How to find local businesses with bad websites (a field guide for freelance web designers)

If you build websites for small businesses, you already know the hardest part of the job isn't the design. It's finding the next client.

Most of us start the same way. Open Google Maps, type "dentist" and the name of a city, click through every listing, open each website, and keep a spreadsheet of the ones that look rough. It works. It's also slow, and after the fortieth tab you stop being able to tell a bad site from an okay one.

We've spent the last year working on exactly this problem, and we've looked at a lot of local business websites along the way. This post is everything we learned about finding the businesses that actually need a new site, figuring out which ones are worth your time, and reaching out without sounding like spam. You can do all of it by hand with a browser and a spreadsheet.

Why "bad website" businesses are the best prospects

There are two kinds of local businesses you can pitch: ones with no website at all, and ones with a website that's hurting them.

Both can work, but the second group is usually easier to sell to. They've already paid for a website once. They already believe a website matters. You don't need to convince them of the idea, only that theirs is costing them customers.

A business with no site at all is a different conversation. Some of them are doing fine on word of mouth and a Facebook page and genuinely don't want one. Others are a great fit, but you'll spend the first call explaining why they need a website before you can talk about yours.

So most of this guide is about the second group.

What actually counts as a "bad" website

"Bad" is vague, and vague doesn't help you in a cold message. If you tell a plumber his site is ugly, he'll shrug. If you tell him it doesn't load properly on a phone and most of his customers are searching on one, he'll go check.

Here's what we look for. These are the problems a business owner can verify in ten seconds, which is why they make good conversation starters.

It breaks on a phone. This is the big one. Open the site on your phone, not in a resized desktop browser. Do you have to pinch and zoom to read anything? Is the menu a row of tiny links? Do buttons overlap? Local searches happen on phones far more than desktops, so a site that's unusable there is losing calls every day.

It looks like it was built a long time ago. Clip art, tiny fonts, a background texture, a visitor counter, an animated "under construction" banner. You know it when you see it. This one is subjective, so on its own it's a weaker pitch than "it doesn't work on mobile."

There's no way to act. No click-to-call phone number, no booking button, no form, or a contact page that only lists an email. For a service business, the whole point of the site is to turn a visitor into a call. If that path is missing, it's an easy problem to point at.

It shows signs of being abandoned. A copyright year from many years ago, a "latest news" section with one post from 2016, no HTTPS warning in the browser, broken images, links to a Facebook page that no longer exists.

Search engines can't make sense of it. Every page has the same title, or the title is just "Home". The business name and city don't appear anywhere in the text. These don't look dramatic, but they're part of why the site sits on page three.

The domain isn't really a website. A parked page, an expired hosting notice, a builder's "site not published" placeholder, or a domain that just doesn't load. These businesses think they have a website. They don't.

When you write down a lead, write down the specific problem, not just "bad site". You'll need it later for the message, and it's the difference between a pitch that sounds personal and one that sounds copy-pasted.

Where to find them

Google Maps is where everyone starts, which is a good reason not to stop there. Here are the places we've found useful, roughly from most to least obvious.

Skip page one

This one surprised us. When you search for "roofer" plus a city on Google, the first page is mostly directories, review sites and a handful of businesses that already have decent websites and probably an agency. They are the worst prospects on the page.

The businesses you want are further down, on pages two, three and four. They're real, they're operating, and they're invisible online. That's a problem you can fix for them, and it's a much easier story to tell.

Look at who's running ads

The most underrated signal we've found is simple: is the business currently paying for advertising?

A business that runs ads already believes in marketing and already spends money on it every month. If those ads send people to a slow, broken or outdated page, every click they pay for is partly wasted. That's a concrete, money-shaped problem, and owners understand it immediately.

You can check this by hand. Facebook's Ad Library is public and searchable by business name, and Google shows "Sponsored" labels on local service businesses in many trades. If you see a contractor whose ads are everywhere but whose site looks like it hasn't been touched in a decade, put them at the top of your list.

