Your Website Is a Flyer — And a Flyer Doesn't Land on People's Hands by Itself
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I’ve been doing tech support and marketing workshops with family child care providers for a few years now. There’s a pattern I keep seeing, and I think it’s worth naming.
A provider builds a website — or someone helps them build one. Maybe it’s a Google Site. Maybe it’s something fancier. They feel accomplished. They should — getting a site up is real work. But then they stop. They believe the website itself will bring families to their door.
It won’t.
A website is a flyer. And a flyer doesn’t land in people’s hands unless you do something with it.
The Gap No One Talks About
In our field, there’s a lot of support for helping providers get online. R&R agencies offer tech workshops. Associations help with Google Business Profiles. There are grants for marketing materials. All of that matters.
But there’s a gap between “you have a website” and “families can actually find you.” That gap is filled with technical concepts most providers have never been introduced to:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — making your site show up when a parent searches “child care near me”
- Google Business Profile optimization — photos, reviews, hours, categories, and responding to inquiries
- Pay-per-click advertising — how much it costs, what CTR (click-through rate) means, what you’re actually paying for
- Social media promotion — not just posting, but understanding what reaches people and what doesn’t
- Analytics — knowing whether anyone is actually visiting your site, and what they do when they get there
Each of these is its own skill. Each one has a learning curve. And together, they represent the real work of being findable — not just being online.
The Free Way and the Pay Way
One thing I try to break down in workshops is the difference between free and paid strategies, because providers need to understand both before they spend money.
The free way: Google Business Profile, social media posts, asking families for reviews, joining local directories, word of mouth with a digital twist (sharing your website link in parent groups, on flyers, in referral conversations). This is real work and it takes time, but it costs nothing.
The pay way: Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram ads, hiring an SEO agency, paying for a listing on a child care directory. This costs money — sometimes a lot — and here’s where it gets risky.
The Agency Problem
If a provider doesn’t know what SEO is, they also don’t know how to evaluate whether an agency is doing a good job. I’ve seen providers pay for “marketing services” and get very little in return — because they didn’t know what to ask for, what to look for, or how to tell the difference between real results and a nice-sounding report.
I don’t want to put anyone in a bad situation. Hiring help is fine — but only if you understand enough to know whether you’re getting what you paid for.
That’s the gap. It’s not just a skills gap. It’s a confidence gap. Providers don’t know what they don’t know, and the people selling services have no incentive to make it clearer.
What I Think We Need
If we’re going to support child care providers in building sustainable businesses, we need to break down the journey past “build a website.”
Something like:
- You have a site. Great — now it needs to be findable.
- You need a Google Business Profile. Set it up, optimize it, keep it updated.
- You need to understand how search works. Basic SEO — what it means, what you can control, what takes time.
- You need to decide: free or paid? Know the options, the costs, and what “success” looks like for each.
- If you hire help, know what to ask. What are they doing? How will you measure it? What should change in 30/60/90 days?
None of this is complicated in isolation. But no one is laying it out clearly for providers. The workshops exist for step 1. Steps 2 through 5 are where families get lost — and where providers lose potential enrollment they didn’t even know was there.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just about marketing. It’s about business sustainability. A provider who can’t be found online is invisible to the families searching — and increasingly, that’s how families search. If we want family child care to survive, we have to treat it like a real business. That means going beyond the website and into the work of making it visible.
A flyer in a box doesn’t help anyone. The same is true for a website nobody knows about.