The GetNoSite field notes
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 is how many there are, the four ways people find them, and which one survives contact with a real week of work.
How many businesses have no website
It depends on the country far more than on the year. In Colombia, 41% of local businesses in the trades we cover declare a website. In Spain it is 58%. In Canada it is 82%, and in the United States 77.5% — so roughly one business in four in the USA still has nothing. A developed market is a worse market for this work, not a better one: the businesses are there, but most already have what you would sell.
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, and the only method that answers “businesses near me without websites” without a tool. 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: 2,492,524 businesses across 21 countries whose source declares no website, each with a phone number, filtered by city and trade. It removes the six hours, not the selling.
Which trades are furthest behind
Consistently: hair and beauty salons, auto repair shops, restaurants, grocery and convenience stores, clothing shops. Consistently ahead: hotels, real estate agencies, dentists — anywhere a booking or a listing forced them online years ago. Selling to the first group is easier and the ticket is smaller; the second group pays more and says no more often.
Pick the city by ratio, not by size
Canada holds 1.6 times more businesses than Colombia and half the sellable inventory. Venezuela’s 28 million people yield fewer businesses without websites than El Salvador’s 6 million, because the underlying map data is thin. Knowing there are 380 businesses of one trade in your city with no website makes it a week of calling with a known end; knowing there are 12 tells you to pick another trade before wasting the afternoon.
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. And keep the list short: forty hairdressers in one city gets worked through, five hundred mixed businesses gets opened once and never again.
GetNoSite team
We build GetNoSite and document how to select and review local business data. These articles explain the method and its limits; they do not replace checking individual records.
What should we explain next?
Send a question or correction about this guide. We review suggestions before incorporating them; your message is not published automatically.
Send a question or correction