Do I need a website if I have a Facebook page? Yes, and the reason is simpler than most people expect. A Facebook page reaches people who already follow you, while they are scrolling and not looking to buy anything. A website is what turns up when somebody types what you do into Google, which is the exact moment they are ready to call someone. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them fills the diary.
Yes. Facebook pages almost never rank for the searches that bring new customers, like plumber Maitland or electrician Cameron Park. They rank for your business name, which only helps people who already know you. A website also gives you something Facebook cannot: an asset on a domain you own, which no platform can switch off or throttle.
Where customers actually come from
When somebody needs a tradie, a haircut, a new website or somewhere to eat, most of them type it into Google. Electrician Newcastle. Web designer Lake Macquarie. Plumber open Saturday Cameron Park.
Those are high intent searches. The person is ready to spend money, they just need to work out who to call. Whoever appears gets the call. Whoever does not, does not.
A Facebook page will not appear in those results in any useful way. For a search like electrician Newcastle, Google shows businesses with websites, Google Business Profiles and LocalBusiness schema. A social profile is background noise in that competition. Our local SEO guide explains exactly what Google is weighing when it decides.
What Facebook is good at, and what it is not
Facebook is a social platform. People are on it to see what friends are doing and watch videos. They are not there to find a business the way they are on Google.
When somebody follows your page, they might see your next post. Organic reach for business pages has fallen from over 16 per cent in 2012 to under 2 per cent, so most of your followers see nothing at all unless you pay.
Facebook is genuinely useful for:
- Staying in front of customers who already follow you
- Running targeted paid ads to a defined audience
- Social proof, in the form of reviews and visible activity
- Sharing news with people already in your network
Facebook does nothing at all for:
- Appearing in Google results for service keywords
- Ranking for local searches like plumber Maitland or accountant Newcastle
- Building a long term asset you actually own
- Converting a stranger who has never heard of you
You do not own your Facebook page
This is the part most business owners have not sat down and thought through.
Your page exists on Facebook's platform, under Facebook's terms, subject to Facebook's algorithm and Facebook's decisions about who sees your posts. Everything you build there can be devalued or removed by somebody else's decision, and you will not be consulted.
Pages get suspended over vague community standards disputes. Reach has been cut repeatedly over the years to push businesses toward paid advertising. Businesses that put their entire presence on Facebook have watched it vanish overnight with no appeal worth the name.
A website on your own domain is a different kind of thing. The domain is yours, the hosting is yours, and no platform decision can take it off the internet. That is what an asset means. Files are delivered to you at the end of every Newcastle Web Co build as well, so the site is yours in the literal sense too.
What a website does that Facebook will not
It ranks on Google
A site with the right keyword structure, LocalBusiness schema and suburb landing pages can reach page one for local service searches within weeks. That is traffic from people actively looking for what you do, rather than people who happened to be on Facebook when you posted.
It builds trust before the phone rings
Somebody who finds you through Google and lands on your site is evaluating you. They want your work, your pricing, your service areas, your process. A good site answers all of that before the call, which means the calls you get are from people already half convinced.
A Facebook page gives them your last three posts and a star rating. The decision often gets made before they have seen enough to feel confident about it.
It works at 11pm on a Sunday
Your site is open every hour, answering questions and taking enquiries while you are on a job, asleep or away. A form submission on Sunday night is a booked job on Monday morning. A Facebook post is gone from the feed in hours. A page keeps working indefinitely.
It gives you a presence in AI answers
Google AI Overviews, featured snippets and ChatGPT now answer local business questions directly. Who is a good electrician in Newcastle. Which web design agencies work in the Hunter. Those questions increasingly return one generated answer naming specific businesses.
The businesses named have websites, specifically websites with content structured to be extracted. A Facebook page will never be cited in an AI Overview. A properly built site can be. Our AEO guide covers how that extraction actually works.
The real cost comparison
A Facebook only approach feels free. It is not.
The cost is the Google traffic you never see. The competitor you never outrank. The homeowner who found somebody else at 11pm on Sunday and had already booked before you opened on Monday. None of that appears on an invoice, which is exactly why it is easy to ignore.
A site built to rank and convert is a one off spend with an ongoing return. The Starter package is $1,800 fixed and includes full SEO, LocalBusiness and FAQPage schema, AEO and GEO optimisation, and Cloudflare Pages hosting. After that it sits on a support plan from $50 a month so it stays current instead of drifting. The packages page has the detail, and our guide to what a website costs in Australia covers every price band if you are comparing quotes.
Set that against running Facebook ads month after month to reach people who were not looking for you, with nothing left over when you stop paying.
Use both, in the right order
This was never website versus Facebook. It is website first, Facebook second.
The website owns your Google presence, earns trust with strangers and converts at any hour. The Facebook page keeps you in front of people who already know you and gives you somewhere to run a campaign when you want to push something specific. Together they work well. Facebook alone leaves a large hole, and it gets larger every time a competitor builds a proper site and takes a position that should have been yours.
If you are ready to build something that does the job, our website design page explains how we do it, and the Newcastle page covers what the local market looks like. Or just tell us what you do and we will tell you what it would take.
Written by Newcastle Web Co, web design & seo in Cameron Park NSW 2285. Last updated 19 August 2026.
