When you are starting out, your Google profile usually matters more than your website

This is not an argument against having a website. You need one, and later it will do work that no listing can. It is an argument about sequence, and about where a limited amount of attention goes in the first six months.

The short version: a new site starts from nothing and has to earn its way up over months. A Business Profile does not start from nothing, because it is competing in a much smaller, much more local field, and it can start showing up quite quickly.

A brand new domain has no history, nothing linking to it, and no record of anyone finding it useful. Search engines have no particular reason to trust it yet, and the pages it is competing against have often been sitting there for years collecting links and traffic.

That is not a flaw in the site. A perfectly built, fast, well written site still has to wait. Anyone who tells you their build will have you ranking in a few weeks is either talking about a search nobody performs or is not telling you the truth.

So for the first stretch, a new site mostly serves people who already know your name, or who found you somewhere else and came to check you are real. That is a genuine job, and it is not the same job as finding you new customers.

A Google Business Profile puts you into the map results, which sit above the ordinary links for local searches and take a large share of the attention on the page. It carries your phone number, your hours, your photographs and your reviews, so somebody can decide about you and ring you without ever loading your website.

It is also a much smaller competition. You are not up against every firm in the country, you are up against the local ones, and most of them have neglected theirs. A profile that is finished, current and accumulating genuine reviews can outperform a competitor's older, larger website for the searches that actually matter to you.

And it costs nothing except the afternoon it takes to do properly and the fifteen minutes a month it takes to keep alive.

Almost all of the value sits in a handful of jobs: the primary category, one exact version of your name, address and phone used everywhere, reviews asked for as part of how you already work, and real photographs.

We have written those up properly elsewhere rather than half repeating them here. If you are setting a profile up or tidying one, read that post next and work through it in order.

The profile gets you seen. The site is where a decent slice of those people go next, and it decides whether the enquiry happens. A listing with good reviews pointing at a site that loads slowly, hides the phone number and says nothing specific about the job will lose you people who had already half decided to call.

So the early website job is smaller than most people think, and more important than it sounds. Say plainly what you do and where. Put the phone number somewhere obvious on a phone screen. Have a page per service that reads like it was written by somebody who does the work. Load quickly. That is most of it.

The elaborate build can wait until you know which services actually sell, which is information you do not have on day one and will have by month six.

The profile has a ceiling. It only competes for local searches, it gives you very little room to explain anything complicated, and you do not own it. The rules can change, and a suspension is somebody else's decision about your livelihood.

The website has no ceiling, and you do own it. Over time it can rank for the questions people ask before they are ready to buy, carry the detail that wins the larger jobs, and be the thing that answer engines quote when somebody asks a chatbot for a recommendation. It also survives the day a platform changes its mind about you.

The sensible reading is not profile instead of website. It is profile first, because it pays sooner, then the website steadily, because it pays longer. Businesses that only ever do the first one hit a wall. Businesses that only do the second one wonder for a year why the phone is quiet.

Both of these put you in front of people. Neither answers your phone, replies to the enquiry the same day or sends the quote before the customer has rung somebody else. That part is still on you, and it is where most of the work is genuinely lost.

If you would rather have the profile done properly and then kept up, that is what our local search work covers, and it runs from £500 to £1,200 a month depending on how much of it there is. If you would rather do it yourself, everything above is doable in an afternoon and a monthly reminder. We would honestly rather you did it either way than left it half finished, which is where most profiles sit.