“We need to be more visible.” Fine — but where, and with what?
Ask “how do I make my business visible online” and you’ll almost always get the same answer: website, Google, social media, directories. Be everywhere. For someone who owns the business and also does the actual work in it, that’s the fastest route to five half-finished channels, not one of which works.
Yet there aren’t many channels and they’ve been known for years. The difference between a business that gets enquiries and one that doesn’t isn’t the number of channels — it’s the order, and which one somebody genuinely keeps up.
First, one question: does the customer look for you, or do they have to stumble across you?
Do they look for you at the moment they need you? A locksmith, when the door slams shut. An accountant in January. A computer repair shop, when the laptop with the invoicing data won’t boot. A driving school, when somebody turns eighteen. Then the channels where people search come first: website, Google profile, maps, directories.
Or does the customer not even know your service exists — a new course, an add-on service, a seasonal offer? Then social media, referrals and advertising move to the front.
For many local services the customer actively searches for a supplier at the moment of need. And there social media isn’t the first channel, it’s the fourth.
Ten minutes that will settle this better than any article: open an incognito window and type what your customer would type — “locksmith Brno Židenice”, not your company name. What’s at the top? A map with three businesses? A directory? Paid links? Articles? That’s exactly where people look, and that’s exactly the channel to tackle first.
This piece compares the channels against each other: how much work each takes, what it realistically returns, and where free stops being enough. If no enquiries are coming in at all and you don’t know where the chain is breaking, start elsewhere — how to get customers for a small business and where to start covers the order of the first steps and checking that your form and phone even work.
Your own website: slowest to ramp up, highest ceiling
Work: days to weeks to launch, then ongoing. When it can start paying off: months.
Your own website and domain give a business considerably more control over the content and its portability than profiles on someone else’s platform. A profile gets suspended, a page’s reach gets cut back, a directory category gets put behind a paywall. Your own domain and your own copy you can take elsewhere. And crucially: every other channel leads somewhere, and that road ends at your door.
What has changed over the past year: for informational queries Google now assembles an answer right above the results and some people never click through at all. That sounds like a reason to write the website off, but the opposite follows — the text on your site can be one of the sources such an answer is assembled from. The website has stopped being just a click destination and can also serve as a source.
In practice, only one thing follows from that. A page saying “we are a team of professionals with a long tradition” has nothing to offer a machine and nothing to offer a person either. A page stating your service area, an indicative price, a turnaround time and what happens if the job goes wrong is usable for both. If you know what those pages should say but never get round to it for years, that’s exactly the part we’ll do for you.
Where free ends: with a site on someone else’s subdomain. The address isn’t yours, you can’t move it anywhere, and everything you put into it stays with the provider. Your own domain costs a few hundred crowns a year — the cheapest insurance policy on this whole list.
Google Business Profile: the best work-to-result ratio
Work: one afternoon to set up and verify, then roughly fifteen minutes a month. When it can start paying off: days to weeks.
When people search by town or the surrounding area, there’s no faster channel. The profile is free, verification happens by video or by a letter with a code depending on the situation, and what you fill in decides which queries maps will even consider you for. The primary category is the strongest field in the whole form: “computer repair service” and “computer store” are two different businesses with different customers as far as Google is concerned.
What has changed and few businesses have noticed yet: Google has removed the questions and answers section from profiles. It switched off the management interface at the end of 2025 and public threads have disappeared from profiles. Take a look at your own profile — it won’t be there any more.
In practice this turns the old approach on its head. You used to be able to post your own question and answer in the profile (“Do you come out at weekends?”) and directly determine what the customer saw. That’s over. Today the machine assembles the answer itself, and among its sources can be your filled-in profile fields, reviews and the text on your website. If you haven’t written anywhere that you come out at weekends, it will hardly reach the customer.
Where free ends: nowhere, and that’s the trap. You don’t pay in money, you pay in time — holiday opening hours, new photos, replies to reviews. A profile nobody has opened in a year looks like a business that may have folded. How to run it long term is covered in local SEO for a small business.
Firmy.cz and Mapy.cz: one listing, two outputs — and a category ceiling
Work: an hour, once. You create the listing on Firmy.cz and once approved it also feeds into Seznam’s maps.
Seznam has a minority share of search compared with Google. But behind that share, in local services, are real people who simply aren’t on Google — and it’s an hour of work, not a monthly commitment.
