First course
Cafes work in Baltimore
Baltimore has a dense cafe trade. Independent coffee shops and small owner run cafes sit alongside the national chains, and the chains dominate the branded searches while the independents compete on neighbourhood and on what makes the room worth walking to. Search demand for cafes in Baltimore is spread across the city rather than concentrated downtown, because people look for coffee near where they already are: near the university, near the hospital, near the office, near home. Paid search in this trade is mostly bought by the chains and by delivery and ordering platforms, which means the organic results carry a lot of the weight for an independent cafe. The businesses taking that demand are the ones with pages that answer a specific local search, not the ones with a single homepage and a menu PDF.