Use reviews as a busyness meter

Reviews don't tell you whether a site is bad, but they tell you whether the business can afford you. A dentist with 400 reviews and a terrible website is a better lead than one with 6 reviews and the same website. The first one is busy and losing money to the bad site. The second one might just be struggling.

Deciding who to contact first

Once you've collected a list, you'll have more leads than time. You need some way to decide who gets a message today and who waits.

You don't need anything fancy. We'd suggest grading each lead on three things and only reaching out to the ones that score well on all three.

How bad is the site? A site that's broken on a phone or doesn't load at all is a stronger lead than one that just looks a bit dated. Be honest here. "I don't love the colours" isn't a problem the owner will pay to fix.

Can they afford it? Review count, number of locations, whether they run ads, and the type of business all give you a rough idea. A law firm or a roofing company spends more on marketing than a single-chair barbershop.

Can you reach a decision maker? A direct phone number or an owner's name is worth a lot. A generic contact form that goes nowhere is worth much less.

A lead that's high on all three is worth a personalised message today. Medium leads can go into a lighter outreach batch. Low leads are probably not worth your evening.

Reaching out without sounding like spam

This is where most people lose the deal. They do all the research, then send a message that could have been sent to anyone.

Show, don't tell

The single most effective thing you can do is show the owner what their site could look like. It doesn't have to be a finished website. A quick mockup of the homepage with their business name, their real photos and a couple of their actual reviews is enough.

Business owners are busy and they don't think in terms of design. Telling them "your site could be more modern" is abstract. Showing them their own business on a clean, fast page makes it real in about two seconds.

You don't need to spend hours on it. A homepage hero, a services section and a contact block is plenty. If they reply, then you build the rest.

Keep the message short and specific

Here's the shape of a message that tends to work:

Hi Maria, I was looking for a dentist near Oak Park and found your practice. Your reviews are great, but when I opened your site on my phone the menu and booking link were hard to use. I put together a quick idea of how the homepage could look on mobile, using your photos and reviews: [link]. Happy to walk you through it if it's useful. Either way, good luck with the new location.

It mentions something real about them, names one specific problem they can check themselves, shows the mockup, and doesn't push. Compare that with "We are a leading web design agency offering affordable solutions for your business." Nobody replies to that.

Pick the right channel

Email is the default, and it's fine. But a lot of local business owners live on their phones, and a short text or a message through their Google Business profile can get read faster than an email to an info@ address nobody checks.

Whatever you use, send it yourself and keep the volume sensible. Blasting hundreds of identical emails from a fresh domain is the quickest way to land in spam folders and burn the domain, and it doesn't work anyway. Twenty thoughtful messages beat two hundred generic ones.

Follow up, once or twice

Most replies come after a follow up, not the first message. People see it, mean to answer, and forget. A short note a few days later ("Just bumping this in case it got buried, the mockup link is still live") is completely normal. After two follow ups with no answer, move on.

Doing this every week without burning out

The research part is what wears people down. A realistic weekly routine looks something like this:

Picking one niche at a time helps more than it seems. After a few dentists you know what a dentist's site needs, your mockups get faster, and you start to sound like someone who understands their business. That's also how you end up with a portfolio that sells the next client for you.

The manual way vs. using a tool

Everything above works with a browser, a spreadsheet and a design tool. Plenty of designers do it that way and do well.

The part that doesn't scale is the checking: opening hundreds of sites, testing each on a phone, noting what's wrong, and then building a mockup for the good ones. That's the part we got tired of, so we built LeadReef to do it. It searches for local businesses, flags the ones with outdated, broken or missing sites, and helps with the mockup and the first message. You still decide who to contact and you send everything yourself. If you want to try it, there's a free plan at leadreef.ai. Full disclosure, it's our product.

But honestly, even if you never use a tool, the process is the same:

1. Look where other designers don't, like search pages two to four and businesses running ads.
2. Write down one specific problem per lead.
3. Prioritise by how bad the site is, whether they can pay, and whether you can reach the owner.
4. Show them a mockup of their own business.
5. Keep the message short and follow up once or twice.

If you've got your own tricks for finding clients, I'd really like to hear them in the comments. Especially the weird ones that shouldn't work but do.