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Inflation fears might make 2023 look like a less-than-promising year for small businesses, yet customer searches for terms related to small business more than tripled since 2019.
To determine which cities and states are more likely to support different types of small businesses, we analyzed search volume data from 2019 to 2022 across all 50 states and major U.S. cities.
First, let's see which states and cities supported small businesses the most in 2022 based on how often residents searched for related terms.
All but one of the top five most supportive states were in the eastern half of the U.S., including:
However, many cities in the Midwest and West also seemed interested in shopping small. Texas is home to six of the top 25, ranking as follows by search volume:
Now that we know where in the U.S. small businesses likely had the most customer support last year, let's see which small business types had the most search interest overall.
Based on 2022 nationwide search volume, Etsy shops were the most popular small businesses searched for in the U.S. The next most commonly searched category was clothing, but despite interest in clothing boutiques rising, Americans searched more for fast fashion. Since 2019, searches for big fast fashion brands have increased by 70%.
Let's narrow those most searched business categories by state to see where they got the most interest last year.
The small business category that had search interest from the most states was home improvement contracting. Services like these tend to be carried out by small companies and independent proprietors, which might explain why it was the top small business search in these seven states:
Let's narrow it down even further and see which small business categories were the most popular across major U.S. cities.
Of all the small business categories we studied, home renovation services topped the list in more cities than any other. Of these six cities, two are in California and two in Florida:
Contrasting with our state-by-state breakdown, home improvement contractors only had the most searches in two cities: Virginia Beach, VA, and Philadelphia, PA. These two categories might sound similar, but renovations are more specific. For example, home renovations are just one category of service a contractor might offer.
Now that we know the top search groups in both cities and states, let's see how searches related to small businesses have changed in volume over time.
Between 2019 and 2022, the volume of these small business searches increased by 267%. And despite inflation, they increased 33% over the course of 2022 alone. And for the most part, this reflects the month-to-month and quarterly trends as well.
When we aggregated yearly data between 2019 and 2022, we saw search volume drop in February before nearly doubling over the following two months. However, this dip could be due to the government reopening after a long shutdown letting up at the end of January 2019.
We saw a steady increase in the demand for goods and services produced by small businesses over the past few years based on search trends. If that's any indication of what we can expect in the coming year, that's good news for small-business owners — especially Etsy sellers and home improvement contractors. Interest in these products and services has remained strong, even in the face of a possible recession. Hopefully, that means a strong future for small businesses.
Skynova provides online invoicing and other business software to help businesses manage timesheets, purchase orders, packing slips, proposals, and more.
For this campaign, we analyzed Google Trends data from 2019 to 2022 to measure the search volume of different terms relating to small businesses across all 50 states and major U.S. cities. We determined which supported small businesses the most based on the search volume of related terms by 100,000 residents.
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