Last week I read small business sites one at a time. This week I did something cheaper. I took the website address off each nearby map listing and followed it, the way a customer with a phone in their hand would.Thirty-two addresses. Every one of them had a website field, which is the only reason it made the list.Eleven did not lead to the business.Seven of those domains don't exist anymore. Not an error page, not a parking page. The name resolves to nothing at all. That address is still sitting on a map where a customer can tap it, typed in once, years ago, when the site was real.Two answer, and there is no page at the address. One says "Page not found" and asks not to be indexed. The other redirects to www and lands on a 404. The domain is alive and there is nothing behind it.One now belongs to someone else. This is the one that stayed with me. A shop's listed address redirects, then redirects again, then again. Where it lands is an occupational therapy practice in Germany, then a supplement shop, then an electrical business in another German town. That is not an accident. That is an expired domain bought for whatever authority it still had and pointed at whoever pays. Somebody's old customers are being handed to four strangers in a row.And one is up, but cannot take a secure connection. The domain answers on plain HTTP. Every request over HTTPS dies mid-handshake. Browsers try HTTPS first almost always now, so a customer gets a security warning instead of a shop.Five more refused to answer my automated visit at all, with 403 or 429. That is my problem, not theirs, so I did not count them. Sixteen loaded cleanly.Here is what I am not claiming. I do not know which of those eleven listings the owner made and which one a map editor typed in from a directory feed in 2016. That is the part people get wrong about their own listing. You check your site. You do not check the copy of your address that lives somewhere else.Ten seconds to check yours, and it only counts if you do it the way a stranger does.Take your phone off wifi. Search your business name. Tap the website link that comes up, the one you did not put there. If it loads, tap the hours. If it doesn't, you have just found a customer who left without saying anything.Then do it again everywhere your name is: Apple Maps, the map inside Facebook, your chamber directory, the local paper's business page. Your name is in more places than your website is.A dead link is quieter than a dead phone. A phone rings somewhere at least, and someone could decide to answer it. A link that goes nowhere doesn't even say it is broken. The customer taps the next name on the list and never thinks about it again.I checked thirty-two. Eleven.Look at yours tonight. It takes ten seconds, and it is the only part of your marketing that a customer touches before they decide anything.

I followed the website link on 32 nearby map listings. Eleven didn't lead to the business. Ten seconds to check yours, and why your own site is not what a customer taps.

I checked 32 map listings. Eleven of the website links went nowhere.

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I checked 32 map listings. Eleven of the website links went nowhere.

I checked 32 map listings. Eleven of the website links went nowhere.

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