Many web designers want to be the low cost provider. In fact, many of our main competitors’ here in Kansas City sell their services on ‘affordability’ and compete to be metro’s low cost leader.
You see it everywhere:
“Local Low Cost Web Design”
“Affordable Kansas City Web Site Design”
“Website Design At A Low Cost”
“We will BEAT any competitor’s quote”
As business owners, we all need to carefully consider new investment decisions for our companies – and pricing always comes into play. The truth is, however, that beautiful low cost websites usually end up being worthless.
They may look good at the surface level, but they typically end up buried in Google search results.
In fact, the web design industry has a dirty little secret: the Internet is filled with great web designs that most people will never see – because THEY CAN’T FIND THEM with the most commonly searched terms.
Web design companies LOVE to sell you on the front-end design, because they know you can’t evaluate what is ‘under the hood’ of your website. So you end up very happy with the design…only to be disappointed later with SEO results and web traffic conversion rates.
Business owners need to determine early on if they want a [highlight color=”#3a87ad”]Show Pony website or Work Horse lead machine.[/highlight]
Think about it.
The search engines (Google in particular) comprise the most competitive digital platform on the planet. Google is a $500 billion dollar company. Over 95% of the company’s revenues come from Adwords – yet only 15% of Google users click Adwords.
We’ve always found this to be pretty astonishing – that Google has been able to become a huge company based on a relatively small chunk of ad clicks from a much larger search pie.
But let’s face it – most people know that AdWords results are in fact paid advertisements. Yet almost all of us use Google for the natural (aka organic) search results.
Back to our original point: Google is the most competitive digital platform on the planet.
This is the NBA, the MLB the NFL. When you need your team to perform at a high level, do you target the cheapest talent in the league? Similarly, would you want to work with the cheapest surgeon, attorney or chiropractor? Or hire the cheapest employees?!
These days, your company website is way too important just to be considered as another business expenses. 97% of consumers use the Internet to buy products and services. It’s the first place people go for pre-sales information and usually they last place they check before making a final decision. Your website is every bit as important as your truck, or your office building or any other essential business asset.
There is no reason to “roll the dice” and pick the low cost provider based on price alone. Google IS the big leagues…does it make sense that a cheap website can win long term?
[highlight color=”#3a87ad”]A low cost website that never generates a phone call becomes the most expensive website of all.[/highlight]
Our agency never competes on price because we will not compromise on search engine friendly coding. We provide agency level service and expertise at the best pricing in our market.
Our goal is not to be the low cost leader – we want to create the most profitable websites in our metro area.
We pride ourselves on our design skills, but we do need to manage tradeoffs in order to maximize search engine potential. Some really cool new designs and web features are stunning but do not play well with Google – this is a simple fact.
So, as you are out looking for a web design partner, try to guide your discussions on results and return on investment. At the end of the day, web design and Internet marketing is about one thing – getting your phone call to ring a lot more than it does now.
