Greg Sterling wrote a piece on SearchEngineLand.com that dealt with small businesses, VC and websites. Greg starts off his article discussing that over the last few years SEO’s have taken the approach that Google My Business, Facebook and Yelp have made the small business website unnecessary. GMB now is so widely used and so complete, that consumers never need to visit the underlying small business website.
Greg points out that recent investments in companies like WordPress parent Automattic and Weebly being acquired for over $365 million, show that the small business website is still important.
From the article:
SMB sites more trusted, still visited. A May 2019 consumer survey from BrightLocal found nearly twice as many respondents (56%) expected SMB websites to be accurate compared with Google My Business (32%). This was a surprise. However, a 2018 survey from the SEO firm found that the most common consumer action by a fairly significant margin, after reading a positive review, was to visit the SMB’s website.
While a majority of SMBs in theory, now have websites — 64% according to a 2018 Clutch survey — there’s still a significant opportunity for providers of websites. New businesses form and fail every quarter. And even with shrinking reach in organic search and social, websites are likely remain to the anchor of SMB digital marketing into the foreseeable future.
I take this part of the comment as important to domain investors, “there’s still a significant opportunity for providers of websites.” Just replace providers of websites with providers of domain names.