Small businesses hold a quarter of Google's page one (but not in retail)

Most small-business owners we talk to have already decided that Google's first page belongs to someone else: the marketplaces, the national chains and the directories with budgets they will never match. We wanted to know how true that is, so instead of trusting keyword-difficulty scores we looked at who actually ranks.

We took 60 everyday small-business niches, from plumbers and bakeries to web design agencies and webshops, in six European markets. That gave 5,953 searches, and we pulled the live top ten for every one of them. Then we sorted each of the roughly 55,000 page-one places by who held it.

The short answer: small businesses hold about a quarter of Google's page one, and in roughly 70% of searches at least one small business makes the first page. How open a search is depends far more on the sector than on any difficulty score.

The headline numbers

	Result
Searches checked (live Google top 10)	5,953
Page-one places held by small businesses (long-tail searches)	26%
Long-tail searches with at least one small business on page one	69%
Most open sector: B2B services	36% of places
Least open sector: retail and webshops	12% of places

A "small business" here means a site that belongs to one business, not a platform, directory or media site, and that draws fewer than 5,000 estimated organic visits a month in its market. The method section explains how we drew that line and how the results change if you move it.

Who holds page one

Small businesses are not alone on the first page, but they are not crowded out either. Across the long-tail searches, the ten places split like this:

Who ranks	Share of page-one places
Larger businesses (more than 5,000 visits/month)	27%
Small businesses	26%
Platforms, marketplaces and social networks	20%
Directories, comparison and lead-generation sites	19%
Magazines, blogs and news	5%
Public bodies, associations and schools	2%

Directories and platforms take almost four in ten places between them. That is the real competition for many local businesses: not a bigger rival, but the listing site that ranks about them. A search for "loodgieter in gent" (plumber in Ghent) shows the pattern clearly. Three local plumbers made the first page, while a services marketplace, four directory and quote sites, a business listing and a Reddit thread took the rest.

Sector matters more than anything else

The biggest difference in the data is not between markets or between short and long searches. It is between kinds of business:

Sector	Small-business share of page one	Searches with ≥ 1 small business
B2B services	36%	87%
Local services	31%	78%
Hospitality and leisure	26%	69%
Retail and webshops	12%	44%

Service businesses do well because Google's results for a service tend to reward the provider who actually does the work locally. A search for "schlüsseldienst hannover" (locksmith in Hanover) put seven small local locksmiths on page one. Retail is the opposite. When someone searches for a product, page one fills with marketplaces, national retailers and test sites: for "running shoes" in the UK, every organic result belonged to a large retailer, a sportswear brand, a magazine or a review site.

The niche-level spread is wide:

Most open niches	Small-business share	Least open niches	Small-business share
Wedding photographer	62%	Running shoes	4%
Web design agency	57%	Hiking boots	5%
Marketing agency	50%	Plant pots	7%
Business coach	47%	Kitchen knives	7%
Office cleaning	46%	Bed and breakfast	8%
Locksmith	45%	Bike bags	8%

For a webshop, the takeaway is not that SEO is closed, but that product searches are the hardest place to start. Questions, comparisons and use cases around a product are usually more realistic than the product name itself.

Short searches are not the walled garden people assume

We expected the classic pattern: big players own the short "head" term, small businesses win the longer, more specific searches. The data did not show it. Small businesses held 25% of places on the head terms and 26% on the long tail, and a small business made page one for 71% of head terms against 69% of longer searches.

The likely reason is that most of these searches are local. Google already treats "plumber" as "plumber near this person", so the head term behaves much like its longer variants. The long tail is still useful, because it is where you match exactly what a customer wants, but it is not a secret door that only small businesses can use.

Keyword difficulty scores didn't predict any of this

Most SEO tools score keywords from 0 to 100 for "difficulty", and many small businesses use that score to decide what to target. We recorded it for every keyword. It told us almost nothing about whether a small business could reach page one:

Difficulty score	Share of long-tail searches	Small-business share of page one	Searches with ≥ 1 small business
0	53%	24%	66%
1–10	18%	27%	70%
11–30	14%	30%	72%
Above 30	8%	30%	75%

Half of all long-tail keywords scored a difficulty of zero, yet small businesses did slightly worse there than on keywords scored above 30. The head terms show why. "hardloopschoenen heren" (men's running shoes, 8,100 searches a month in the Netherlands) scores zero difficulty, and its first page belongs to Decathlon, bol.com and running retailers.

Difficulty scores are built from the link profiles of the pages that rank, and in smaller European markets that data is often thin. A zero frequently means "not measured well", not "easy". If you take one practical lesson from this study, take this one: look at the live page one instead of the score.

How to check a keyword yourself in two minutes

You do not need a tool to do what we did for one keyword:

1. Search the keyword in a private browser window, so your own history does not shape the results.
2. Skip the ads and the map, and look at the ten organic results.
3. Count how many belong to a business that is genuinely comparable to yours, meaning a single company of similar size rather than a directory, marketplace or national chain.
4. If two or three comparable businesses are there, the place is realistically winnable with a better page. If page one is all platforms and chains, pick a more specific angle on the same topic.

Method

• Niches and markets: 60 small-business niches in four groups (local services, hospitality and leisure, retail and webshops, B2B services). We wrote one search term per niche as a local searcher would type it, in six markets: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium (Dutch), Belgium (French), Germany and France. That made 360 seed terms.
• Keywords: for each seed we collected up to 200 keyword suggestions containing that term, with search volume, difficulty, cost per click and intent from DataForSEO. That was about 62,000 suggestions in total. We removed "near me" and opening-hours searches, merged spelling variants and kept keywords with at least 50 monthly searches.
• Filtering: an AI model removed searches naming a specific company, brand or shop, unrelated meanings and job-seeking searches. From what remained, we took the head term plus a reproducible random sample of up to 19 longer keywords per seed, which gave 5,953 keywords.
• Page one: we pulled the live national Google top ten for each keyword in its market and language, organic results only. Some pages show fewer than ten organic results, so that came to about 55,000 places.
• Classifying sites: every ranking site got DataForSEO's estimate of its monthly organic traffic in that market. For subdomains we also took the parent domain's traffic, so a big company's subdomain is never counted as small. Well-known marketplaces, social networks, directories and public bodies were classified by rule. The remaining 18,409 lower-traffic sites were labelled by an AI model as a single business, a directory or lead-generation site, a media site or other. Unsure cases were labelled directory, so the small-business numbers lean conservative. A manual spot check agreed with 23 of 25 labels.
• Small business: a single business's own site with fewer than 5,000 estimated organic visits a month in that market. At a stricter 1,000 visits, small businesses hold 19% of long-tail places; at a looser 20,000, they hold 31%. The exact share moves with the threshold, but the overall picture does not: small businesses hold a substantial minority of page one at every threshold.

Limitations

These are national results, not city-level ones, and they exclude Google's map pack, where local businesses often appear as well. Traffic figures are third-party estimates, and the AI filtering and labelling are not perfect; roughly 2% of the sampled keywords are borderline cases that slipped through. Some narrow niches had fewer than 19 eligible longer keywords. None of this changes the direction of the findings, but the exact percentages should be read as estimates, not census counts.

The data was collected on 1 October 2026. If you would like the full dataset for your own analysis or reporting, contact us at hans@boltseo.eu.

By market

Market	Small-business share of page one (long tail)	Searches with ≥ 1 small business
Netherlands	32%	76%
Belgium (French)	27%	76%
Germany	27%	66%
Belgium (Dutch)	26%	69%
United Kingdom	25%	65%
France	21%	63%

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