“Small business is the backbone of our economy”—almost no US president has gone a term without reciting this phrase.
The number of small businesses is steadily growing over the years, reaching its peak in 2021 (no official 2022 data yet). As of 2021, the US has 32.5 million small businesses.
So we used our keyword and more particularly search volume intel to explore some trends of interest within the realm of small business and:
See whether Americans’ interest in small business ventures has seen some YoY shifts and whether it’s subject to any patterns;
Armed with data we pulled from our clients’ sites (insights taken from various Alien Road tools), we also managed to track some general success patterns. We analyzed everything from their traffic growth trends to organic and social media performance over time—all to see which small business categories manage to do better online.
Exploring searches around opening a business
To pinpoint some general trends around starting a new business, we looked at search volume for various searches that feature this desire—from “how to start a business” to “open business”.
It seems, however, that the inclination to start a new venture is subject to strong ‘seasonality’—the majority of the searches occur in January and March.
The only exception here was in July 2020, when interest in opening up a business skyrocketed off the typical season—and this can be linked to what’s now called the pandemic effect.
The user interest growth pattern is consistent with what we saw above, but the pace of growth is much faster.
From 2018 to 2022, the number of searches for all things related to starting a small business spiked by 76%.
As you can see, the actual growth in the number of small businesses and interest in starting them has indeed increased over the years. So Google searches often pre-empt the actual leap into the world of entrepreneurship.
What Are the Hottest Small Business Types?
While general interest in starting a small business is spiking, its distribution is not even as some businesses get more traction than others.
Capitalizing on hobbies is also popular—starting an Etsy business looks attractive to almost one-fifth of all the searchers.
Queries related to “starting a boutique” have always had the largest share of all small business related searches, but the rest of the top three kept changing over time:
Vending machines appear to be gaining the biggest traction, as the category broke into the second spot of most-searched small businesses.
The table below shows which small business types saw the biggest growth in Google searches related to starting a new venture:
Any Local Nuances?
Stats across regions, however, can vary a lot, so we took a more granular look at the most popular small business categories within each US state.
The “Etsy, cleaning, boutique” triad is present—fully or partially—across each state’s top 3. There are some exceptions, though:
In exactly half the states, coffee shops also make it into the top 3 most searched small business categories.
In exactly half the states, coffee shops also make it into the top 3 most searched small business categories.