Why bother promoting your site?

If you've got a successful small business, there's a fair chance that you were getting business before you had a website. You might have even become quite a big business without a site - perhaps you get all of your leads through Facebook, or Instagram, or Checkatrade, or perhaps it's all word of mouth.

If you're in this situation it might feel like your website is really just something you have because you ought to have one, rather than that it's an essential part of attracting customers. And if you feel like that, then why bother working on the site or promoting it, or even caring about how many visitors it gets?

After all, it would certainly be simpler to just rely on Facebook or Instagram to plug yourself - you've probably got the app installed already, and they make it really easy to upload new content as you're just going about your day to day, and it's really easy to pay to boost a post on there. You don't have to learn anything technical, or think about backlinks or keywords or anything, you just need to produce content to feed the algorithm, and maybe throw them some money to boost your posts.

As simple as that might sound, in this post I'm going to try and convince you to shift your mindset to think of your website as the primary place you promote yourself, and social media networks or industry websites as the secondary places.

First Reason - Cumulative Progress

First up is what I think is the most compelling reason to work on your own site first - all of the effort you put in builds on itself. This is unlike social media websites, where it's all about how active you're being right now, and how much you're spending right now, both in time and money.

If you can get your site ranking well, then more people will visit it, and the more people that view your site, the higher the chances of one of those people linking to your site from elsewhere on the internet, or mentioning you on their socials, which will bring more visitors. Visitors, eventually, result in more visitors.

Or, if you create a really useful page on your site that addresses a common searcher intent, that page is there for the lifetime of your site - someone might discover it two years after you wrote it, and that visit is just as valuable to you two years down the line as it was when the article was fresh - the visitor is just as likely to turn into a sale.

This isn't how social media sites work - they prioritise recent content that's getting engagement over everything else. On Facebook your attention is the product because the longer you're on Facebook the more adverts you see and the more tempted you are to spend money to boost your posts, and so Meta, the owners of Facebook, want to keep your attention on Facebook for as long as possible. So for small business owners this means they want you to constantly re-visit Facebook to create new fresh content to feed the algorithm, which they can use to convince other people to spend more of their attention on Facebook. It's a hamster wheel, and as soon as you stop running, it stops and you've gone nowhere.

Second Reason - You Can't Trust Anyone Else

This sounds like a very cynical thing to say but I think it's fair when describing the modern internet. If we take Facebook as an example, they've been the target of numerous lawsuits for misleading advertisers about how many people have seen their posts. They also do a really terrible job of removing bots on the platform - in fact Mark Zukerberg shares posts from AI bots and seems to quite like them. Personally, I don't trust any Facebook stats about engagement, or views, or advert clicks, or anything else.

In a 2016 case, Facebook even admitted lying about view numbers on adverts, overestimating the amount of viewers watching ads by between 60 and 900% depending on whether you ask Facebook or the prosecution.

And never mind the numbers that Facebook give you - I also don't trust them to not pull the rug out from underneath advertisers at a moment's notice. This has happened before - it used to be the case that "following" a page meant you'd see all of their posts, and people put a lot of work into getting follows, but now the algorithm gets involved and hides your posts from an unknown amount of your followers, and there's nothing you can do about it except pay to boost it - and hope that Facebook doesn't fudge the numbers about how many saw it.

Also, Facebook and Instagram want you to spend all of your time on Facebook and Instagram, so they limit the reach of posts that link to other sites. So if you've got a booking system or a contact form you'd like your customers to fill out, and you're linking to it from your Facebook or Instagram posts, just having the link will limit the reach.

All in all this adds up to a pretty hostile environment to be marketing your business in, where the rules can change with no notice, where your reach is limited without giving you any insights into why, and where maybe you can't even trust the numbers you're seeing.

Compare this to promoting your own site, where anything you post can be popular, where you can measure the traffic yourself, and where visitors will always be able to find you. Admittedly you don't fully escape the algorithm since you ideally need to appeal to search engines, but at least that a system that people understand how to do well on, and at least there's multiple search engines out there even if Google does dominate that industry right now.

Third Reason - Easier Customers

Facebook want everyone to spend as much time on Facebook as possible, which includes you when you're dealing with customers. The design of Facebook encourages your potential customers to message you on there, rather than clicking off and viewing your website. The same applies to Checkatrade or RatedPeople or Bark or any of those lead generating websites - they want the customer to complete the full experience without ever leaving the site.

This means that when someone messages you on those platforms, they might not know anything about your business. Facebook don't give you any easy way to answer frequently asked questions, or display all of your products, or show your most recent menu or offers, or really show anything other than your recent posts. You're very limited in terms of informing your customer about how you do business.

Compare this to someone getting in touch after browsing your website. On your own site, you can totally control what visitors see. You can set up your order system to collect all of the information you need for the specific product the customer is interested in, and so the lead can arrive in your inbox with a lot of the details already figured out. You can save a lot of back-and-forth messaging and avoid some time waster customers by having them visit your website before getting in touch. Many business owners have told me that website customers are much easier to convert into sales than social media or lead generation site ones.

