The Link a Toronto Customer Vouched For

Quarter past nine on a Tuesday night, a couch in Toronto, the TV on mute.

A woman is in a group chat with three friends, and one of them has just asked, in the half joking way people ask, whether anyone knows someone decent for a job she’s been putting off since spring.

She does know someone. She used you in March and you were good.

So she types your name, goes off and finds your website, copies the address out of the bar at the top of her screen, and pastes it into the chat.

That’s the best thing that can happen to a small business, and it happens to yours more often than you’ll ever hear about.

Now watch what her friend gets.

Two versions of the same address

On some sites the address turns into a small tile on the friend’s screen. A photo, the business name, one line saying what they do.

On the rest it stays a run of characters with a domain buried in the middle, and the chat carries on talking about something else.

Open Graph tags are the few lines her friend’s phone reads before it draws anything at all. Filled in, she gets a picture and your name. Blank, she gets characters.

The recommendation still happened. It just showed up with nothing attached to it.

I keep a chat thread open with myself for exactly this, and every site I finish gets pasted into it before I hand the keys over, because I’ve never found another way to see what everyone else sees.

I test the contact form the same way now, having spent years never asking where those messages were landing.

Do you know which of the two versions yours is tonight? Most owners guess, and they guess in their own favor, and I do the same thing about my own car.

Three ways a bare link dies

Someone says they’ll look at it later, and later is a word that means never on a Tuesday night.

Or someone asks which one of them it is, and the answer arrives four hours later when the moment has gone quiet.

Or another friend in the chat drops a different name, with a picture attached, and that business gets the phone call on Wednesday morning.

Nothing breaks. Nobody complains. No message arrives to tell you what happened.

None of those three feel like anything from where you’re sitting. Your phone doesn’t ring, and a phone not ringing feels identical on every night of the year.

She tapped one link inside a second or two, and the fact that 71.5% of the sites I audited in this city carry those tags, which is last place at 24 of 24, is not something anybody in that chat had any way of knowing.

What she could tell you is which one she opened.

Manufacturers do this to their buyers as well, naming every page carefully and then sending the link out bare.

Count it in customers instead

When did a customer last hand your name to a stranger? It happened. You weren’t in the room for it.

Think about the last month of your own business, and not about percentages.

How many people did you do good work for? How many of them mentioned you to someone else, in a message, in a group, in a text to a sister who just bought a house?

You’ll never know the number. You do know it isn’t zero, because that’s how work has always arrived for businesses like yours, long before any of us had websites to argue about.

Every one of those messages is a small audition your website turns up for without telling you.

I ask owners to guess how often it happens and they always guess low, because the only ones they hear about are the people who went ahead and called.

The direction nobody sets up

Owners in Toronto are not shy about social media. 65.0% of the sites I audited here link out to a profile of some kind, and most of those links are there because a person decided they should be.

Traffic going the other way, out of your page and into a private message, is the direction nobody sets up. There’s no dashboard for it and no follower count, so it never comes up in a meeting.

Which of the two brings you more work, honestly? I’d put my money on the private message every time, and so would you if I asked you to bet.

It isn’t a redesign

The fix is a picture, a name and one sentence, saved once, in a settings screen that already has the empty fields sitting in it waiting.

Whoever built your site could have done it in the time it takes to make a coffee. Mostly they don’t, because nobody puts it on a list and nobody complains about it afterward.

Jobs that size are what looking after a website really consists of, and not one of them ever reaches a quote.

You wouldn’t complain either. You never see what your own link looks like, because your phone doesn’t show you a preview of your own address in your own hand. I only know how common the blank version is because I sampled 7,413 businesses here and audited 5,512 of their websites to find out, and you can read the same card I read by setting the city menu on my report to this one and leaving the industry menu on all, because one menu on its own rolls the whole place up and every check on that card arrives carrying the number of sites behind it.

You already did the expensive part

Around here 90.5% of the businesses I audited hold at least one Google review, which tells me the public conversation about these companies is in good shape. The private one is bigger, and nobody can see it.

Every one of those stars came from a job done properly, on a day when you were tired, for a customer who had other options.

The link is the last inch of that work. It’s also the only inch nobody owns, because it isn’t design, it isn’t marketing, and it isn’t anything a client has ever asked me to quote for.

When someone hires me to build a site in this city, that block gets filled in the same afternoon the logo goes on, and then it never comes up again for the life of the site.

A contractor here emailed me on a Sunday to ask what a rebuild would run him, and he didn’t need to buy one to fix this.

If you’d rather have me look at yours than go poking around in your own settings, that’s what my free audit is for, and it takes me a minute to check.

What I’d do tonight

Text your own homepage address to yourself, then look at what appears above the words.

A picture and your name means someone did the job properly. A bare address sitting there on its own means the block is empty, and it’ll stay empty until a person fills it in.

If it were my business, I’d have that done before Friday. The woman on the couch is the cheapest customer I’ll ever get, and she already did the hard part for nothing.