You can build visibility in all kinds of places.
Someone may discover you through Instagram, hear you on a podcast, read your name in an article, find you through Google, meet you at an event, receive something you wrote from a friend, or hear about you from someone they trust.
All of those things can be incredibly valuable. In fact, a strong visibility strategy usually depends on more than one of them.
But eventually, someone who discovers you may want to know more.
Where do you send them?
Years ago, I wrote an article about why every business should have a website. My argument was fairly simple: social media is rented space. Your website is something you own and control.
I still believe that.
But after decades of helping businesses think about visibility — and years of building, rebuilding, and occasionally overthinking websites of my own — I think there’s a bigger reason.
Your business needs somewhere to come home to.
YOUR WEBSITE GIVES EVERYTHING ELSE SOMEWHERE TO LEAD.
Social media can introduce you. A media story can validate you. Search can help someone discover you. A podcast can let them hear how you think. An email can bring them back. A referral can arrive with trust already attached.
None of those things has to compete with your website.
They can lead to it.
That matters because most of the places where we build visibility give people only part of the picture. A social post captures one thought. A podcast conversation explores one topic. A media story tells one piece of the story. A search result answers one question.
Your website can bring those pieces together and provide the context someone needs to understand the business behind them.
That’s the real value of a business website: it gives everything else you’re doing somewhere intentional to lead.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve never been particularly interested in the argument that websites are becoming irrelevant because people spend so much time elsewhere.
Elsewhere is often where discovery happens. Your website is where someone can arrive.
A GOOD WEBSITE HELPS PEOPLE GET ORIENTED.
When someone lands on your website, they shouldn’t have to work very hard to figure out where they are.
At its most basic, a website should help someone answer three questions:
What is this?
Is it for me?
What should I do next?
That sounds simple.
It isn’t always.
Over time, websites have a tendency to accumulate. Another service gets added. Then a free resource. Then an old offer stays in the navigation even though you barely talk about it anymore. A new audience emerges, so you squeeze in a paragraph for them. Three different calls to action compete for attention because all three seem important.
Before long, the website may contain everything about the business without making the business particularly easy to understand.
That’s when I stop thinking about pages and start thinking about paths.
Where did this person probably come from? What might they need to understand first? What belongs next? What would be useful to them from here?
A good website doesn’t simply store information.
It creates an experience.