Fourth Reason - All your eggs in one basket

I should clarify that I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a Facebook or Instagram page, or that you shouldn't be on Checkatrade, or anything like that. You should definitely be on whatever platforms can bring you some business, even if the customers ask more questions or the algorithm is fickle or anything else I've said so far.

But, you should be careful not to entirely rely on one source for your business because things can change at a moment's notice. Facebook's algorithm might decide to deprioritise you and never tell you, or someone could spam you with negative reviews on a review site, or your account could get hacked or blocked for some reason. If any of these happen it's generally really hard to get in touch with anyone at the website to help, and if that's where all of your business comes from it'll really suck.

By getting your business from a few different places you're protected against this, and you're also probably attracting different sets of customers too. Some people will search Facebook or Instagram for businesses, but I'd bet that more probably search Google, and there'll be others who only ever use review sites, or who find businesses on Google or Apple Maps, or maybe even their TomTom GPS, or from asking Siri, or a million other ways. You really ought to try and ensure your business shows up on whichever spots make sense for the type of work you do.

Fifth Reason - Data ownership and privacy

I don't trust big tech companies. There have been too many examples of companies misusing user data, or the data of the sellers who use their platforms.

Some examples that come to mind are Amazon, tracking their sellers to see which products did well and then making their own AmazonBasics version of the product and ranking it above the original, or Facebook uploading your whole contacts list to build shadow profiles about each one, even if they didn't have a Facebook account.

Your interactions with customers on these platforms add to the knowledge the platform has about your customers, but that knowledge isn't shared with you. Facebook won't tell you why it costs a certain amount to boost a certain post, or anything about who saw it. They won't give you an email address for the customer so you can contact them outside of the platform, and they won't tell you how they landed on your page or what they were interested in. And if the customer deletes their Facebook account, it's like they never existed as far as you can tell. But you can collect that data through your own site - and you can do it in a way which is anonymous and protects the privacy of your site visitors, and which is under your full control.

Where to Start

So hopefully you're slightly more convinced to put some effort into your website and online presence now, but where should you start? Well, you can check out our guides and videos for helpful tips, including our SEO checklist!

But if you've done the things in that list and are wondering how to replicate your social media stuff on your site, I think it might be worth re-thinking that a bit. Your site and your social media are two separate things, and it's usually the case that they'll have different things on them. Check out our guide "What To Blog About" in the guides section, where I mention that it's pretty redundant to make a blog post which just describes a product - you're better off spending that time improving the product page.

So in terms of linking your social media posts to your website promotion, what might be a good approach could be to, when you're considering posting something to social media that basically just advertises a product, first looking at how that product or service is represented on your website, improving the website version however you can, and then linking to the new improved version from the social media post. You're improving the website version, and then showing the new improved version off on social media.

Or, if you're considering posting something to social media which has the room to go a bit viral, like maybe a behind the scenes video, or something funny, like a post which took a bit of effort, maybe you could upload that video to YouTube too, and embed the YouTube version in your site. That way, rather than only the people on Instagram seeing your cool new video, people on YouTube or your website can too.

It's about spreading the effort out to multiple places on the internet, including your website, rather than focusing it all in one place.

It's worth remembering throughout this that you probably won't see instant results on your website. It takes a while for search engines to find the new content, and then for people to find it, and then for them to tell their friends, or book with you - it's a slower burn than social media sites where a post either does well or it doesn't within a couple of days. Don't be too disheartened by this - like I said before it's about the cumulative effort, and if you track things on a week to week or month to month scale you'll see visitor numbers to your site climb and more conversions coming in.

Time Investment

You should try and improve something to do with your web presence reasonably regularly, maybe once a week. This might be as simple as adding a couple of lines to a product description to address a question you've been asked a few times, or responding to reviews on your Google Maps listing, to as complex as recording a video walkthrough of how to use one of your products or adding a whole new category to your site. Remember what I said before about the effort being cumulative? So even if you just do a tiny bit each week, 52 times a tiny bit adds up to a pretty big bit over the year. And remember to mix it up - don't just spend all year working on product descriptions, spend some of that time improving your maps listing, or your news posts, or your profiles on industry websites.

Improving your web presence is like exercising - the important thing is to do something reasonably regularly, and it doesn't really matter whether that's something big or small. Consistency is key. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Slow and steady wins the race. You know all the cliches, but they're true.

Measuring Success

Ultimately, the three metrics that matter are how many people found your site, how many of those got in touch with you, and how many of THOSE were able to pay for your services. It's worth setting up some sort of way to measure this - maybe that's as simple as using Google Search Console to see how many times your site showed in results and was clicked, and counting the number of enquiries you get.

The annoying reality with web marketing is that it's often very hard to pinpoint what specific action lead to someone becoming a customer. Like, lets say you add a new blog post to your site describing an interesting job you did at a food festival. I've never been your customer but I happen to see that post when researching something else, and tell my friend who runs food festivals the next time I see them. She searches you on Google, finds your business, and spends a load of money with you. Your stats will show that this sale came from Google, but really they'd been primed by their friend who read a blog post of yours.

Of course, a good way around this is to just ask customers how they found you - which is probably the most accurate way to measure your success, with the bonus side effect of probably giving you new ideas of how to market yourself.

If you're ready to start promoting your website properly, get in touch.