A website or only a business profile

What a profile does exceptionally well

Local discovery. Somebody searching for a service near them sees a map result with hours, a rating and a phone number, and a complete profile frequently wins that comparison outright.

It is also where reviews live for most local businesses, and reviews do more for a local decision than anything a business says about itself.

Claim it, complete every field, and keep it accurate. Our page on business profiles covers the detail, and it is the highest-return hour available to a local business.

What it cannot do

Explain anything. A profile has a category, a short description and photographs. It cannot say what makes your work different, what goes wrong on a job, or why your price is what it is.

Be found for a specific question. Somebody searching for a problem rather than a category is looking for a page, and there is no page in a profile to find.

And it cannot be quoted. Our page on choosing sources covers what gets cited, and a profile entry rarely qualifies as a source about anything.

Where the two reinforce each other

A profile with a website attached performs better than one without, because the site gives a hesitant customer somewhere to satisfy themselves before calling.

The site also gives the profile something to link to for every service, which makes the listing more useful and gives visitors a route into real material.

And the facts have to agree. Our page on consistent business details covers why a disagreement between the two is worse than either being incomplete.

What a profile alone leaves on the table

Each item below is work a local business loses by having no site. None of it is visible as a loss, which is why so many businesses stay with a profile alone for years.

• Anybody searching for a problem rather than a category
• Anybody comparing two businesses in detail before calling
• Anybody researching months before they buy
• Any question that takes more than a sentence to answer
• Being named as a source in an answer
• Links from other sites, which a profile cannot receive
• Anything you want to say that the profile has no field for

The minimum site worth having

Five pages. What you do, where you work, proof of the work, how to get in touch, and what happens next. That is enough to support a profile and to be found for a service in an area.

It does not need to be elaborate. Our page on one-page sites covers the smallest honest version, which is better than nothing by a wide margin.

Add pages as real questions appear. The profile keeps producing calls meanwhile, so there is no pressure to finish everything at once.

Keeping the profile primary at first

If your time is limited, keep the profile complete before improving the site. Photographs, hours, services, questions answered and reviews responded to all move local results.

Then build the site around what the profile cannot carry. That ordering wastes no effort, because the two are answering genuinely different questions.

Revisit the profile quarterly. It goes stale quietly, and a wrong opening time there costs more immediately than any page on your site.

The risk of a profile alone

It is an account on somebody else's platform, subject to suspension, category changes and rules you do not control. Businesses do lose profiles, sometimes in error, and recovery is slow.

A profile also cannot be moved. Everything it has accumulated belongs to that platform, and there is no version of it you can take somewhere else.

A small site alongside it is the insurance. It costs little, it earns work of its own, and it means a suspended profile is a setback rather than a closure.