A quick way to impress a local business about your online skills...

This won't often apply to a local business website, but it takes 30 seconds, and when you find it, it's like a 'Golden ticket of entry' to get a business owner's attention.

NOTE: I even found a major brand retailer in Australia who made this mistake (and they only corrected it after I blogged about it), so it's worth doing.

Here is the tip.

When you see a website eg TheLawyerInMyLocalArea dot com then visit both these sites:
www dot thelawyerinmylocalarea dot com
thelawyerinmylocalarea dot com

You might be surprised how often one of these is either not working, or just different from each other (eg one is a cpanel login)

Letting a business know about this problem - and perhaps explaining why it is important they fix it - is a good way to give a business something that costs you nothing, demonstrates your knowledge goes beyond that of whomever did their website originally, AND helps them immediately be better online for their prospective buyers.

Hope you find it useful.

 

Thanks for the Like Ryan - glad it was of use.

I'm surprised more people didn't pick up / comment on this so far, because a tip like this is the 'edge' that reading a forum like this can give people.

And it's free!

 

Great tips. As a matter of fact just recently I pointed out the exact same mistake to somebody on this forum. I don't think I heard back from the person, but, yeah, it's a huge deal if your www extension doesn't work. Imaging setting up a physical store and then forgetting to install the entrance. Kinda goes in the same vein.

 

Really good tip, Thank you

 

Thanks QwikAd & PNV - all part of the education!

 

This is spot on. It's good to be aware of these technical things because having them will really give you that 'expert' status and will display to potential clients that you know what you're talking about.

 

Oh yes, that's a good tip friend. Thanks for pointing out. I've not experienced such an issue ever, but I do check it every time. Good to know there are people around who does the same things. We're indeed a community!

 

Getting through to local businesses is very difficult. If you try to email them they'll perceive your message as spam. Calling them won't be much different. The only easy way to really get through to local businesses is to send out thousands of mailings. Contact the leads that you generate through that to begin the sales process. Once you start getting customers build a reputation to generate word-of-mouth. That's the formula that many local business services use.

 

really good information,thanks for sharing

 

What is also sort of important is that the www. subdomain doesn't show the same content as the normal domain name. That could cause problems with search engines, because of perceived duplicate content, although I think Google covers that eventuality. But still, the golden rule is, you should have either everything with or without the www. subdomain and not both showing the same content. So if you go with not using the www. subdomain, you should redirect any traffic going to the www. subdomain to your normal domain. If you go with the www. subdomain, you should redirect any traffic going to your normal domain to the www. subdomain. The latter, for instance, is what digitalpoint does.

Scott

 

My friend just helped me set up a website on his server. He got it all set up and working then I saw something in Google analytics that made me think I needed to change my url listing. After I dumped the www part I got myself into a reference loop and couldn't log on to either my www or my http version of the website. I had to call my friend and have him go into the database to fix my blunder.

 

In webmaster tools you can set whether or not the www. is supposed to be the same as without it.