Building a website can be a daunting undertaking. Will you lose some of your domain reputation, or some of the SEO it took you years to build? Will you have to write the copy?
It’s also hard to decide who to go with. The well respected web design company in town may charge you $20,000 for your new site, and the kid down the street may offer it for $2,000. And when looking at their portfolios, you cannot really tell the difference.
What to do?
The thing to do is to look at the ongoing performance of a website, and the associated cost, after it’s launched. Don’t be afraid to ask for real metrics during your evaluation process.
For example, we recently rebuilt the website for a client. After we launched the new website, they saw their year over year growth in business per month (so Nov 2017 vs Nov 2018) increase by a factor 6. A factor 6X!
In another instance, we started delivering leads that result in $700-3,000 in new business coming from their new website PER WEEK, and continuing to grow every week.
For another client, we increased the quality of their leads by 50% and we increased their volume of qualified leads by 20% — resulting in thousands of dollars in additional business, six months into the project.
In another case, we tripled the number of qualified leads within one month of a new SEO project.
To be clear, these results do not just come from building a new website. When we build a new website, we do optimize SEO, so that you do not lose any “Google juice” during the transition to the new website. We also optimize technical SEO, Local SEO, and tweak the the site’s content for a set of key phrases. That being said, successful SEO is not a one time thing. It requires nurturing and constant tweaking. And if you want to do it right, in most cases, it needs a lot more upfront work than what you can price into the competitive cost of a new website.
Those clients who see the biggest returns, are those who have an ongoing relationship with us.
The key to success in those relationships, is that unlike most digital agencies who offer ongoing digital marketing services, we do not just work on a retainer basis (e.g., $1,000/mo for ongoing SEO, regardless of how much competition you have, and how many key words you need to optimize) . We work on a combination of retainer and performance based payouts. In effect, we lose money if we do not deliver measurable business results to your business via your new online presence. But we make money together if we deliver results — and we typically do not accept clients for whom we know we will not be able to make a difference.
The next time you decide on building a new website — think of it that way. What will your ongoing cost be to deliver real results through your new web presence. Not what will it cost to set up that presence.
