Everyone Wants to Talk About Social Media. Nobody Wants to Talk About Their Website.
A strong website marketing strategy often gets overlooked. We get it. Social media is exciting. It’s visible. You post something and people react to it right there in real time. Your site, meanwhile, just kind of sits there. Quiet. Doing its thing in the background. Easy to forget about.
But here’s what we’ve learned after years of building marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes: the ones with strong sites recover from every algorithm change, every platform shift, every new trend. The ones who built everything on social media? They panic every time Meta tweaks the algorithm or a platform goes through turbulence.
Your Instagram page isn’t yours. Neither is your Facebook page or your LinkedIn profile. TikTok? Same deal. You’re building on someone else’s property. They set the rules. They change the rules. And you find out after the fact. One of our clients lost 40% of their organic reach on Facebook after a single algorithm update. Hadn’t done anything wrong. Just woke up one morning to different numbers.
That’s the one piece of digital real estate that actually belongs to you.
AI Search Made Your Website More Important, Not Less
We’ve heard this from a few business owners recently: “If everyone’s just asking ChatGPT for answers, what’s even the point of having a website?” It sounds logical until you look at where ChatGPT actually gets its answers from.
50% of all the sources ChatGPT cites are business and service sites (Semrush’s AI SEO statistics). Not social media posts. Not tweets. Sites. Your site is literally what AI reads to decide whether to recommend your business when someone asks a question about your industry.
And here’s a number that caught us off guard. ChatGPT users click out to external websites about twice as often as Google users. 1.4 links per visit on ChatGPT compared to 0.6 from Google. That came from the same Semrush research and it flips the “nobody clicks anymore” narrative on its head. People using AI search are actually MORE likely to visit your site, not less. They just get there through a different door.
The catch? AI doesn’t cite just anything. It’s picky. Position Digital’s compiled data shows that content depth, readability, and freshness matter far more than traditional metrics like backlinks when it comes to getting cited by AI. Speed matters too, and the numbers on that are pretty wild.
What Happens When Your Website Is Weak
We onboarded a client who had 12,000 Instagram followers. Decent engagement. Regular posting schedule. Their social media game was honestly solid.
Their site? A five-page template they’d put together three years ago with placeholder text still visible on the About page. The contact form was broken. The blog section had two posts from 2022. Page load time was over six seconds on mobile.
When we ran a search for their industry keywords, they didn’t show up at all. Nowhere on Google. Completely absent from AI-generated answers. All that Instagram effort was building awareness, but the moment a potential customer tried to learn more about the business through search, there was nothing to find. The site was quietly sabotaging what the social media was building.
We see some version of this with roughly half the businesses that come to us.
Your Website Is Where Trust Gets Built (Or Broken)
Social media builds familiarity. People recognise your brand, they feel like they know you. But familiarity isn’t trust.
Trust gets built when someone lands on your site and within a few seconds feels oriented. They understand what you do. The navigation makes sense. The information is current. There’s a clear next step. A clean layout and readable fonts go a long way. So does loading fast on mobile. Having calls to action that are actually visible. These aren’t design preferences. They’re trust signals. And your site is the only place where you control all of them completely.
Speed Isn’t Just a User Experience Thing Anymore
This is the part where most business owners’ eyes glaze over, but stay with us because the numbers are genuinely compelling.
Position Digital found that pages with a First Contentful Paint under 0.4 seconds averaged 6.7 citations from ChatGPT. Pages slower than 1.13 seconds? Just 2.1 citations. Three times the AI visibility, purely because the page loaded faster.
We had one client where the only change we made in the first month was improving their page speed. We compressed the images. Cleaned up code that had gotten bloated over the years. Moved them to faster hosting. Load time dropped from 4.2 seconds to 1.1 seconds. And within a few weeks, both their Google rankings and their presence in AI-generated answers started improving. We hadn’t touched the content at all. We hadn’t built a single backlink. It was purely the speed.
Google has been saying page speed matters for years and a lot of businesses nodded along without doing much about it. Now that AI platforms are using speed as a factor in deciding what to cite, the consequences of a slow site have multiplied.
