People don't discover businesses in one place anymore
If you've ever felt like you need to be doing everything, posting on social media, keeping your Google Business Profile updated, showing up at networking events and hoping your website is pulling its weight too, that feeling isn't wrong. That is genuinely how people find businesses now.
There isn't one place doing all the heavy lifting anymore. It's several places, working together, often over weeks or months before someone actually gets in touch. Whether you're a yoga teacher, a retreat facilitator or an interior designer, the way someone finds their way to you is rarely a straight line.
It usually starts with Google
For all the change in how people discover businesses, Google is still the biggest starting point. That might be a straightforward search, it might be someone finding your Google Business Profile through Maps, and increasingly it's someone asking an AI search tool a question and your business turning up, or not, in the answer.
Your Google Business Profile is often the very first impression someone gets of you, sometimes before they've even reached your website. It's where your reviews sit, where your opening hours and location live, and where a lot of people decide whether to click through any further. If a photographer or a personal trainer's profile is incomplete or hasn't been touched in a while, it's often the first thing worth fixing, before anything else.
Then people go and check you out properly
Once someone's aware of you, your website and your social media do different jobs.
Your website is usually where people go to enquire and find out the actual detail, what you offer, how it works, what it costs, how to book. Social media is more like your storefront, it's where people see the ins and outs of your business, the behind the scenes, the educational and value led posts, the entertaining and trend led content. For a food photographer or a hypnotherapist, that's often where someone first gets a feel for who you are, long before they're ready to enquire.
Neither one replaces the other. A brilliant Instagram with a weak website loses enquiries. A great website nobody can find loses them just as fast.
Word of mouth hasn't gone anywhere, it's just gone digital
One of my own enquiries came from meeting someone at a networking event, connecting with her on LinkedIn afterwards, and then a couple of months later she got in touch through LinkedIn wanting to work together. That's word of mouth, it just routed through three different places before it turned into a conversation.
That's fairly typical of how discovery actually works now. People rarely convert from the first touchpoint. They see you somewhere, then somewhere else, then eventually they're ready.
Personal trainers, therapists, coaches, this is especially true in service based industries where trust matters before anyone hands over money. Nobody books a course of therapy sessions off the back of one Instagram post. They need to see you a few times, in a few places, before that trust builds enough to enquire.
It's rarely one tidy route either. I've had people message me directly on Instagram, others get in touch through my website, and some book a Social Brew Call straight off the back of a link on my social media without any message at all. There's no single path people take to get in touch, which is exactly why having several places working properly matters more than perfecting just one.
AI search is raising the stakes
AI search tools are a genuinely huge part of how people are finding businesses now and it's only growing. This makes it more important that your website, Google Business Profile and social media profiles are all properly optimised with clear, specific industry keywords, the actual terms your ideal client is searching for.
Small details matter more here than people expect. Make sure your business name, not your personal name, is what's set as the title on your profiles and pages. It sounds minor, but it's exactly the kind of detail that determines whether AI search tools and Google understand what your business actually is.
It's worth going through your website, social bios and Google Business Profile with fresh eyes and asking whether a stranger or an AI tool could work out exactly what you do and who it's for within a few seconds. If it takes any real digging to work out, that's costing you visibility you don't need to be losing.
You don't need to be everywhere, but you need everything you do to work together
None of this means you need to be everywhere constantly. It means the places you are need to be working together rather than sitting in isolation; your website reflecting what your social media says, your Google Business Profile reinforcing both and your social content actually leading people somewhere.
If you want a proper look at how your website, Google presence and social media are working together right now, book a Social Brew Call and we'll take a holistic look at your digital marketing.
