Strategy3 min read
Do you still need a website if you have Google and Instagram?
Plenty of businesses run on a Google listing and an Instagram account. Here is what that gives up, and who can afford to give it up.
It is a fair question. A Google Business Profile is free, appears on the map, collects reviews, and takes bookings. Instagram shows the work, reaches people, and costs nothing. For a barber, a landscaper, or a café, that can look like enough. Sometimes it is. Usually it is enough until the moment it is not, and the moment tends to arrive when the business is trying to grow.
What the profile and the feed do well
Credit where due. The Google profile is the single most important local listing a business has: it is where the map pin, the hours, the phone number, and the reviews live, and for many searches it is the first thing a customer sees. Social media is where personality and recency live, where a business shows it is active and human, and where a certain kind of customer discovers it. Neither is optional. A business without a maintained profile is invisible on the map, and we say so in our note on local search.
What they cannot do
- They cannot make the case. A profile is a listing; a feed is a stream. Neither can walk a hesitant customer through what you do, why it costs what it costs, and what happens when they get in touch, in the order that persuades.
- They are not yours. The platform decides what is shown, to whom, and in what order, and changes its mind without notice. A business that lives entirely on rented ground has no floor.
- They cannot answer specific questions. "Do you do retaining walls in Elora?" has no home on a profile. On a website it is a page, and that page is what search engines and AI answer engines quote.
- They flatten you into the category. Every profile looks like every other profile. Everything that makes your business the obvious choice rather than one of five is invisible there.
- They do not compound. A feed post is gone in a day. A well-made page answers the same question for years.
The site is the thing the others point to
The businesses that win locally do not choose between a website and the platforms. They treat the website as the destination and the platforms as the roads to it. The profile links to the site. The feed links to the site. The site is where the visitor arrives already interested and is given every reason to act. That is why the site has to be good: it is the only surface where the business controls the whole experience, and it is where the platforms send the customers who are closest to deciding.
Who genuinely does not need one yet
We would rather say this than sell you something you do not need. A business that is fully booked by word of mouth, does not want to grow, and has no reason to differentiate can run on a profile and a feed. A business testing whether an idea has customers at all should spend on the test before the site. And a business with no photographs of its work, no clear service list, and no time to think about positioning should fix those first, because a website built without them will be a template with a logo, whatever it costs.
When the answer changes
The answer changes when the business wants customers who are not already looking for it by name, when it wants to charge more than the cheapest competitor, when it adds services or locations, or when a platform change costs it visibility overnight. At that point the website stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the asset everything else depends on. Most businesses arrive here; the question is whether they arrive before or after the cost of not having one has been paid.
Questions people ask
- Is a Google Business Profile enough for a local business?
- It is essential, but it is a listing, not an argument. It gets you found on the map; it cannot make the case for choosing you over the next pin. The businesses that convert map traffic send it to a website that does that work.
- Can Instagram replace a website?
- For discovery and personality, it is excellent. For answering specific questions, for search, for anything a customer wants to read at their own pace, and for being something you own rather than rent, it cannot.
- What is the minimum website a small business should have?
- A fast, honest site that says what you do, where, for whom, and what happens next, with real photographs and a way to get in touch that takes less than a minute. It can be small. It cannot be vague.
Put it to work