I stumbled across this method, almost by accident, when researching a potential startup website after a standard callback request to my website. It’s surprisingly straightforward and you can easily find people in particular regions, even your own city, who are crying out for your brand of search engine expertise.
The elegance of this medium is that it also provides the ammunition they need to go to the potential customer and show them why your website is not performing as well as it should. It will allow you to show them that they are on the search engines and that they can be discovered through a search (even if it is very poor and irrelevant) and that starting to generate traffic or increasing traffic to your website will come at a fairly low price. (depending on your search engine optimization rates of course).
Use of the site: in Google searches: Google offers several useful search engine optimization tools to discover information about your website and the information it contains on your site, one of them is place: If you search for place: and add your domain name afterwards, Google will return all the internet pages it has indexed for that domain name, for example Website: amazon.co.uk. To find your own website, simply change amazon.co.uk to your own domain name. You can also use www. at first but, so far, I haven’t noticed a big difference in the results. Google allows you to specify if you want to have the www. on your domain name in their results using their webmaster tools. This search tool is designed to allow you to search for a phrase on a particular site by placing the phrase in front of the place: little in search. For example, a search for fantasy site: amazon.co.uk will search for the word fantasy on the Amazon UK website.
This will be useful once you have found a website that needs search engine optimization, as you can then analyze all the web pages that Google has for them.
The process Finding clients who need your search engine optimization help is simply this. Go to Google and search for the phrase Untitled document and then add a region after, for example, find Untitled Document London. This will display all web pages within London that have Untitled document, generally in the Title. This shows me that whoever created the website hasn’t bothered to fill in the page title tag and that the page in question is simply ignoring an excellent opportunity to get some keywords and key phrases on Google and get discovered by your market and potential customers.
In my opinion, every professional web designer should provide a website with at least a basic SEO template, which would involve completing the Qualification and meta description (at the very least) so that search results look attractive and present certain information when displayed on search engines. Even if they’re not on page one for their particular services, at least they’ll be on page something and not floating to the bottom with no consequences to your business. Unless, of course, your business is selling titled documents Entitledin which case, good luck trying to get a top result.
Use of intitle: in Google searches: If you want to limit this search, you can use one of Google’s search tools qualification. As the name suggests, this will return all results with a word or phrase in the Page title from the website. So try searching instead intitle:Untitled Document London. You can waste time putting quotes on each side of the first part and then adding your region to make the search more technically correct, this slightly changes the results.
Once you have found a likely target, you can now use the first tool (place:) to study the rest of its pages. If you have a long list of Untitled document you can almost guarantee that they are not getting even a tenth of the results that they should be getting. Providing them with fast and noticeable results should be simple. If they’ve had the website for a while, even better, since their domain name will have some age. I have found that once you can show good traffic and queries are slightly up, the next step will be to update your website, as an outdated website will put a lot of people off. All of this leads to more business and another addition to your holiday card list.
This method will return a lot of old sites and, in all likelihood, some personal websites, but there will be many businesses there who are clearly unaware of the opportunity they are wasting and the potential new business they are missing out on. (Using this method, for my rural hometown, I found a lawyer, two day care centers, and a company that provides rent to students would all be fine, and on the first three pages of Google results.)
In the end, they’ll thank you as their visits and inquiries grow, and you just might get a decent long-term client.
Your job now is to persuade them of that, good luck.