How to find businesses without websites
Selling a website is easy once you are talking to someone who needs one. The hard part is the hour before that: working out who, in your city, still has no site at all. Here are the four ways people do it, what each costs, and which one survives contact with a real week of work.
1. Google Maps, by hand
Search your city and a trade, open each result, look for a website field. It is free and it works. It is also about six hours for a hundred businesses, and roughly seven in ten of the ones you open will already have a site — so you spend most of that time confirming you should not call. Fine for your first ten prospects. Unworkable as a habit.
2. Facebook pages with no link
A local business with an active Facebook page and no website in the bio is a strong signal: they already believe in being online, they just have not taken the step. This finds better prospects than Maps does. It is also slower, because there is no way to filter for the absence of a link.
3. Walking your own street
Genuinely underrated. Note the shops you pass, check them that evening, call the ones with nothing. Very high conversion, because you can open with something true and local. It does not scale past a neighbourhood, which is exactly why almost nobody does it — and why it still works.
4. Start from a filtered list
The same data Maps holds is published openly by the Overture Maps Foundation, which means the filtering can happen before you see it rather than after. That is what this site does: 2,165,514 businesses across 20 countries whose source declares no website, each with a phone number, filtered by city and trade. It removes the six hours, not the selling.
What to do with the list
Call, do not email. A local business owner answers the phone and deletes the email. Open with the specific: you noticed they have no site, you build them, it takes a week. Expect most to say no — a hundred calls turning into two or three jobs is a normal, profitable week when a site sells for several hundred.