"We Analyzed 55 Home Service Businesses in the Inland Northwest. Here's What We Found."
We spent the last week researching 55 home service businesses across Spokane, Spokane Valley, Post Falls, and Coeur d'Alene. Six verticals: HVAC, plumbing, general contracting, landscaping, electrical, and cleaning. Public data only. Google reviews, website presence, Google Ads, business profiles.
The goal was to understand what the digital baseline looks like in this market before we started running full competitive intelligence reports here.
Here's what we found.
The headline numbers
55 businesses total. Average Google rating across the market: 4.7 stars. Average review count: 624.
That 624 number is misleading, and we'll explain why in a minute.
75% of businesses have a website. That means 1 in 4 don't. Only 20% are running Google Ads. And just 14 of the 55 businesses, or 25%, had what we'd call a strong digital presence. Another 16 had some gaps but were generally active. The remaining 25 had significant holes, or we couldn't find enough public data to score them at all.
The short version: this is not a market where everyone has figured out digital presence. There are real, measurable gaps across most verticals.
HVAC owns the digital game here
Six of the 14 businesses we classified as having strong digital presence are HVAC companies. That's 43% of the top tier from a vertical that makes up 18% of the sample.
What does that look like in practice? Trademark Mechanical has 3,327 Google reviews. Holliday Heating has 2,521. Cougar Mechanical has 1,674. All three are running Google Ads. All three have established websites. Their ratings are strong: 4.8 and 4.9 across the board.
HVAC companies have had to compete digitally for longer than most home service verticals because the category is more competitive. There are more of them, the jobs are high-value and semi-emergency (your heat goes out in January, you search immediately), and franchise players like Aire Serv have pushed the bar up. Independent operators responded by investing in reviews and paid search.
The result: if you're an HVAC company in Spokane that doesn't have 500+ reviews and a Google Ads presence, you're behind the market. The threshold for "competitive" in this vertical is higher than in any other.
Plumbers have the most reviews. By a lot.
The average review count for plumbers in this dataset: 1,411.
That is not a typo.
Bulldog Rooter has 4,768 Google reviews. Gold Seal Plumbing has 3,168. Shaw Plumbing has 1,176. Raptor Rooter has 870. These are extraordinary numbers for any service business, let alone one in a mid-size regional market.
Why plumbing? A few factors. Plumbing jobs are frequent and repeat. When you fix a backed-up drain or a broken water heater, the customer is relieved and usually happy to leave a review. The service is also more transactional than, say, a contractor remodel, so the review window is shorter and the ask feels natural.
Eight of the 10 plumbers we analyzed hit the top tier. That makes plumbing the most digitally competitive vertical in this market after HVAC.
If you're a plumber in Spokane with fewer than 200 reviews, you are not showing up in the same searches as your competition. The gap between the top operators and the median is larger in plumbing than anywhere else.
General contractors have almost no digital presence
On the other end of the spectrum: 12 general contractors analyzed, zero in the top tier. Six of the 12 had so little public data that we couldn't meaningfully score them at all.
The average review count for general contractors in this sample: 39.
Compare that to plumbers at 1,411. That's a 36x gap in review volume between two verticals operating in the same geography, targeting the same homeowners.
Why? Construction projects are longer, more complex, and the client relationship is different. A contractor builds a relationship over months, not hours. Asking for a review at the end of a 6-month remodel is an afterthought. Many contractors get most of their work through referrals and have never needed to build a digital presence.
That's changing. Homeowners now research contractors online before they call, even if someone referred them. A business with 4 Google reviews and a competitor with 40 will lose that first-impression comparison. It doesn't matter if the work is excellent.
The opportunity here is significant. Construction is the least competitive digital vertical in this market. A contractor who commits to 2-3 review requests per project would outpace the market average within a year.
Electricians and cleaners are invisible online
This one surprised us.
Every single electrical contractor in our sample, all 7 of them, had no website. Every cleaning company we found, all 6, had no website either.
These are not struggling businesses. VPC Electric has 217 Google reviews and a 4.9 rating. Epic Electric has 514 reviews and a 4.8 rating. Maids of Movher has 161 reviews and is running Google Ads. Live Clean Today has 458 reviews and a 4.9 rating.
Real customers. Real revenue. No website.
What this tells us: these businesses are running almost entirely on Google Business Profile and word of mouth. That works, until it doesn't. A well-optimized GBP with hundreds of reviews can carry a service business for a long time. But there's a ceiling. No website means no location pages, no service descriptions for Google to index, no place to send paid traffic, no content to show up in AI search results.
The cleaning companies in particular are spending money on Google Ads without a website to send the traffic to. That's a significant inefficiency. You can run ads to a GBP listing, but conversion rates are much lower than sending someone to a purpose-built landing page.
The Google Ads gap
Only 11 of 55 businesses are running Google Ads. That's 20%.
By vertical:
- HVAC: 6 of 10 running ads
- Cleaning: 2 of 6
- Electrical: 2 of 7
- Plumbing: 1 of 10
- Landscaping: 0 of 10
- General contracting: 0 of 12
HVAC companies have clearly decided paid search is worth it. The other verticals mostly haven't. Some of that is rational: a plumber with 4,768 reviews and a dominant organic presence doesn't need to buy traffic. But for businesses with thinner review counts, particularly in contracting and landscaping, ads could move leads while organic presence builds.
Zero landscaping companies in this sample are running Google Ads. That's either a market opportunity or evidence that seasonal demand makes the ROI difficult to justify. Probably both.
What to do with this
If you operate a home service business in the Inland Northwest, here's what the data suggests.
The number that matters most
Every vertical has its own threshold for what "competitive" looks like online. In HVAC and plumbing, you need hundreds of reviews to be in the conversation. In contracting, 50 reviews might put you ahead of most of your competitors.
The way to know where you actually stand is to score your business against the same data points we used here: reviews, rating, website quality, Google Business Profile completeness, paid search presence, and overall visibility.
We run that analysis automatically. The report is free, it takes about 5 minutes to set up, and it compares you directly against your local competitors. Get your free report at gonerecon.com.