How People Find a Business Online — Digital Marketing & SEO Foundations

Three ways to be found

Every business that wants customers online faces the same basic problem. People have a need, and they look for an answer. Your job is to be one of the answers they see, and then the one they choose. There are three ways to appear in front of them. Marketers call them owned, earned and paid channels.

Owned: channels you control. Your website, your email newsletter, the price list you publish. Nobody can take them away. But nobody sees them unless something brings people there.
Earned: attention that other people give you. Reviews, a newspaper article, a recommendation from a friend, a link from another website. You cannot buy it directly. You earn it with good work and by making that work easy to talk about.
Paid: attention you buy. Search ads, social media ads, a sponsored post, a paid listing. It can work from the first day. It stops on the day you stop paying.

Organic search results sit in an interesting place. You do not pay Google for them, and you do not control them. A page earns its position by being a useful answer to the search. That is what search engine optimisation (SEO) is: making your owned pages good enough that search engines give them earned visibility. How Google finds, stores and ranks pages is the subject of the next course, How Search Engines Work.

Channel type	You control it	Cost	Speed	Examples
Owned	Yes	Your time, hosting, tools	Slow to build, lasts	Website, newsletter, blog guide
Earned	No, you influence it	Mostly time and good work	Slow, lasts	Reviews, press, links, word of mouth
Paid	Yes, while you pay	Money for every click or view	Fast, stops when you stop	Search ads, social ads, sponsored posts

The customer journey

People rarely go from need to purchase in one step. A typical journey for a local service looks like this:

Need: the brakes squeak, or the e-bike battery is empty after 10 km.
Search: they type a question, or a service and a town, into Google, Google Maps or an AI assistant.
Compare: they look at two or three options. Reviews, prices, opening hours, distance.
Decide: they call, book online or walk in.
Return and recommend: a good experience brings them back and makes them tell others.

Each channel helps at a different step. A helpful guide about squeaky brakes (owned) meets people at the need stage. Reviews (earned) do their work at the compare stage. A search ad (paid) can reach someone who wants to decide today. A newsletter (owned) brings past customers back.

In 2026 the search step has more doors than before. Google may show an AI Overview above the classic results, a map with local businesses, and ads. Many people also ask AI assistants for recommendations. The basics stay the same. These systems draw on websites, business profiles and reviews. A business with clear, accurate information in those places is easier to find and easier to recommend.

The trap: starting with the loudest channel

Many small businesses start marketing by buying ads or posting on social media, because it feels like action. Then the ads send people to a slow website without prices, and the Google profile shows the wrong opening hours. The money buys visits, and the visitors leave. Fix the places where people land before you pay to send more people there. Good owned and earned foundations make every paid franc work harder.

Worked example

Meet Lena Kessler. She runs Velo Kessler, a small bike workshop in Winterthur, Switzerland, with one part-time mechanic. She services city bikes, gravel bikes and e-bikes. Customers who find her tend to come back. Her problem is the finding. Her website has a home page and a contact form. Her Google profile was set up years ago by a friend. Last spring she spent CHF 400 on social media ads that sent people to the home page, and she cannot say whether a single booking came from them. We will follow Lena through all eight lessons, with her real-looking (invented) numbers, as she turns this into a plan.

Do this now

Open a notes file and make three lists: owned, earned and paid. Write down every channel your business, or a business you know well, uses today. Then search on your phone the way a customer would: the service plus the town. Note what you see, in order. Ads, a map, an AI Overview, websites, reviews. That page is your starting point.

💡 Search in a private browser window. Your normal results can be shaped by your search history. A private window is closer to what a stranger sees, although your location still affects local results.

Where this course goes next

The Funnel in Numbers: turn marketing into a chain of numbers, so you can see exactly where customers get lost.
Search Intent: understand what a searcher really wants, so the right page appears for the right search.
Your Search Snippet: write titles and descriptions that make people choose your result.
Google Business Profile: set up the free profile that appears in map results for local searches.
UTM Links: tag your links, so you know which newsletter, post or flyer brought a customer.
Can You Afford a Customer?: calculate how much a new customer may cost before you lose money.
Your First 30-Day Growth Plan: choose the few actions that matter and put them in a calendar.

Knowledge check

Lena pays a cycling magazine CHF 400 to publish an article about her workshop. Which channel type is this?

Next lesson →