If you’re seeing this, we did a good job so far!
The internet is so integrated into our lives these days, that it can be hard to trust a business without a website. That’s why you need one! It can also increase your visibility to new consumers!
This month is donate life month. If you are interesting in becoming an organ donor, or you would just like to know more, please visit https://donatelife.net/.
SOURCES
Adapted from this list: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/basic-marketing-questions
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-cheap-website-builder/
https://www.business.com/articles/building-online-presence/’
https://www.upwork.com/resources/how-to-promote-business-online
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/03/08/20-tips-for-improving-online-business-visibility-through-seo/
https://www.positional.com/blog/pagerank https://basicsofmarketing.com/seo/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Today we’re going to talk about one of the biggest topics many businesses worry about – how to be visible online! And if you’re watching this, I’m going to assume that you’re not working for a Fortune 500 company that should have already figured this sort of stuff out. I’m going to assume you’re working for a small business that needs to grow in visibility and you’re really struggling to know where to start.
And hey, guess what – this is an area where I’m not an expert, so I’m going to cite some sources today that you can check out in the show notes!
Some of this is medicine I need to take myself, so it’s going to be a reference for me and RPG as well.
But let’s first and foremost ask the question – does your business need to be visible online? The long answer is, “probably yes, but possibly no, depending on what sort of business you’re running…” but honestly, let’s stick with the short answer of “yes” because there are very few cases in which having zero online presence is going to be better for you than having at least something.
Why? Because research has shown that 70-80% of people, when they need something, go to Google to search for it, and if you’re not showing up through their information search, the only way they’re going to find you is through a referral. So if you have a really good referral-based business or you’re running something that’s geographically very visible to the local population you serve, sure, you probably don’t need much of an online presence.
But what do you do when those referrals dry up or when that location is no longer getting the foot traffic it once did?
That’s where having an online presence can help!
So let’s delve into this topic, and I’ll try to give you some good sources you can turn to if you want to learn more.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So let’s begin this episode with the acknowledgment that everything is changing right now and what has been working or is working for people today, which just happens to be April 1, 2026 – no foolin!’ – may not work for people at any date past today. So what we really need to have is a framework rather than a set of practical tips, because generative AI is causing us to rethink the entire process of internet search and digital marketing.
So let’s begin with the basics. If you want your business to be visible online, you first need three things.
You need a website.
You need content.
You need reviews.
Let’s unpack all of these a bit to understand why they’re important.
The need for a website in 2026 should be a no-brainer. If you have a business and don’t yet have a website, you need to set one up. It’s not hard to do it, and if you’re even a little bit tech-savvy, it’s also not that expensive.
I’m going to presume you’re not tech-savvy enough to build your own website. If that’s the case, don’t worry – there are multiple services on the web who specialize in serving smaller businesses, and the best and easiest to use really boil down to a few choices. The three I’d recommend are Squarespace, Shopify and WordPress. A couple of other popular ones are Hostinger and GoDaddy. All of these will cost you between $10-30 a month and generally purchase your domain name for you.
Your domain name is your address on the internet. We have themarketinggateway.com and researchplan.com. You don’t need to have a dot com to have an effective website – you can try cheaper options like dot net or dot biz or dot us – but whatever web domain you do have should be easy for people to associate with your business. If you’re running a retail business called Sally’s Fruit Stand, you probably won’t get something easy like sallys.com, but sallysfruitstand.com or sallysfruit.biz or sallysstand.biz would all probably be easier to get and set up.
If you’re using a service like Squarespace, Shopfiy or WordPress, they have tools that will help you create a website. I would recommend using their templates and building it yourself – don’t waste time with AI tools that generate a bunch of junk, because your business will look fake to people checking you out. The most important things to have on your website are the things people would want to know if they want to do business with you:
What products or services you offer
Where you’re located
How to contact you
What your hours are, if you have a storefront
A little bit about your business
That’s really it! If you want to provide more than that, you can, but the general rule of thumb for a small business website is to keep it simple. Remember that most people will be viewing your site on their mobile phones, and too much information is overwhelming. The easier it is for them to find what they’re looking for, the more effective your website will be.
Often, you want to drive people to contact you. Generally, you don’t want to post your actual email address on the website – post a general one instead or use a contact form – and do make sure you include your phone number and links to any social media sites you plan to use.
Speaking of which, you definitely should be on social media, but only if you plan to utilize and monitor those social channels. If you have a link to a Facebook or LinkedIn business page, make sure it has all your contact information and that you occasionally post something on it. Likewise for X or Instagram or TikTok or any other social media you might use.
These can be helpful for ensuring that search engines drive traffic to your webpage, but don’t rely on these social media websites to be your online address – when people hit a login screen, as they often do on social media they tend to search elsewhere because extra effort. You want to make it easy for people to find information about your business.
All of these tools so far are very important for providing the basic information that search engines will find and index, and the same goes for AI tools that rely on their training data or which use internet search. Unfortunately, your website is not going to be very visible unless you can build some hooks into it to get search engines to really notice it.
Think of this like putting a sign on the front of your business. If you just have a sign on your door, which is what a website basically is, no one’s going to see you unless they’re really looking for you or know your address already.
But if you build a big, visible sign – well, that can change things. And that’s essentially what search engine optimization, or SEO, is used for. It helps you to build a big sign that search engines will see and which make you more visible online.
