Online visibility as a founder: where do I even start?

Why the order matters more than completeness

In the startup phase, time is the scarcest resource, not knowledge. So it’s not about being active on every channel at once, but about identifying the steps that have the biggest effect for the least effort. A business that can’t be found online loses customers to competitors who are simply found first – regardless of who has the better offer. Visibility is therefore not a nice-to-have, but a basic requirement before other marketing measures can work at all.

A clear order has an added benefit: it breaks one big, vague task into manageable steps you can work through one after another. That makes getting started easier than trying to tackle every topic at once.

A sensible order for getting started

First comes the Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). It’s free, set up quickly and directly decides whether a business shows up in local searches at all. For most founders with a local or regional customer base, it’s the lever with the best effort-to-benefit ratio.

Next comes a working, technically sound website – not elaborately designed, but with the basics: fast load time, mobile display, a clear way to get in touch. Only once this foundation is in place does it pay to invest in SEO content work, because otherwise technical weaknesses slow down every content effort.

Only in third place come content and visibility in the narrower sense – SEO texts, collecting your first Google reviews, possibly first steps toward paid advertising (SEA). These steps take time to work, which is why they should be built up alongside day-to-day business instead of waiting until “there’s time for it at some point.”

More elaborate topics like a broad content strategy, a presence on several social media platforms or more complex ad campaigns can deliberately wait: they only have an effect once these three foundations are already in place anyway.

See it from the customer’s point of view

A helpful way of thinking is to look at your visibility strategy from a potential customer’s perspective rather than from your own to-do list. A customer with a problem first searches roughly for a solution, finds several providers, checks how trustworthy they are based on their website and reviews, and only then makes a decision.

Each of these stages corresponds to a building block of online visibility: being found (Google Business Profile, SEO basics), building trust (website, reviews) and finally convincing (content, offer). This order is no coincidence – it reflects exactly the order in which a customer actually comes into contact with a business.

Differences depending on the business model

The order described is a solid rule of thumb, but it doesn’t have to look exactly the same for every business model. Businesses with a local customer base – trades, restaurants, local services – benefit especially strongly and quickly from the Google Business Profile, since most of their potential customers search locally anyway. Businesses that sell across regions or only online, on the other hand, should put more weight on their own website and its findability from the start, since the Business Profile plays a smaller role for them.

Small steps are enough at the start

A misconception that holds many founders back is the idea that every step has to be done perfectly from the beginning. A Google Business Profile doesn’t have to shine with professional photos and polished posts at first – what matters first is that it’s filled in completely and correctly. Likewise, the first version of the website doesn’t have to be flawless; above all, it has to work and provide the most important information. Fine-tuning can come later, once the foundations are in place.

The most common mistake: too many projects at once

By far the most common mistake in this phase is trying to tackle everything at once – starting social media, the website, ads and content in parallel instead of following the order described above. The result is usually that each project gets only superficial attention and nothing has a real effect. A website, for example, gets hardly any visibility without a Google Business Profile and without any initial content – the effort is invested without paying off. It’s better to complete the three foundational steps cleanly, one after another, before adding more channels.

A quick reality check to finish

If you finish this article feeling you’ve already done everything right, you can check that with two simple questions:

1. Is your Google Business Profile complete and up to date?
2. Does your website load on a smartphone within a few seconds and clearly show all the important information?

If you can answer yes to both, the foundation really is in place. If either answer is no, it pays to continue right there before adding new channels.