The advice I give small business owners is often different from the advice they expect when they hire a web consultant.
They expect frameworks, complex strategies and phased plans with acronyms. They expect me to tell them about funnels and customer journeys and brand pillars. They expect a lot of talking before anything happens.
What I actually tell them is: what's the one thing about your website that's costing you business right now? And what would it take to fix that?
That's not a lesser version of strategy. That's usually the more useful question.
Why "digital strategy" mostly doesn't help small businesses
Digital strategy is a real thing. It makes sense for organisations with multiple teams, multiple products, and enough complexity that they need a framework for making consistent decisions over time.
Most small businesses don't have that problem. They have the opposite problem. They have too few resources to execute on anything ambitious, and too many opinions about what they should be doing. A strategy doesn't resolve that. It gives it more shape, but it doesn't make any of the actual decisions.
What small businesses need is not a plan for the next three years. It's clarity about what to do next. Those are genuinely different things.
The decision that actually moves things forward
In my experience, there's almost always one decision that would unlock progress for a small business website. Not ten decisions. One.
Sometimes it's "should this site be trying to generate leads or just confirm credibility?" Those two jobs require completely different approaches, and trying to do both at once means doing neither properly.
Sometimes it's "do we have a page that actually explains what we do and who we do it for?" Often the answer is no, or sort of, or "there's a page but it hasn't been touched in four years".
Sometimes it's "is there one service we should be pushing harder than the others?" That decision affects every page on the site.
Until that decision is made, everything else is decoration. New photography, a better layout, faster hosting -- they're all improvements on a wobbling foundation.
The paralysis problem
One reason people reach for strategy rather than decision-making is that decisions feel risky and strategy feels like preparation. If you're still in the planning phase, you haven't committed to anything yet. The bad outcome is still avoidable.
But planning without deciding isn't preparation. It's procrastination with better vocabulary.
The reality is that most website decisions are reversible. A headline can be changed. A service page can be rewritten. A call-to-action can be tested. The stakes are much lower than they feel. And the cost of doing nothing -- keeping the site that's not working while you perfect the strategy for fixing it -- is the one cost that compounds quietly and reliably.
What practical web advice actually looks like
I don't ask clients to fill in brand questionnaires or map their customer personas before I start working with them. I ask them to show me the website and tell me where it's letting them down.
Then I ask them what they want more of. Usually it's one of three things: more enquiries, more credibility, or more clarity about what they actually offer.
Those answers lead to specific decisions, not strategies. "Your contact page has no phone number and the form is broken" is not a strategic insight. But fixing it will probably do more for your business than any amount of strategic planning.
The question worth asking yourself
If you're feeling stuck on your website, try this: forget about what you should eventually do with it. What's the single thing that, if you fixed it this week, would make the biggest difference to how well the site does its job?
That's your next decision. Make it, do it, and then work out what the next decision is.
Strategy is what you do when you've got the basics sorted and you want to get better at something that's already working. Most small business websites haven't got the basics sorted yet. So start there.