of 27 | 4% |
| Very little text on the page | 1 of 27 | 4% |
| No canonical URL declared | 1 of 27 | 4% |
What every single site got right
Worth publishing. A report that lists only failures is an advertisement rather than a finding.
- Available to search engines — all 27 sites
- Served securely over HTTPS — all 27 sites
- Built to work on a phone — all 27 sites
What it means
Three things worth taking from this
The fundamentals are in good shape. A median of 84% is higher than the way agencies usually talk about local websites, and it is worth saying plainly: every site in this sample was reachable, secure and built for a phone, and most get the basic metadata right. Anyone selling you a rescue on the premise that Ocala businesses have terrible websites is not describing what is actually there.
The gaps are in the local layer, not the basics. Hours, address, a 352 number, business information a search engine can read — these are missed far more often than anything technical, and they are the fields that decide whether you appear for a search happening a mile away. They are also the cheapest things on this list to fix.
Most are losing speed to the same cause. 78% of these sites (21 of 27) delay their own rendering with scripts. On a phone on cell data that is the gap between a visitor who calls and one who leaves before the page appears — and it is a configuration problem far more often than a rebuild.
The advantage is in the specifics, not in doing everything better. With most of the market clearing the fundamentals, the separation comes from a handful of things a majority still miss: publishing hours, putting an address on the page, showing a local number, and not delaying the render. That is a much shorter list than a rebuild, and it is one we could not have written honestly before running this.
Limits
What this report cannot tell you
- It looks at one page per site — the homepage. Service and location pages were not examined, and on most local sites those are thinner still.
- Google Business Profile strength, review counts and actual rankings are invisible from a webpage, and for local search they matter more than everything measured here.
- Core Web Vitals need field data from real visitors. Response times here are single measurements from one location, not what customers experience.
- 27 sites across 6 trades is a strong indication and not a census. A larger sample could move any of these numbers.
- Nothing here says whether a business is any good at its actual trade, which is what its customers care about.
Anyone is welcome to repeat this. The method is above, the checks are the ones running on the public audit tool, and if you run it and get something different we would genuinely like to hear about it.