Guide
Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?
An honest answer from people who sell websites: the profile does most of the work. Here is when a site actually matters, and when it can wait.
Short answer: your Google Business Profile does most of the work for local searches, so fix that first. A website matters for the customer comparing you against two others, for jobs above a few thousand dollars, and as the one place online you own outright.
The honest version
We sell websites, so treat this section with appropriate suspicion and then read it anyway.
If you have no website and a half-finished Google profile, the website is not your problem. Fix the profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it is what shows up when somebody searches your trade in your town.
In our study of 141 local service businesses, one in eight had no website at all, almost all of them in towns under 5,000 people. Plenty of them were busy. A website is not a licence to operate.
What the profile already does
For local searches, a complete Google Business Profile covers most of it: your hours, your phone, your services, your photos, your reviews, directions, and a button that calls you. Somebody can find you and hire you without a website ever loading.
That is why the order matters. Profile first, always. A beautiful website attached to a profile with a blank services section is a shop with the lights on and no sign on the road.
When a website earns its keep
Four situations, in rough order of how much difference it makes:
The comparison
Somebody has three tabs open and is deciding. The profile got you into the comparison; the site is where you win or lose it. No site means the decision gets made on review count alone, which is fine if yours is the highest and expensive if it isn't.
Bigger jobs
Nobody researches a blocked drain. People absolutely research a re-roof, a renovation, a heat pump. Above a few thousand dollars, customers slow down and look for evidence, and evidence is photos of jobs like theirs.
Answering the same questions
Do you service my town, do you do emergencies, are you licensed, roughly what does it cost. Every one of those answered on a page is a call you do not have to take or a conversation that starts further along.
Being reachable after hours
Most enquiries do not arrive at ten on a Tuesday morning. A form or a text option catches the ones that arrive while you are on a roof or asleep.
When it can wait
Some cases where we would tell you not to bother yet:
- Your profile is unverified or thin. Do that first, in full
- You are booked out and not trying to grow. A website is a growth tool. If you do not want more work it is a monthly bill with a nice font
- You are about to change trades, name or coverage area. Build the site after that settles, not twice
What we would not recommend is a site nobody maintains. A page listing hours from two summers ago and a phone number you have changed is worse than no page, because it is confidently wrong in public.
The argument nobody makes
Your Google profile is not yours. It can be suspended, edited by strangers through “suggest an edit”, or merged with a duplicate somebody else created. Usually none of that happens. Occasionally it does, and the businesses it happens to are always the ones who had nowhere else to point customers.
A website is the one address online you own outright. Not glamorous, and much more comforting on the day something goes sideways.
One more thing worth knowing: 97% of the sites we could check in our study already had Google Analytics installed. Almost nobody had ever opened it. Most local businesses are not short of tools. They are short of twenty minutes and somebody to say which twenty minutes matter.
See where you stand
We will look at your profile and your site, if you have one, and tell you which of the two is actually costing you work. Free, before you pay us anything. If the answer is “neither, you're fine”, we will say that.