Do You Need a Website If You Have a Google Business Profile?

Short answer: yes.

Your Google Business Profile gets you found. The website is what people check before they call. Those are two different jobs, and the listing cannot do the second one.

Here is the longer answer, without the jargon.

What your Google listing does well

Your listing is how you show up on Google Maps and in local search. It carries your name, your hours, your phone number, your photos, and your reviews. When someone searches "barbershop near me", the listing is what they see first.

It is free, it matters, and if you have not claimed yours, do that before anything else.

What your listing cannot do

The listing is Google's page about you. It is not your page.

• You get a few lines to describe your business. Not a page per service, not your prices, not your story.
• Google decides the layout, and Google can change it whenever it wants.
• When someone wants to know more, the listing points to one place: your website. If there is no website, that road ends.

Think about how you buy. You find three plumbers on Maps, then you check each one before you call. The one with no website gives you nothing to check.

What changed in March 2024

For years, Google built simple free websites out of Business Profiles. Plenty of owners used them and never thought about it again.

Google shut those down in March 2024. A listing that pointed at one of those free sites now points at nothing.

If that was your setup, your listing is doing its job and then sending people to a dead end.

The listing gets you found. The website gets you chosen.

A website earns its keep in four ways a listing cannot:

• A page for every service. Someone searching "hot towel shave" finds a page about hot towel shaves, with the price on it, not a homepage that mentions everything you do at once.
• Pages for the neighborhoods you serve. People search where they live, not where you park the van.
• Your reviews as real text on the page. Quoted word for word, where a reader and a search engine can both see them.
• Something for AI to read. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for a business like yours, those systems answer from what they can read. A listing alone gives them very little. We wrote up how ChatGPT picks the local businesses it recommends if you want the details.

Here is what that looks like when it is real. Grove Batu Barbershop in Coconut Grove had a Wix site. We rebuilt it from its Google listing, its reviews, and the old site itself.

Their photo, their rating, their hours, one tap to book. Every fact on it came from things they had already written down somewhere.

The two have to say the same thing

One more part people miss: the listing and the website need to match.

If your listing says you close at 6 and your website says 7, one of them is wrong, and whoever trusted the wrong one is standing at a locked door. Search engines notice mismatched facts too.

The clean setup is one source of truth. You update your hours and services on Google, the way you already do, and the website follows. That is exactly how we build it, and there is a whole page on how the site stays matched to your listing.

"My customers all come from word of mouth"

Fair, and probably true. But follow the referral one more step.

Someone recommends you at a barbecue. The other person does not call you on the spot. They look you up later, on their phone, and what they find decides whether the referral turns into a booking. A complete listing and a real website close that loop. A dead link breaks it.

Word of mouth is not instead of a website. Word of mouth is traffic to it.

The same goes for a Facebook or Instagram page standing in for a site. Social pages are rented ground with someone else's rules and someone else's ads on them. Fine to have. Not a substitute for a page you own where your services, prices and hours live in plain text.

So what should you actually do?

If you have a listing and no website, in order:

1. Make sure the listing itself is complete. Hours, services, photos, and a real description.
2. Get a website that is built from the listing. Same name, same services, same hours. Not a generic template you fill in from scratch.
3. Give every service its own page. This is the single biggest difference between a site that gets found and a site that just exists.
4. Put your reviews on it as text. You earned them. Let them do some work.

You can do all of that yourself with a site builder, pay an agency to do it once, or have a service do it and keep doing it. We broke down what each route really costs with real numbers.

The fastest way to see it

This is the part we built. Type your business name at 30secondsites.com and you will see a website built from your Google listing in about 30 seconds. Your photos, your reviews, your services.

Looking is free. No card, no login, no email until you want to keep it.