How do customers actually find my website?

The honest breakdown

There is a version of this answer that sells search engine optimisation packages, and there is a version that matches what small business owners actually see in their traffic. Here is the second one.

Visitors arrive by four routes. First, a name search: someone was told about you by a neighbour, a contractor or a Facebook group, and typed your business name — often misspelled — into a search bar. Second, a local or map result: they searched for a service near them and got a list of nearby businesses. Third, a handed link: your card, your invoice, your van, your email signature, a post you made. Fourth, and newer, an AI assistant that answered their question in prose and named a business while doing it.

Ranking first for a broad, unbranded keyword sits well below all of these for most small firms, and it is the one everybody asks about. That is worth saying plainly given who is asking: as of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small businesses [1]. In New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 employer businesses are small [1]. This is a market of owner-operators being sold a strategy designed for national brands.

Route one: your own name

The most valuable search term you have is your business name plus your town, and you are competing with almost nobody for it. Winning it requires three things: your name written as text on your home page, your town written as text, and no second site or abandoned page competing with you. It is unglamorous and it is where most of the traffic is.

This is also why a stale phone number is the most expensive error a small site can carry. Someone who already decided to call you cannot.

There is a second, quieter version of the name search: the misremembered one. People type the trade plus a first name, or the name of the street, or a half-remembered brand. The defence is to have your real name, your town and your service written as ordinary sentences somewhere on the page, so that a near-miss search still lands on you. This is also the reason to keep an eye on old listings, dormant profiles and a previous business name — an abandoned page that outranks your current one is a customer sent to a dead end.

Route two: maps and local listings

For anything with a service area — trades, clinics, restaurants, shops — the map result is often the whole game. The listing and the website are two different assets and they need to agree: same business name, same phone, same hours, same address or service area. Disagreement between them is a reason to be ranked lower and a reason for a customer to call the wrong number. We compare the two directly in do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?, and the related social question in is a Facebook page enough instead of a website?.

Route three: the link you hand out

Underrated and free. A short domain on a card, a van, an invoice footer and an email signature turns every existing customer into a referral path. This is the one route entirely under your control, and it is the best argument for a domain that is easy to say out loud. Which extension to use is covered in should a Canadian business use .ca or .com?.

Route four: AI answer engines, honestly

Some share of your prospective customers now asks a question in plain language and gets a prose answer that names two or three businesses, without visiting anyone's website at all. Nobody outside those companies can tell you exactly how the shortlist is chosen, and anybody who claims a guaranteed method is selling you something. What can be said honestly is what these systems are working from, because it is not mysterious: text they can fetch and read.

That produces a short, practical list.

Let the crawler in. Robots rules are matched by the crawler's own name — a product token that should appear as a substring of its User-Agent header — and where no group matches the requester, or a matching group contains no rules, the URL is allowed [2]. The common failure is not being blocked deliberately; it is a blanket disallow left behind from a staging site. Check the file exists and says what you intend.

List your pages. A sitemap is an XML file with a urlset and one url entry per page, entity-escaped, UTF-8, all URLs on a single host, plus a documented way of informing crawlers it exists [3]. It removes guesswork about what your site contains.

Say the facts in text. An assistant cannot quote a phone number that only exists inside a JPEG, and neither can a screen reader. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [6]. The same habits serve both audiences: real text, labelled fields, headings in order, sufficient contrast.

Restate the facts for machines. The Schema.org LocalBusiness type describes a particular physical business or branch, with properties including address, telephone, email, openingHours, areaServed, geo and priceRange [4]. Marking up what a visitor already sees removes ambiguity. We go through this in how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business?.

Answer the questions people ask. A short FAQ written in a buyer's words — "do you come out to Sussex?", "do you charge for a quote?", "how fast can you get here?" — is the most quotable content a small site can carry, because it is the only part written as an answer.

One rule that applies to every route

Being quoted more widely means being wrong more publicly. Under section 74.01 of the Competition Act, a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect is actionable, and a performance or efficacy claim must rest on an adequate and proper test, with the burden of proof on the person making the representation [5]. If an assistant repeats "same-day service across the province" because your page said it, you own that sentence. Write what you can do, not what you would like to do. More in what can I legally claim on my website?.

What about ads and directories?

Paid search and paid directory placement work, and they are the fastest lever available, but they are amplifiers rather than fixes. Sending paid traffic to a page that does not state your hours, your service area or your price is buying visits to a leak, and you pay for every one of them. The sequence that wastes the least money is: make the page answer the obvious questions, confirm the free routes are producing calls, then decide whether buying more of the same traffic is worth it. Directories have a second, less obvious cost — each one is another place your phone number can go stale, so list yourself in a few you will actually maintain rather than in forty you will forget.

What to do this month

Search your own business name and see what comes up, including anything abandoned. Check your listing hours against your real hours. Read your home page and ask whether a stranger could tell, in ten seconds, what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Add five real customer questions with honest answers. That work costs nothing and improves all four routes at once.

Where we sit

A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; beyond that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. Turnaround is 48 hours from brief to live, and media can be added any time afterwards.

We build sites as readable text with the structured markup already in place, because that is the cheap part and retrofitting it is the expensive part. What we will not do is promise you a position in a search result or a mention in an AI answer. Nobody can sell that honestly. What we can do is make sure that when something reads your page — a person, a crawler or an assistant — it finds a business that plainly states what it does, where, for how much, and how to get in touch.