Category Archives: business tools

Does Your Website Pay for Itself?

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When we meet with a prospect, we often ask: “What problems does your business have that a website can solve? More often than not, the response is something like, “Well, I was hoping you could tell me.” 

Everyone acknowledges that they need a website, however, many still believe that a website is not much more than a digital billboard. We know it’s much more. It’s your…

  • first impression
  • major credibility factor 
  • problem solving machine
  • extra salesperson
  • friendly receptionist
  • email marketer
  • full-time networker
  • customer support

If you sell things or hold events, it’s your ticketing agent, cashier, inventory control manager, scheduler, event coordinator, and publicity agent. 

If you think you can’t justify the cost of a professional, custom built website that solves your customer’s problems — think again. What you save in man-hours proves you can!

For example, according to digital.com, a basic informational website is $2,000 to $8,000 with very little customization. A website management firm will charge for domain name transfers/renewals, hosting fees, responsive layouts, built-in SEO, favorite icon design, images, secure shopping carts, SSL fees, selling fees, monthly email marketing campaigns, multiple-managed social media posts, and content and software updates. These, and a well-written monthly blog, add up to another $5,000 to $12,000 a year. If you pay for these services monthly, the cost per year increases from $500 to $5,000. 

So consider this: the salary for a marketing manager with digital savvy who can write and code is about $40,000 – $60,000 a year. In our Florida market, our customers pay an average of $6,000, plus $300 – $600 per month for maintenance, blogging, email marketing, social media services, and SEO. Amortized over 5 years, that’s $550 a month. 

Now think of your website as a member of your sales team, or the head of marketing, or your outside salesforce. If built and maintained well, your website can save tens of thousands per year, pretty much enough to hire that extra sales or marketing pro to close the deals the website brings in.

Do You Really Need SEO?

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SEO water glassWe have a client with a product so unique, only a handful of markets use it. The site serves companies that play in that market with product updates and industry news. No one other than the businesses who need their product subscribe to their newsletter or product update notices. This client does not need SEO. They have, but they don’t need it.

However, we believe that most companies benefit from the basic building blocks of SEO—The Five C’s: Code, Content, Connections, Communications, and Capture.

Let’s take look at each building block:

Code

Every website should have underlying code that Google, Bing, and Yahoo can use in order to rank the site on a search engine results page (SERP). These are often referred to as meta tags. How to write certain meta tags is a science in itself and usually requires identifying the keywords used by direct competitors.

Content

The content on your site (and content about you elsewhere on the web) is your single most important SEO ingredient. SEO-friendly content satisfies the search engines and delights and amazes your prospects. Keyword phrases done well are subtle, relevant, and read like we speak. If you’re overaggressive with SEO keywords, a site can actually be “punished” with a lower rank or no rank at all. Writing SEO-friendly content is an art.

Connections

It’s called link-building, and it’s the most difficult to do well because it requires engagement. Not the proposal-leading-to-marriage kind of engagement, but link exchanges with “influencers” in your market. So if your site boasts the world’s first electric tractor, you want Farm Industry News writing about you and linking to your website. Don’t pay anyone to find broken links on other sites with the offer to replace the broken link with yours. Google wants high quality SERPs and will punish those who abuse their algorithm.

Communications

Social media is not SEO. But using social media to engage with customers and influencers is one of the best ways to create the connections that lead to SEO-helpful links. Don’t get me wrong, we all belong at the Social Media Marketing Table. So when you post, keep in mind who you are posting for—your customer and a potential industry influencer.

Capture

As Alice said to the Cheshire cat, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” When looking at website traffic, we can’t know how well we are doing today unless we know how well we did yesterday. Google Analytics embedded in a website is just the beginning. Knowing how to analyze the data, then change, alter, add to or get rid of certain content on your website is critical to a site’s success.

What if No One is Picking Up What You’re Putting Down?

Let’s say you have invented a new product that has proven immensely popular with the friends and family whom you persuaded to try it. It could be the next top-seller gadget for 2018, but no one is searching for it because no one knows it exists. Running keyword research is a waste of time—keywords won’t exist yet. You have to create them! In these cases, the best SEO tactic is paid search in an awareness campaign. The good news is that the cost of paid search is affordable—there’s no competition in this case. Once there’s demand, return to an SEO strategy and drop or scale back any AdWords campaign.

Want to check out your website’s SEO potential? Email us and we’ll send you our SEO Best Practices Guide. Or just call (772) 932-7969. Do it now!

Web Builder vs Web Designer

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There’s an old adage attributed to copywriter Gary Halbert (1938-2007), “The Prince of Print” that goes like this:

What does it take to have a successful restaurant?

Great location? No.
Superior service? Nope.
Good prices? Nope.
Ambiance? Not even close.
Amazing food? Actually, not even that.

To have a successful restaurant … you need a starving crowd.
Everything else is a means to serve that crowd a little better—to get their attention
and give them what they want.

Your business has its own version of the starving crowd. It’s up to you to figure who’s starving. Or is it?

dog and catHalbert goes on to say that once you know who’s starving, get their attention and give them what they want. If you have a successful business now, you’ve got a pretty good handle on who is picking up what you put down. But guess what? Those starving people can now find you!

New customers, patients, clients, donors, whatever, tell Google their problem, and like magic (not really magic, more like an algorithm) up comes a menu of solutions providers. Often, the list is long, so you want those eyeballs to see your business name right in front of their eyes. Not an easy task! But we’ll get to that later.

So now they found your website and it’s beautiful. They love the look. But they’re still starving because they can’t figure out in the first 3 seconds how you can solve their problem. This is pretty common when you’ve chosen a website builder like Squarespace.

I mean, would you hire me to take photos at your wedding? I’m a whiz on my iPhone camera and have Photoshop, so why not? It’s just the most important day of your life. Well the same thing applies to your website.

There are so many complicated back-end things that go into a beautiful custom website that have nothing to do with design:

  1. Write marketing copy or repurpose existing copy that is intelligently packed with keywords in the right tone and voice for your business.
  2. Build a navigation scheme around that copy that gets attention, raises curiosity, engages visitors so they spend time on your site, and finally, to get a visitor to engage or take action.
  3. Ask questions in order to know you and your business; do exhaustive research on the competition and outline a strategic marketing plan. (Clients often get more out of this process than any other).
  4. Refresh a logo or repurpose images to put your best face forward online.
  5. Implement and integrate SEO, social media, email marketing, blogging, e-commerce, CRM, and more.
  6. Provide for approval a written content document and a static mockup of the site before the actual site building starts.

If you’ve thought about using a website builder, give us a call. We’ll buy you cup of coffee, lay out the pros and cons in a fair and honest way, and give you a chance to really understand your options. If we move forward, great. If not, no hard feelings and you never know what’s down the road. Just saying though, next time, coffee is on you. I like the Flat White at Starbucks.