Do You Need a New Website? Marketing Basics for Small Business Owners

Here is a conversation Mickey Mellen has more often than you would think. A business owner calls and says, I need a new website. Mickey asks why. The answer: our team page is out of date, somebody left six months ago, and the blog has not been touched in years. His reply, in his words: “No, you don't. We need to update your team page and write a blog post.”

Mickey is the co-founder of GreenMellen, a web and marketing company in Marietta, Georgia. He has been building and maintaining websites for seventeen years, and a big part of his job is talking people out of rebuilding what they already have. Here is what I took from our conversation, with his ideas credited to him.

Do you really need a new website?

Usually not. Mickey's point is that owners overthink it. Before you pay for a rebuild, ask whether the real problem is that nobody has been maintaining what you have. An out of date team page, social links that go nowhere and an event announcement from two months ago make a company look careless, and none of it needs a new site to fix.

After speaking to a local business group, he looked up four members' websites at random, and all four had obvious problems. His view: for most companies, simply getting up to average is a big win.

If the message needs work, he recommends the StoryBrand approach: your homepage should tell people what you do and how you solve their problem, not open with who you are or how long you have been in business. Visitors come to get something solved.

If they go to Google and search for you by name, you win.

Where do customers actually decide? Your website is the last stop

Mickey says that five or ten years ago, your website was where the customer journey started. Now it is often the last place people go. They research by talking to friends and asking ChatGPT or Claude, then visit your website to verify that you are legitimate and professional, and that your Facebook page is not twelve years out of date.

He passed along a line from Rand Fishkin: Google is the reward for doing your other marketing right everywhere else. The payoff is that people search for you by name. Your job is not to blow it with a broken or unclear site.

What are the five marketing basics every small business needs?

Mickey calls them WELDS, as in welding. Work on your:

1. Website. Solid, current, and sending a clear message.
2. Email. You own your email list. Build one and reach out to it.
3. Local. A Google Business Profile, reviews and the basics, for most businesses.
4. Data. Some way to track leads and customers. His point: a color-coded inbox or an Excel sheet is not a CRM, and a simple paid CRM tool is a big upgrade.
5. Social media. At least have a pulse. A last post from years ago is worse than being absent, and a link to a dead page is worse still.

Do a little in each, and stick to the basics.

Why do good marketing plans fall apart?

Two reasons came up. The first is perfectionism. Mickey described a client who passed on a perfectly good new site because it was not perfect, and years later was still on the old one. Perfect is the enemy of good. The second is trying to do too much: we need Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and everything else, and then a halfway job at all of them.

I add a leadership point here. Owners are good at generating ideas, and the plan slides on the operations side. Who writes it? How often? Where does it go? An idea turns into a quick meeting, and three weeks later almost none of it is happening. Put someone beside you who can build a process or a checklist, and do not hand that person a new priority every week.

How do you stay consistent with marketing?

Mickey's fix is not fancy. Dedicate one person, even as part of their job, and set a modest budget so marketing is not whatever is left over. Then build a content calendar. Decide how often you will post, plan the next month or quarter, and work backward from events. If a promotion is in November, the graphics are due in October.

A shared spreadsheet is perfectly fine. Add a recurring task every Monday with a link to it, because nobody does anything without reminders. His consistency bar is encouraging: if you are at all consistent, you are in the top five percent of businesses.

Why should you own your website?

Mickey's company prefers WordPress, and his reason is ownership. In his view, with WordPress you own the site and can move it to another host. With platforms like Squarespace or Wix, the platform owns it. His analogy: WordPress is owning a house, Squarespace is renting an apartment. Owning means you handle updates, backups and security scans yourself, or pay someone to.

He says neglect is common. He built a scanning tool, ran about 15,000 WordPress sites through it, and found roughly 4,000 wildly behind on updates with security holes. That is his own scan, not a formal study. For a very small business a hosted platform may be fine, he says, but for a legitimate company, own your stuff. It is his view and the tradeoff is real, so weigh it for your situation.

He also says there is no such thing as a finished website. Launch day is one day in the life of the site. A steady rhythm of small edits, a few changes a month, beats a rebuild every few years.

What is AI doing to Google and your marketing data?

Mickey has two practical points. First, your analytics may be telling you the wrong story. Social platforms suppress posts with links, so people interested in you simply search your name on Google. Your data says they came from Google, and you think you should pour more into SEO, when really the video you posted created the interest.

His example: he heard a CPA speak at a conference, subscribed to his blog, later listened to his podcast, and about five years later, when his company needed a CPA, searched the name on Google and hired him. Analytics would credit Google. The truth was a talk, a blog and a podcast, none of which can be measured cleanly.

That is attribution versus lift. Attribution is tracing a sale to a click, and it is getting fuzzier. Lift is noticing that you ran a strong campaign and sales rose around the same time. You cannot prove it, but you know what you did. Mickey says you have to be okay with that.

Second, AI search works differently. He explained that AI tools split your question into many related versions, search them all and combine the results (he calls it query fan-out). The takeaway is to cover the whole cluster of related topics, not one phrase. He admits it is geeky, and the bigger point holds: publishing once a week or once a month already puts you ahead of most.

How should small businesses use AI without getting burned?

Mickey loves AI and would wave it away if he could, because he misses the handcrafted days. Since he cannot, he embraces it. His team uses AI to help write site content and to build small custom tools. His rule: do not publish AI content raw. Use it to draft, then clean it up.

On risk, he says accept some, as with any technology, but know that AI sometimes makes things up. He asked about a baseball game and got the right score with invented details around it. For post ideas, that is fine. When you need facts, check them.

AI also changes what you can charge. A client's single beautifully made video could not compete with a competitor putting out dozens of decent ones. Know what you are selling before you hire for work AI may do.

Business lessons: your numbers, your partner, and the basics

Mickey said that for his first five years, the way he knew how the company was doing was the bank balance, which only shows how you did six months ago. A CPA helps you understand the present, and a CRM helps you forecast from your leads. This is the same theme I hammer on with builders: know your numbers and look months ahead. If you are not gifted at finance, put someone beside you who is.

His other lessons: hire for fit over raw talent, since skills can be learned. Let go quickly when someone is not working, since he held on to a couple of people too long. And a good partnership works when skills differ and values match, and decisions are split clearly.

He closed with Kobe Bryant, who invited a reporter to a 5 a.m. practice and was found drilling elementary school fundamentals. Mickey's version for business is the same five basics, done consistently. If you try one thing this week, look at your website through your customer's eyes.