u/Due-Bet115

Hi

Ran a dataset on 153,625 law firms across the US. Data comes from public listings so there is noise in there for sure. Closed firms, offices that moved, practitioners who operate purely on referrals and have not updated anything in years. But at this volume the gap is real.

- 62% have no SEO page title
- 37% missing meta description
- 46% have no website
- Only 45% have a public email listed

Tried going at this last quarter. Shortlisted solo practitioners in mid-size markets, figured they would be more receptive than established firms. Sent a personalized sequence with a mini audit showing exactly what their SERP result looked like versus the two firms ranking above them. Got a 34% open rate. Three replies. One said they were happy with their current setup. One asked me to call the office. I called. The receptionist took a message. Nothing came back.

The firms that might actually move on this are probably the ones who recently relocated or just went independent and lost their referral base. But finding them cleanly in the data is hard because nothing flags that.

Has anyone actually gotten traction here or is legal just a vertical you mine for data and then leave alone?

I'm not totally sure this is as smart as it looks but I keep thinking about it.

Each US Starbucks has on average 4 others within a mile. That's not something they failed to notice. They built it that way. Since the 90s.

It started because a store in Vancouver was about to lose its building. They opened another one 30 meters away. Both made money. Schultz looked at the numbers and instead of calling it a fluke, made it the model.

If your corner is profitable, someone else will figure that out eventually. A Dunkin'. A local roaster. So you take the lease yourself first. Even against your own traffic.

No ad budget either so two stores on the same street was cheaper than a billboard.

I get why it made sense. What I don't get is how nobody saw it tipping. At some point the density went from moat to drag. BMO downgraded the stock because overlap was hurting traffic. But I mean, what was supposed to look different at store #4,000 vs store #400? The logic was the same the whole way through.

Maybe defensive strategies just work like that. They hold until they don't and you only know after.

Not sure where I land on this one honestly.

Two Starbucks on the same block. You've probably walked past this and figured someone in corporate wasn't paying attention.

I thought the same thing until I looked into it. And honestly I'm still not sure what to make of it.

It started in Vancouver in the 90s. A store was about to lose its building to renovation. They opened another one 30 meters away. Panic move. Both made money at the same time. The old one wasn't even closed yet.

So instead of treating it as a weird anomaly they just... kept doing it.

Schultz said they were cannibalizing a third of their own stores every day. The thinking being, if your corner is profitable, give it long enough and a Dunkin' or a local roaster shows up next door. So you take the lease yourself first.

They had no ad budget either so clustering was their visibility play. Two storefronts on the same street apparently costs less than one billboard campaign.

You can see it on Google Maps. Search Starbucks in Manhattan. The pins don't spread out. They stack on top of each other.

Now whether this is actually genius or just worked for a while, I don't know. Average US Starbucks has 4 others within a mile now. BMO downgraded the stock partly because the overlap started killing traffic. Same strategy, different result at scale.

Anyway. It made me wonder if anyone here has ever grabbed a lease mostly to keep a competitor out. Not because you needed the space but because you didn't want someone else to have it.

Hi,

Something I've been noticing lately when looking at digital audits done for local businesses.

A lot of them are pretty thorough on the technical side. Page speed, Core Web Vitals, on-page stuff. But Google Maps and the GBP listing tend to not be in there at all.

I'm not sure if that's a scope thing or just how most audits are structured. Maybe clients don't ask for it specifically. Maybe it's treated as a separate service.

It just stands out because for a lot of local businesses, that's where customers are actually making their decision. Not the website. And the listing stuff, photo recency, review responses, how it compares to nearby competitors, doesn't seem to show up much in what gets delivered.

Could be I'm looking at a biased sample. Genuinely not sure.

Has anyone else noticed this or is it more common than I think to include Maps in a local audit?

Hi,

Look at Starbucks locations near office buildings on Google Maps. Boston, Manhattan, Chicago, Philadelphia. There's almost always a Dunkin' within a 2-3 minute walk. Hard to believe it's random.

Dunkin' already figured out which corners get morning traffic, which blocks sustain a coffee shop long term. Starbucks seems to just let that play out, then open nearby.

At that point competition collapses into something very simple. Two shops, similar price, similar wait. You grab whichever is on your side of the street. After two weeks it's habit.

Most positioning logic says find open space, differentiate. Starbucks does the opposite. Match on location, match on convenience, and bet that proximity alone does the work.

The part I'm less sure about is whether this is actually a strong position or just an expensive one. You're paying premium rent to split traffic with someone who proved the spot works. That math only holds if your margins can absorb it. Which Starbucks can. Most brands probably can't.

So maybe it's less a strategy and more a privilege that looks like a strategy.