A Good Website Isn’t Enough: How to Get Found, Trusted and Chosen Online

Obviously, having a good website is important. I’m a web designer, so it would be a bit weird if I told you otherwise. But here’s the thing. A good website on its own isn’t enough anymore.

You can spend thousands on a beautiful new website, but if nobody can find it, what’s the point? And even if people can find it, that doesn’t mean they’re going to contact you.

Think about the last time you were looking for a business online. Did you click on the first website you found and immediately get your credit card out? Probably not. You had a look around. You checked a couple of businesses. You looked at their reviews. You might have had a look at their social media. You worked out who you trusted and who you didn’t, and eventually, you chose one. Your customers are doing exactly the same thing.

That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I actually help my customers do at Exaltis. Yes, I build websites. I do SEO. I help businesses with Google. But ultimately, all of those things need to achieve three things:

Get you found, get you trusted, and get you chosen.

So, let’s look at what that actually means.

This is the obvious bit. You could be absolutely brilliant at what you do, but if someone searches for your service and finds three of your competitors instead of you, they’re probably never going to know that.

That’s where SEO comes in. And SEO really doesn’t need to be as mysterious as it’s often made out to be.

Google needs to understand what your business does, who you help and where you do it. Your website needs to answer the things your potential customers are searching for, and it needs to give Google good reasons to show your business rather than somebody else’s. If you’re a local business, your Google Business Profile matters too. For some businesses, it’s one of the first things a potential customer will see.

Then there’s the fact that the way we search is changing. We’re not just typing things into Google anymore. People are asking much more detailed questions and using different platforms to find businesses, products and recommendations.

That doesn’t mean you need to panic and completely change everything you’re doing. It does mean that having clear, genuinely useful information about your business online is becoming even more important.

Because before anyone can buy from you, they need to be able to find you.

So, they’ve found you. Excellent. Now they’re judging you, and they can do that incredibly quickly.

Does your website look professional? Is it obvious you’re still trading? Are your reviews recent? Can they see examples of your work? Does the whole thing feel credible? These are just a handful of the questions you need to answer.

Businesses often underestimate the importance of their online presence. You might know you’re brilliant at what you do. Your existing customers might know it too. A potential customer doesn’t know that yet. Your website has to give them enough confidence to take the next step.

That doesn’t mean you need the fanciest website on the internet. In fact, I’d take a clear, genuine, easy-to-use website over something flashy and confusing every single time.

Show people who you are. Show them your work. Use genuine customer reviews. Explain how you work. Answer the questions people are likely to have before they contact you. And keep everything up to date. Trust is built through lots of small signals. Your website is a massive part of that, but it isn’t the only one.

Think about how you buy online, especially when you’re spending a decent amount of money. What do you check before you part with your hard-earned cash? I know I don’t buy anything without doing a bit of digging first. How long have they been trading? What are their Google reviews like? Are those reviews recent? Does the business look genuine? What happens when I Google their name?

Your customers are doing exactly the same thing to you.

Being found isn’t the same as being chosen. Let’s say I search for an accountant in Newcastle. I find five that look decent. They’ve all got professional websites, and they’ve all got good reviews. They all offer roughly the service I’m looking for. Now what? Something has to make me think: “Yep. That’s the one I want to speak to.”

And this is where your website needs to do more than tell people what you sell. It needs to give them a reason to choose you.

What are you like to work with? Who do you work best with? What matters to you? How do you do things differently? What do your customers keep mentioning in their reviews? Quite often, the thing that makes your business different is something you don’t even think is particularly special because you do it every day. Your customer reviews can help you see through their eyes, so read them and note what keeps coming up.

I see this with Exaltis. A lot of my customers come to me because they’ve had a bad experience elsewhere, or because they feel completely out of their depth with websites and SEO. They don’t want to feel stupid for asking a question; they don’t want someone trying to baffle them with terminology, and they definitely don’t want to be sold a load of stuff they don’t need. To me, that’s just how I run my business, but to the right customer, those things really matter.

The important thing is not to look at your website, SEO, Google profile, reviews and social media as completely separate things. Your potential customers certainly don’t, they just see your business.

They don’t care whether the reason they found you was brilliant SEO, a well-optimised Google Business Profile or something you posted on LinkedIn three weeks ago. They care about what they find when they start looking.

And this is why I think Get found, get trusted, get chosen is a useful way to look at your own online presence. If people aren’t finding you, you need to work out why. If they’re finding you but not trusting you, there’s another problem to solve. And if they’re finding you, everything looks credible, but they’re still choosing somebody else, you need to understand what’s stopping them from taking that final step.

It sounds incredibly simple when you put it like that, but I actually think that’s the point. You don’t need to start with “Do I need SEO?” or “Do I need a new website?” Start with what isn’t working.

That might sound like a crazy thing for a web design company to say, but I really want to make this point because I think there’s far too much “your website is three years old, you need a new one” nonsense around.

You might not need a new website. Sometimes a website genuinely has reached the point where starting again makes more sense than trying to patch it up, but sometimes it hasn’t.

Maybe the website is fine, but hardly anybody is finding it.

Maybe plenty of people are finding it, but the content doesn’t really explain why they should choose you.

Maybe it looks dated compared with your competitors.

Maybe your reviews are fantastic, but you’re hiding them away where nobody sees them.

Maybe the website is getting traffic, but people aren’t actually getting in touch.

These are all very different problems, and building a shiny new website without knowing which problem you’re trying to solve isn’t necessarily going to change anything. So, before you spend money on anything, work out what’s actually broken.

Have a Look at Your Own Business.

Pretend you’ve never heard of it. Try to look at it as a potential customer, not as the person who knows every word on the website because you’ve stared at it 400 times. Search for the service or product you offer. Can you find yourself?

Then search for your business name. What comes up?

Look at your Google Business Profile. Check your reviews. Visit your website on your phone. Have a look at your social media.

Then do exactly the same thing with two or three of your competitors.

Now ask yourself:

• Can people find me?
• Does what they find make them trust me?
• Have I given them a reason to choose me?

And be completely honest about it, because if one of those questions makes you go “Hmmmm…”, you’ve probably just found the thing you need to look at next.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to fix everything at once. You don’t. If you’ve realised your reviews are two years old, start asking your happy customers for new ones. If your website still talks about something you stopped offering in 2023, update it. If you’ve Googled what you do and you’re nowhere to be seen, then yes, it’s probably time to look at why.

And if you’ve just looked at your website on your phone and thought “Oh God…”, you know where to start.

The important thing is that you actually look at your business from the outside every now and again, because your customers don’t see all the work happening behind the scenes. They can only judge your business on what you put in front of them.

And ultimately, that’s what getting found, trusted and chosen really comes down to.