I spent this week looking closely at nineteen private sports coaches who run their own sessions and set their own rates. Thirteen of them had no website of their own. What they had instead was a profile on the page of a club or venue they work out of, with a name, a photo and an email address.
That arrangement clearly works, or they wouldn't still be doing it. But it has a specific shape, and the shape is worth understanding before you decide it's enough. This applies well beyond coaching. Tradespeople on directory sites, therapists on booking platforms, consultants listed on a partner's site, it's the same structure every time.
You get found for their name, not yours
When your details live on someone else's site, that site is what ranks. Search their venue and you might appear halfway down a staff page. Search your own name and, very often, nothing useful comes back at all.
That matters more than it sounds, because word of mouth doesn't send people to a venue. It sends them to a name. Someone tells a friend "go and see Ben, he's really good with kids," and that friend types "Ben" and the town into Google. If there's nothing there, the recommendation quietly dies at the exact moment it was working.
The arrangement can change without you
A listing exists because a relationship exists. Venues change management, redesign their site, restructure who they promote, or simply stop updating a page that nobody owns. None of that is hostile, it's just what organisations do.
The problem is that your visibility is downstream of decisions you don't make and usually don't hear about in advance. If most of your enquiries arrive through that page, a redesign you had no say in can quietly cut your inbound work, and it can take weeks to notice why.
A listing can't make your case
Most profile entries give you a name, a qualification and a line of text. They rarely have room for what people actually decide on: what you charge, who you work best with, what a first session is like, what happened to other people who came to you.
That's not a failing of the venue. Their page is built to present a team consistently, so every profile has to look the same. But it means the thing that makes you worth choosing over the person listed above you is exactly the thing there's no space for.
What "your own" actually needs to be
Far less than most people expect. For a solo operator, a site that does its job is usually one page, and it answers four things without making anyone hunt: who you are, what you do, what it costs, and how to get hold of you.
- Your name and what you actually do, in the words a normal person would use
- Real prices, or at least a real starting point, because "contact for pricing" loses more enquiries than a high number does
- One or two genuine photos of you doing the work, not stock images
- A direct way to reach you that does not route through anyone else
That's it. It doesn't need a blog, a booking engine, or ten pages. Those can come later if the work justifies them.
This isn't an argument for leaving anywhere
The listing is doing real work and there's no reason to give it up. A venue that sends you clients is a good thing, and a directory that ranks well is worth being on.
The point is simply that it should not be the only place you exist. One sends you work while the relationship holds. The other is yours, follows you if anything changes, and is where a recommendation lands when someone goes looking for your name specifically.
If you want to see the kind of businesses I build these for, that is on the Work page, and what one costs is on the Pricing page.
If you're weighing up what that costs, I've written about what a small business website should actually cost. If you already have one and it isn't bringing in enquiries, what actually makes a site convert is the more useful read, and how a new site gets found by Google covers what happens once it's live.
Before any of that, it is worth checking that Google can actually see the site you already have. This is the ten minute check.
And if people keep agreeing to calls with you and then not turning up, that is usually a fixable mechanical problem rather than a lack of interest.