How To Find Businesses that Don’t Market Themselves Well

B2B networking is never easy, and if you want to find businesses that are terrible at SEO or marketing the task is even more difficult. Being able to find and make contact with these businesses can allow you to access markets that are otherwise isolated and untapped, which is a rare thing in today’s service saturated world, and an essential skill if your business is about marketing, networking, web design, or SEO services.

Businesses Without A Web Presence

As far as local businesses are concerned, the yellow pages are surprisingly rewarding. Businesses without a web presence often still take out ads in the yellow pages. Simply open up the phone book and Google search the name of each business plus the city in which they’re located. If they have a website it’ll pop up and you can look at it to determine if you think they would benefit substantially from your services.

For businesses that aren’t in your local area it’s a little bit trickier, but not much. You’ll just have to look up the yellow pages online for each area that you want to examine. Considering the number of cities in the country and the number of businesses in each you could do this to find clients for the rest of your life and never run out.

Businesses With A Website But No Contact Info

All business sites should have some form of contact on the website, but that doesn’t mean it’ll always be there. Perhaps the site owner just wants the site to be informational, wants to avoid spammers, or simply forgot. Alternatively they might have a contact form that is broken or an email that no longer works. An easy way to find another form of contact is to go to whois.com and to run the website’s domain name through the search. This will return the owner of the website, and the email address that they used to register the domain, which you’ll be able to use to contact them. Failing that you can search their name on Facebook or in the phone book.

Businesses With Social Media But No Website

The thing about social media sites is that Google doesn’t crawl their pages because they would otherwise dominate the search results. That means if you try to find a business that doesn’t have a website, but is active on Facebook, you’ll have to look very hard to find it via a Google search.

Because you won’t be able to find this business through normal search methods you can try a few other tricks. First and foremost, look for groups on social networks that small businesses are likely to build, such as “consignment”. Every town in the country has two or three of those shops now and many of them are run by people who know all about social media networking, but are relatively SEO illiterate. Dig through these groups and search for corresponding websites to find possible clients. Conveniently finding leads on a social network makes it easy to make contact and pitch your service.

Finding poorly connected businesses can be time consuming, but tends to be very rewarding because these people typically won’t know about, or won’t have been very well exposed to your service which means you won’t have to compete against other companies for their business.

Kyle Hurst writes about business to business search, business software & technology, and marketing techniques for small businesses. Check out his Google+ here