Is Instagram enough, or do I need a website too?

They do two different jobs

Instagram is a consideration tool. It’s extraordinary at it. Somebody who has heard your name, seen a friend’s brows, or walked past your window can open your profile and be convinced in ninety seconds. Nothing else does that as well, and if your grid is good you should keep doing exactly what you’re doing.

Search is a discovery tool. It reaches the person who hasn’t heard of you and was never going to. They know what they want and roughly where they want it, and they’re typing that into a box.

The mistake isn’t choosing Instagram. It’s assuming that because one of those jobs is going well, the other one is covered. They don’t overlap at all.

The test

Ask your next ten clients how they found you. If nine say a friend, or your Instagram, or they’ve been coming for years, then Instagram is carrying the business and a website is a polish job rather than an emergency.

If you’d like more than ten, and you don’t have nine friends’ worth of referrals queued up, then the question is where the strangers come from. There’s no version of that answer where the strangers arrive through Instagram, because nobody opens Instagram to find a facial near them. They open Google.

What I actually see in the numbers

I have Search Console access for the studios I work with, and one pattern holds across nearly all of them: the large majority of the clicks a studio’s site gets are from people typing the studio’s name. People who already knew. Meanwhile the searches for the actual treatments, the ones from strangers, make up almost all of the times a studio gets shown and almost none of the times it gets clicked.

That gap is the whole argument on one line. The demand from strangers is already there, already being shown your site, and mostly not choosing it. I published the exact split, and how I measured it, on the benchmarks page.

What a website does that a profile can’t

• Rank for the treatment, not the name. A page about dermaplaning can win “dermaplaning near me”. A grid post about dermaplaning cannot.
• Say what you are in a way machines can read. Structured data on a page tells Google, and the assistants people are increasingly asking instead of Google, what you do, where you are, your hours and your prices. A profile can’t be marked up.
• Hold up the map listing. A Google Business Profile with a real website behind it is a stronger listing than one without. The two support each other.
• Cut the taps. Bio, to a link tool, to a booking system is three taps and two chances to lose somebody who had already decided. From a page it can be one.
• Belong to you. An account can be hacked or restricted for reasons nobody will explain to you, and there’s no meaningful appeal and no way to take the audience with you. A domain and the site on it can’t be removed by somebody else’s moderation decision.

The honest case for staying Instagram-only

There’s one, and I’d rather say it than pretend otherwise.

If you’re three months in, fully booked from a chair you rent, running on referrals, and the constraint on your business is hours in the day rather than clients, then a website won’t fix anything you currently have wrong. Build it when you want more strangers, or when you want to charge more and need to look like it.

What I would do even then, today, and it costs nothing: claim your Google Business Profile. That’s the piece that gets you into the map results, and it works whether or not you ever build a site.

The smallest version that’s worth building

If you do build, this is the shape that earns its money for a solo studio. It isn’t many pages.

1. A home page that says what you do and where, with booking one tap away.
2. One page per treatment you actually want more of. Not a menu. A page. This is the part that does the discovery work and the part almost everyone skips.
3. An about page, because people booking a face or a body want to know whose hands.
4. Real contact details, written identically to your Google profile.

That’s four to seven pages. It’s the shape of nearly every build I do, and it’s $1,000 with the search work included. If you already have a site you like, the search half on its own is $350.

Keep the Instagram. It’s doing a job the website can’t do either.