This is where most businesses hit the limit: the free listing allows a limited number of categories. If you do computer repairs and also rent out equipment, it can easily happen that one of those activities won’t fit into the free listing, and no clever form-filling will get around it. Paid options push the limit further, but their terms and prices change — check the current rules and figures directly in Seznam’s help pages and price list, not in an article.
The verdict: always do the basic listing. A paid one only makes sense when you can name another activity that earns you money and doesn’t fit into the free listing, and work out what a single job from it is worth. And if that other activity doesn’t even have its own page on your website yet, the order is reversed: page first, paid listing second. Which listings are worth it and which are money down the drain is covered in Firmy.cz, Mapy.cz, Google: where should a small business be listed.
Social media: good for reminding, bad for being found
Work: hours at the start, then every week. Result: irregular and hard to attribute to a specific job.
The difference from search isn’t the quality of the content, it’s the mechanics. A network shows your post to people who follow you, or to those the algorithm picks — it doesn’t reach someone at the moment they need you, but when they happen to be scrolling. The second thing: practically nobody can dig up last year’s post. A substantial part of social media sits behind a login, so search engines and AI assistants draw on it only to a limited extent.
Where social media honestly does work:
- visual trades, where the result is there to see — crafts, interiors, gardens, hairdressing; two before-and-after photos do a job that three paragraphs of text won’t,
- local groups where recommendations get made; one substantive answer in a community group is worth more than thirty posts on your own page,
- staying in touch with customers you already have.
Where free ends: at reach. The moment you want to address people beyond your own followers, you’re into paid advertising — a different discipline, a different budget, different measurement.
Visibility in AI: a new channel, but different in every field
The advice “write content so AI cites you” holds reliably only where AI cites company websites. But the sources differ from field to field: in some, the answer rests on comparison sites, in others on e-shops, in others on articles in the media, and in others genuinely on suppliers’ pages.
That’s why the first step is measurement, not writing. Ask the assistants your customers use about your field and your town — “who in Brno can fix…” — and look above all at what the answer links to. If it’s three comparison sites and one media outlet, your own website is the slowest route into the answer and you’ll get there faster via the source the machine reads. If it’s company websites, you know where to write. The procedure, and what to note down from the answers, is described in what ChatGPT says about your business.
Repeat it a month later. One answer is chance; three matching answers spread over time are a signal.
The channels compared in one place
The figures are indicative. Nobody can promise you a specific ranking or number of enquiries — this is an order-of-magnitude comparison of work and result, not a pledge.
| Channel | Work at the start | Upkeep | When it can start paying off | Where free ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your own website | days to weeks | ongoing | months | on someone else’s subdomain; someone has to write the content |
| Google Business Profile | an afternoon | ~15 min a month | days to weeks | never in money, in your time straight away |
| Firmy.cz + Mapy.cz | an hour | twice a year | weeks | at the number of categories |
| Social media | hours | weekly | irregularly | at reach beyond your followers |
| Visibility in AI | measurement first, then content | ongoing | months | depends on the field — sometimes your own site isn’t enough |
What’s a waste of time
- Being on every network. Five half-empty profiles look worse than one that’s alive — and nobody is searching for any of them anyway.
- Paid directories that cold-called you. You can spot them by the direction: they call you, push for a quick signature and invoice you for a listing nobody ever calls from.
- Bought followers and reviews. You pay for a number that brings nobody in, and you risk having your profile removed.
- The “your SEO is bad” phone call based on an automated analyser. A score from a tool like that says nothing about whether a customer can find you.
- A blog about whatever came to mind. Without checking that anyone is asking, it’s writing into the void.
- Enquiry portals as your main source of work. You pay for the contact, not the job, and the quality is a lottery — as a supplement maybe, as a foundation no.
Where free stops being enough
You can get a surprising amount done for free: profile, listing, a basic website, the first texts. The limit arrives at three specific points.
First: you have another activity that earns money but doesn’t fit into the free listing and doesn’t have its own page either. Second: the profiles and listings are filled in, the numbers in them are going up, but the enquiries are still few — the weak spot is then further down the chain, on the website or in the copy. Third: you know what customers are asking, but you have no time to write it, and half-finished content sits there for months.
At that point there’s no sense in polishing another channel blindly. An initial analysis goes through your profile, listings, website and real enquiries all at once and says exactly where the chain is leaking and what to start with — whether you end up doing it yourself or not.
