Owning Your Narrative

Hello Reader,

In my Summer of SEO program, I mentioned that my current thinking around online visibility for businesses is that in order to have a well-understood "entity" (aka your brand or a specific person/place/thing) online that surfaces when people are looking for what you offer, you need to have a current, updated, logical website, and some other property on the internet that also supports your brand.

This was an off-handed remark, but a couple of my program members pushed back and said, "But I don't want to be on Instagram."

Fair!

And you don't have to be!

Let's zoom out and look at why this setup matters.

1. Your website is your home base, your single source of truth about you and your business.
2. We know that all the little bots crawl websites continually to understand these internet properties.
3. We also know that properties outside of your website round out that picture, which can mean media features, other people talking about your brand—and it can mean other properties owned by you.
4. Which is why it's a bit risky to rely exclusively on those properties owned and managed by other people—not having something allows un-owned assets to control the narrative.

So, that means we need to be smart about that outside our website narrative. And, for many people that looks like a searchable, public social media platform like Instagram or Facebook. People just default towards those platforms because they're used to using them, but they're not required!

But it could be something else such as YouTube, Bluesky, LinkedIn, a Ghost newsletter that's public... really there are many possibilities—the key being that it's public and discoverable. (Some of these require specific settings to make that happen.)

An unsung hero of this, and what I recommended to my clients who said, "But I don't want to do Instagram!" is Google Business Profiles. I will forever say that GBPs are an unsung hero in brand management and that it can do a lot to reinforce that branded or entity visibility. In my Google Business Profile workshop, I literally teach that just ten minutes of work a week and boost your visibility. Which is a lighter lift than, say, daily instagram posts.

This effort does not need to be hard—you don't get bonus points for choosing a more difficult route!

One off-site platform I do not recommend for a multitude of reasons (including and especially that the company is run by truly terrible people) is Substack, as the platform rarely allows smaller publications to be publicly indexed, so that's considered a complete picture of your entity. You can't even verify Substacks with Google Search Console. Yes, some big publications are indexed, but that's only because Substack deigned to allow that—there's nothing you can do to request it. (Wild, I know!)

Building a recognized online entity doesn't require being everywhere, and it most certainly doesn't require hanging out in spaces you can't stand. Instead, think about being intentionally discoverable where it actually counts.

Protect your brand narrative, pick the off-site ecosystem that feels least like a chore, and keep it simple. If that means ten minutes a week on a Google Business Profile instead of nonstop Threads posting or finding the perfectly-curated image for Instagram? Consider that a massive win for both your strategy and your sanity.

Talk soon,

Sarah

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