Mardan Online: What 2,126 Business Listings Actually Show

We wanted to know something specific: if you are a customer in Mardan with a phone in your hand, how many of the businesses around you can you actually find, and how many of those are worth finding?

So we counted. Every business Google Maps knows about in Mardan, trade by trade, and then we checked each one by hand — does the website open, is it secure, does it work on a phone, has anyone touched it in the last two years.

The answer is 2,126 businesses. What follows is what they look like, with no names, because the point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is that the gap is enormous, it is measurable, and it is fixable.

The number that is missing from this survey

Start with what this count is not. These 2,126 are the businesses that are visible — the ones that have a pin on Google Maps. Many of those pins were not put there by the owner at all; anyone with a Google account can add a place to the map (Google Maps Help), and a great many Mardan listings were created by passing Local Guides, not by the shop.

Now set that against the city. Mardan district recorded about 2.74 million people in the 2023 census (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics). Two thousand findable businesses in a district of nearly three million people is not a market that is online. It is one visible business for every thirteen hundred residents.

Walk through Bank Road, Shamsi Road or any bazaar in Takht Bhai and count the shutters. Thousands of real, trading businesses — tailors, workshops, suppliers, clinics, tuition centres — appear nowhere in this survey, because they appear nowhere online at all. Everything below describes the most connected part of Mardan's economy. The rest is worse.

What the visible 2,126 have online

1,727 of 2,126 — eighty-one per cent — have no website. Not a bad website. None.

Another 103 have put a Facebook or Instagram link in the website field, which is a different problem: they are reachable, but on an address they do not own and cannot move. Twenty more sit on a free subdomain, where the same is true. And 76 have a website on their listing that no longer opens at all.

That leaves 200 businesses in all of Mardan with a working website of their own.

The trades that are not online at all

Averages hide the real story. Broken out by trade, the picture is starker.

Four trades are at one hundred per cent. All 43 tire shops, all 37 building materials stores, all 20 warehouses and all 16 butcher shops have no website between them. Not one.

Grocery stores are at 96%, transport services and phone repair shops at 95%, auto parts and marble suppliers at 94%. These are not marginal trades — building materials and marble are two of the things Mardan and the surrounding district are known for, and we have written separately about moving the marble factories off paper registers.

At the other end, the most-online trade in Mardan is education consultancy: of 23 such businesses, only 5 have no site. Banks follow, mostly because they are branches of national chains whose websites were built in Karachi.

One in four websites in Mardan is already dead

This is the finding that surprised us most, and it changes what the problem actually is.

Of the 276 Mardan businesses that went to the trouble of building their own website, 76 of those sites — 28% — no longer open. The domain expired, the hosting lapsed, or the developer disappeared. The link is still sitting on the Google listing, sending every customer who clicks it into a dead end.

The rate is worst in exactly the trades you would expect to know better. Half the internet service providers who built a site have lost it. So have half the car dealers and half the hospitals who built one. Four of the nine software companies in Mardan with a website have a dead website.

We are not pointing at anyone. We are pointing at a pattern: in Mardan, a website has usually been bought as a one-off purchase rather than kept as a working asset. Somebody paid once, nobody renewed, and the money is gone. That is a maintenance problem, not a design problem, and it is why we treat website management as an ongoing service rather than a delivery date.

The customers are already there

Here is the part that should interest any Mardan business owner. Demand is not the missing piece.

Mardan's restaurants have collected 12,688 Google reviews between them. Sixty-two restaurants, nearly thirteen thousand people who cared enough to write something — and exactly one of those restaurants has a working website.

Bakeries have 3,996 reviews and one working site. Fast food has 3,788 reviews across 23 businesses and five sites. Car dealers have 2,173 reviews and two.

Those reviews are proof that customers are searching, arriving, and talking. The businesses simply have nowhere to send them afterwards — no menu, no booking, no order form, no way to be found at eleven at night when someone is deciding where to eat tomorrow.

The Google listing is doing all the work, badly

For most of these 2,126, the Google listing is the entire online presence. So we checked how well it is set up.

What we checked	Result
No phone number on the listing	449 businesses (21%)
A social page pasted into the website field	103
A dead link left on the listing	76
A free subdomain instead of their own address	20

449 businesses have no phone number on their listing. A customer finds them, wants to call, and there is nothing to tap. Among warehouses it is 16 of 20; among government offices, 11 of 19.

A listing is free and takes an afternoon. Google's own guidance on categories, hours and contact details is short and public (Google Business Profile Help), and we have written the Mardan-specific version in local SEO for Mardan businesses.

Of the 200 sites that do open, 20 still have no HTTPS — Chrome has marked plain HTTP as "Not secure" since 2018 (Chromium Blog) — and certificates have been free for years (Let's Encrypt). Ten are not built for phones, which is where effectively all of this traffic comes from and what Google indexes first (Google Search Central).

What we would tell each trade to do first

Different gaps need different first steps. Based on what the survey found:

If you are…	Start with
A tire shop, butcher, grocery or building materials store	A complete Google listing with photos and a phone number. You do not need a website this month.
A restaurant, bakery or café	A one-page site with your menu, location and WhatsApp. Your customers are already reviewing you.
A travel agency, consultant or clinic	Check whether the site you paid for still opens. Four in ten in your trade do not.
A supplier, warehouse or workshop	A page that shows what you stock and who to call, so buyers outside Mardan can find you.

Mardan in five years

We did not run this survey to sell anything. We ran it because Softhat moved its office to Mardan, and we wanted to know the city we now work in.

What we found is a market where the hardest part is already done. The customers are online — twelve thousand restaurant reviews say so. The demand exists. What is missing is the other half: somewhere for that demand to land, kept alive by somebody whose job it is to keep it alive.

That is the work we have set ourselves for the next five years. Not one website at a time, but the whole stack a Mardan business needs to stop being invisible: a listing that is actually complete, a site that still opens in 2031, and the automation that lets a six-person shop answer customers at midnight. We have written about where to start with digital marketing here and which jobs are worth automating first.

Mardan does not need to be a city where 81% of businesses are unfindable and a quarter of its websites are dead. That is not a shortage of talent or money. It is a shortage of anyone treating this as ongoing work. In shaa Allah, five years from now this survey will read like a record of how things used to be — and we intend to spend every bit of our energy making that true, for businesses that can afford us and for those who cannot.

Key takeaways

• 81% of Mardan's visible businesses have no website, and the businesses not visible on Maps at all are a far larger group.
• 28% of the websites that were built are now dead — bought once, never maintained.
• Four trades are at 100% with no website: tire shops, building materials stores, warehouses and butcher shops.
• Demand is not the problem. Mardan's restaurants hold 12,688 Google reviews between them and have one working website.
• 449 businesses have no phone number on their Google listing, which is a free fix and the fastest one available.
• Treat a website as something that is kept, not something that is bought.

Find out where your business stands

If you are in Mardan and you are not sure whether your listing is complete, whether your site still opens, or whether anyone can find you on a phone, we will check it and tell you plainly — no charge for the look.

See what we do in web development and website management, or book a free strategy call. We are at First Floor, Walyan Plaza, Near Sugar Mill, Mardan, and you can reach us on +92 315 9300600.

Method, briefly. Every Google Maps listing in Mardan was collected trade by trade in September and October 2026, giving 2,126 businesses. Each website was then requested directly to record whether it answered, whether it used HTTPS and whether it was built for mobile. Listing fields are as Google held them on the date of collection. Social media coverage was incomplete at the time of writing and is deliberately left out of the figures above.