My colleague Zank Creek explains on his website Basics of Marketing that there are three pillars of SEO:
Technical SEO – Accessibility/Usability/Crawlability/Indexability
On-Page SEO – Maximizing Value for Audiences
Off-Page SEO – Authority & Reputation
You can find a link to his guide in the show notes.
But in truth, you don’t need to be an expert in SEO to use it, and you don’t need to hire anyone to do SEO for you initially. Hire reputable SEO specialists when you’re trying to grow. You can do a lot of it on your own using your own knowledge about your business.
The basic SEO tools are probably going to be included in the backend of your website. Your website-builder tool will very likely ask you to describe what your website has to offer and to describe it in a few sentences. It might even have an SEO tool that asks you for some keywords. So think about these carefully. What would people need to search for to find you?
And a few other questions to ask – What are you known for? What problems do you solve? What pain points do you alleviate? Who is your target audience? These are all topics your website should address.
For me at Researchplan.com, a few important words are “st. louis”, “marketing research” “focus groups” “surveys” and “in-depth interviews.” These are all services I offer, and if someone search for “st. louis focus groups,” I want them to find me. So all of these words are on my front page and also mentioned on my website in ways that the search engines will notice them.
But you know what? There are a bunch of people in St. Louis who offer focus groups, and even worse, there are people outside of St. Louis who just buy a bunch of search terms so they can get ads placed to drown me out on Google so they can try to siphon off my business. This means I’m less likely to show up as one of the first search results. And so I can boost my SEO in a few ways.
The first is by having some expert content on my website that talks about things I have to offer. I can conduct focus groups – so what? I need to explain why I’m a good choice for providing them. I have a lot of good selling points – I’m an expert on them, I’ve done hundreds of them, I teach graduate students how to conduct them, I know how to do different types of them, and I even have a space in my office where we can do them for far less than it’d cost to do them in a large research facility.
So I have plenty to say that might be of interest to a potential customer! And if I write that up on a page on my website, the search engines will pick that content up as well.
But people game search engines all the time with loads of useless content, and so they have a second rule they look at – how authoritative is your content? Search engines used to be based on algorithms like Google’s PageRank, which would determine the authority of your content through how many links you had to your website. But now, the ranking is much more sophisticated and involves things like user experience, keyword optimization, content quality and freshness, multimedia content, mobile accessibility, site structure and local presence. Most of these are addressed by creating content on your website and other platforms.
Here’s where things can be fun. Do you have a Youtube video about your business? Embed it on your website somewhere.
Have you written articles on a site like Medium or LinkedIn or Substack? Be sure to link to your website somewhere in that article, but also be sure to have a spot on your website directing people to that content.
Do you have events or promotions going on that are of interest to locals? Be sure to have them listed in your website in a text-based format alongside any images you’re posting up so the search engines can find them, but also look for local directories when you can post them and link back to your website.
Have you produced some cool images or infographics or charts? You can and probably should put them on your website, but don’t be afraid as well to embed posts from Instagram or X that show how you’re sharing this content.
All of this content can also be really useful for creating backlinks, which is when you get other sites to link directly to your content. If you create a few useful articles, guides or infographics and put them on your website and then get some blogs, news sites or link to you, you’ll get good backlinks.
You can also seek out opportunities to write guest blogs or content for sites that cover topics pertaining to your business and get some backlinks that way. And hey – being on a podcast also helps, especially if the podcast is going to promote you and your website though multiple channels!
OK, so we’ve got a website, and we’ve got content across our own website and social media. There’s one more thing we need, and that’s reviews.
Reviews can come from many places. Yelp is a common one for retail businesses and restaurants, and TripAdvisor is also pretty common for things tourists might check out. There are also review sites for business to business products, for healthcare services, for specialty products, and so forth.
And two of the most important are Amazon and Google.
Amazon is only really important if you’re selling a product. Having a 4-star or better rating on Amazon gives you a lot of credibility and helps you to sell products better when you list them on your own website with a link to Amazon for purchasing. A lot of the zero-click AI tools are picking up Amazon ratings as well, and so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to attract good Amazon reviews. That’s another topic for another episode, though.
Google is the other one. Google has automatic business pages for most small businesses and you absolutely need to claim yours and update it if you haven’t already, because Google often gets the details wrong. Once you do, ask some of your best customers to write honest reviews for you.
Even one nice review can significantly boost your profile on Google when people are looking for specific services, and those searching for you will also trust you more if your review scores are 4 stars or above. You also want to have a bunch of positive reviews on there in case someone decides to give you a negative one. Remember that a perfect score is less credible than one that’s nearly perfect.
I wouldn’t focus on reviews as a key strategy until you have the website and content under control, but I’ve noticed AI bots are picking these review scores up and reporting them in zero-click searches and even prioritizing recommendations based on them. So take them seriously!
I hope this primer has been helpful to you. Again, I’m not an expert on this topic, so if you want to become truly visible online, be sure to bring in someone who specializes in SEO and online visibility.
Just be discerning about who you hire – there are a lot of charlatans out there who’ll take your money to run some automated tools you could have run yourself. Make sure you’re getting a good consultancy out of the relationship and they’re invested in helping you truly grow your business.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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