I used to work for an online booking company that supplied its SMBs with a business profile page, Facebook widget, website widget and reputation management. Alm

I used to work for an online booking company that supplied its SMBs with a business profile page, Facebook widget, website widget and reputation management. Almost universally, they all felt that their website was very important and spent an inordinate amount of money on it...some well into the 6-figures, which was much more than they spent on our service. However, also almost universally, they'd get almost no bookings through the website widgets. Customers overwhelmingly preferred dealing with them through Facebook and our business profile page. Also, our business profile pages showed up much higher in Google for non-name searches. I'm sure there are some SMBs that really do have a need for a website and it really is important to them, but for the verticals that we dealt with, there was a huge perception gap between the perceived and actual value of the website and a profound misunderstanding of the preferences of their customers. The question of whether SMBs still care about their websites is, to me, less interesting than the question of whether SMBs should care about their websites.