Structure Your Content Like AI Is Reading It (Because It Is)
There’s a study from Seer Interactive cited by Position Digital showing that 85% of AI Overview citations were published in the last two years. Nearly half are from the past year alone. Perplexity leans even harder toward recent material, with about half its citations coming from content less than a year old.
If your site still has content from three or four years ago and nothing newer, AI is basically looking right past you. The platforms want fresh material. But freshness alone isn’t enough.
44.2% of all LLM citations come from the first 30% of a piece of content (that’s from Growth Memo’s February 2026 research, also compiled in Position Digital’s stats roundup). Nearly half the value is in the intro. If your pages bury the main point three paragraphs deep beneath filler text, AI skips right over you.
We’ve started restructuring client sites with this in mind. The main answer goes near the top. Supporting detail follows. Clear headings that match what people actually search for. FAQ sections with direct, concise responses. Schema markup so AI crawlers can parse the content properly. None of this is flashy. All of it compounds.
Social Media Should Point to Your Website, Not Replace It
Here’s how we think about the relationship, and this analogy has clicked for a lot of our clients. Social media is the shopfront window. It gets people to stop and look. Your site is the actual shop. It’s where people come inside, browse properly, and decide whether to buy.
A business that invests everything in the window display but lets the shop itself fall apart is going to confuse people. Someone walks past, sees something they like, steps inside… and immediately gets a weird feeling. The inside doesn’t match the outside. We check for this disconnect with every new client because it’s one of the most common problems we find.
Every social media post, every email, every ad you run should be driving people somewhere. And when they arrive, they should land on something that’s ready for them. Current content. Pages that load without making them wait. A clear reason to take the next step.
We Build Websites That Actually Work as Marketing Foundations
At Salty Lavender, we always start with the site. Social media comes after. Content calendars come after. Ad campaigns come after. The site is what holds everything together. That’s how we approach marketing.
If yours hasn’t been touched in a while, or if you suspect it’s not doing its job, we’re happy to take a look. Honest assessment, no runaround.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I really need a website if I have a strong social media presence?
Yes. We do a lot of social media work for clients ourselves, so we’re not saying that from a position of bias against social platforms. But your social accounts are on borrowed ground. We had a client whose Instagram got disabled for almost two weeks. No explanation, no real appeals process. Their site? Still up, still working, still generating leads the entire time. That one experience turned “I’ll get around to fixing the site” into “this is getting done this week.”
How fast does my site need to load?
Faster than you probably think. Two seconds is the baseline for not annoying your visitors. But if you want AI platforms to actually cite your content, research shows that pages loading in under 0.4 seconds get three times more ChatGPT citations. Three times. Most small business sites we audit sit somewhere between 3 and 6 seconds on mobile, which is genuinely painful by current standards. The encouraging part is that fixing speed is usually one of the cheaper and faster improvements a business can make.
What’s schema markup and do I actually need it?
It’s code you add to your site that helps search engines and AI figure out what your content is about. Think of it like labels on file folders. Without labels, whoever’s sorting through your files has to guess what’s in each one. There are different types depending on what’s on the page. FAQ schema for question-and-answer content. HowTo schema for instructional stuff. Local Business schema if you serve a specific area. We put it on every client site because the payoff relative to the effort is one of the best ratios we’ve found in SEO.
My website is only a few years old. Does it really need updating?
Almost certainly, yes. The vast majority of AI Overview citations come from content published within the last two years. Perplexity is even more biased toward recent stuff. So a site that was built well a few years back might still look fine on the surface, but if the content hasn’t been refreshed, AI is looking right past it. The design probably holds up. The information? That’s where things start to crumble.
What should I prioritise first if my site needs work?
We usually start with three things when onboarding a new client. How fast does the site load? Is the content actually current? Does it work on mobile without falling apart? Those three cover the majority of issues we find. If a site loads in under two seconds, has content from this year, and doesn’t break on a phone screen, that’s a working foundation. Everything beyond that is refinement.
