For the record, I have absolutely no idea.

Web Traffic Solutions (WTS) was a Niagara web design company that was around until 2016 as far as I can tell. Looking at the archived versions of the site available using the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org), it seems there were live versions until October 2016, error pages until around 2019, and then nothing after that.

Why does this matter?

Well, it doesn’t, per se. I’m working on a new site for a customer who had their original site designed by Web Traffic Solutions and I noticed that when I clicked on the site credits that the website at http://webtrafficsolutions.ca wasn’t available. Moreover, the domain webtrafficsolutions.ca was available for registration. That was interesting, because there are still a lot of pages online that point to that domain. What to do?

Obviously, I registered the domain 🙂

I don’t expect a huge jump in traffic, but now I’ll have a few more visits to the site (this page, in particular) because of that domain registration. Will it result in more much more traffic? It might. Perhaps a customer of Web Traffic Solutions is trying to track them down to get some changes made – and they’ll find me instead – and perhaps I will be able to help them with their website needs.

I also recreated the email address used on the WTS website and forwarded it to my own. I’ll probably get a ton of spam, but then again, I might just get a new customer out of it.

What’s the Marketing Takeaway?

When a local business in your industry closes, see if you can buy the domain from them when they close their doors. If they don’t agree or the price they want is too high, consider putting a backorder in so when the domain expires you’ll be able to register it. Perhaps create a page for the domain on your own site explaining what happened and how you’ll be happy to help any of the former business’ customers.

I hope you find this tip helpful in your own online marketing endeavours!