NECRONOMICOMM

How to Find Businesses With Outdated Websites (and Win Them as Clients)

Guide · 5 min read

A business with an outdated website is a web designer's best prospect. The problem is real, it's visible, and it's costing them customers. You just have to find them and say so. The catch is that checking businesses one at a time is slow. Here is how to do it in a way that scales.

What "outdated" actually looks like

You're not judging taste. You're looking for things that cost the business money or hide them from search. The ones that matter most:

• No website at all, just a social page or a directory listing. The pitch there is simple: they're invisible when someone searches.
• Not built for phones. No responsive layout, tiny text, buttons you can't tap. Most local traffic is mobile, so this is lost revenue.
• Slow or insecure. Multi-second loads, or no padlock in the address bar. Both send visitors away and drag down their Google ranking.
• Dated tech and design. Table layouts, old jQuery, a stale copyright year, clip-art. It reads as neglect, which makes customers wonder if the business is still running.
• Weak SEO. Missing page titles and descriptions, no local info, so they never show up for "[service] near me."

Turn what you see into a score

Instead of eyeballing every site, rate each one on those categories and roll it into a single number: how modern the site is, from 1 to 100. Now you can sort a whole town from worst to best. The lowest scores are the businesses with the most problems, and the most fixable ones. A site that scores in the teens isn't a maybe. It's a pitch that writes itself.

Confirm before you pitch

Data is never perfect. A business tagged "no website" might have one your list missed, and a site that failed to load might have just been down for a minute. Spend ten seconds confirming with a quick search for their name before you reach out, so you never open with a mistake.

Lead with the specific problem

The reason these leads close is that you can be concrete. "When someone searches for a barber in your town, your shop doesn't come up, and a competitor with a real site gets that customer" beats any "I build websites" email. Name the exact problem, connect it to lost customers, and offer to show them what a better version would look like.

Do it at scale

The method works by hand for a block or two. To cover a whole city, hundreds of businesses scored and ranked, you'll want it automated. That's what NecronomiComm does. Point it at a city or ZIP and it hands back the ranked list, worst first, with contact info and a specific message for each one.