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What should a website cost?

Many times the first question I get from people is, "how much does a website cost?"

So, my reply is, "It is like asking, how much is a house?" Before you can answer that question you need to ask a few questions, to know what you are building.

What kind of house? How big? Who is it for? What do they want to do in it? Do you want anything special or unique? What neighborhood will it be in? And you get the point.

The same response is required before you can accurately answer that question about websites. So we need to talk about some things and do a little homework before we can know what the time and hard cost might be.

• Your website needs to be able to engage your audience and do it better than your competition's site does.
• Your website needs to be able to instill confidence and trust in your brand, products or services.
• Your website needs to meet the expectations your audiences have for quality, information, functionality, and ease of use.
• Your website needs quality content to drive traffic, engage and generate leads.
• Your website needs to meet SEO standards and compliance, be safe and secure and be able to grow with your business needs.

SEE BASIC COST GUIDE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE:

Content is: Copy, Visuals and Functionality (like forms, scheduling and calendars, etc.) Content is the most important part of your site. And can be the most expensive thing to create.

Simply said the content is what engages your site user. And it is what helps search engines find your website and offer it up to people who are searching for what you have to offer.

Website content needs to contain language and keywords that search users use to find your services, products or information.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is much more complex than it used to be.

Why? Because the more complex and sophisticated the algorithms become, the more considerations that need to be addressed to accomplish any quality level of SEO.

Here are a few of the things that need to be addressed when providing a quality SEOed website.

• Site Structure

  Any site that is being built for you should have this in the development cost and part of the original proposal.

  • Responsive and mobile friendly
  • Site Structure – SEO Friendly - navigation, page structure, page relationships (parent and child pages)
  • Information Hierarchy: Prioritized "href" heads, subheads, etc. allowing search Engines to prioritize the site information and index the content of the site.

• Site Content

  The relevance of the content on your site to the requested searches. This requires keyword planning and an understanding of what search terms people use when looking for your business, products, services or information.

  • Site Copy- The copy on your site is not written the same as the copy you would put in a printed brochure. THis is not romancing copy but search-friendly text. That contains the keywords and search terms that mimic and directly respond to the words people use to search for what you have to offer.
  • Site Images - People like visual content and are drawn to it. So we want the images to be quality, communicate well and be copyright law compliant. Images with the right metadata: keywords, descriptions, alt. text, etc.
  • Geo Friendly - Geographic location plays an important part in search results. Depending on the product or service it might be the most important thing.
    • An actual place of business is better than a vague or broad location. So an actual address is best.
    • Making sure that your business is listed on any and all online directories and review sites - like Google Business listings, Bing Business Listings, Yelp, business association sites, etc. And you want your website link on these directories. The more the better.
  • Current Information - Blogging, news, and updates with new, relevant information for your audiences can be valuable, a site with dormant or old info can hurt your site SEO and Ranking.

• External Links

  Inbound links to your site from other trusted, relevant, quality - company sites, blogs, directories and social media can drive traffic and increase your site ranking.

• Site Traffic

  The more traffic the better the site ranks. Older established sites often SEO better than new sites. This is mostly because they have a history and built a consistent stream of traffic that shows the search engines that people value your site and what you have to offer. So doing things to drive traffic to your site helps your site SEO organically.

• SEM or Search Engine Marketing - PPC

  These are the search results that show up at the top of your search results at the top or the side. They are marked "Ad", but they are the first thing the search user sees when they hit enter to a search. This increases the chances of you getting a click. So people bid on getting their ad/link appear at the top of the search page search results. You need to use analytics and trial and error to maximize the value and results you get from this effort and investment.

• Display Ads - PPC

  These are actual banner ads that have images, headlines and click buttons, etc. They can be animated or static, but they get placed on sites that draw people that fit the profile you describe to increase the targeting of your message to get in front of people who index highly to use your product or service. Indexing measures the level of interest different groups as defined by age, sex, income, geography, interest, jobs, hobbies, etc. This can cost more per click through. because you can get a better return by being able to better target your audience and site traffic.

Pay Per Click or PPC

This is as it sounds, you pay every time someone clicks on one of these paid links that take them to your web page.

There are a few types of this type of PPC:

SEM or Search Engine Marketing - PPC

These are the search results that show up at the top of your search results at the top or the side. They are marked "Ad", but they are the first thing the search user sees when they hit enter to a search. This increases the chances of you getting a click. So people bid on getting their ad/link appear at the top of the search page search results. You need to use analytics and study what is working and what is not. You try different ads based on keyword research to maximize the value and results you get from this effort and investment.

Display Ads - PPC

 

These are actual banner ads that have images, headlines and click buttons, etc. They can be animated or static, but they get placed on sites that draw people that fit the profile you describe to increase the targeting of your message to get in front of people who index highly to use your product or service. Indexing measures the level of interest different groups as defined by age, sex, income, geography, interest, jobs, hobbies, etc. This can cost more per click through. because you can get a better return by being able to better target your audience and site traffic.

What effects PPC results?

Landing Pages

Google and Bing Judge your PPC marketing based on what you say in the ad and how that links and is related to the content on the landing page the ad links to.

 

Keyword Relevance

It is important to craft relevant PPC keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.

 

Quality Score

Quality Score is Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores get more ad clicks at lower costs.

The landing page is the page that a user lands on when clicking on a link somewhere on the web. This could be linked from organic search results, PPC advertising, links on directories or in articles, and so on.

A landing page should

A landing page can be:

• A stand-alone page that is developed to be the primary page for a specific marketing campaign or a link on a page directed a particular group or audience to better address them, the offer and drive call to action.
• The homepage of your website is often the most common landing page used, but might not always be the best one. If you sell multiple products or services, you might see better performance if the link you use sends people to the specific web page that addresses the information and details fo the product or service you are promoting. And it may rank better when doing PPC.

What Platform? Or what platform are you on? This is a question you might hear or see when considering getting a website.

WEBSITE PLATFORMS:

This is what the site is built on. There are a variety of directions you can take, depending on what you are trying to achieve. The cost of development is effected by the platform you build on. In all cases below, it takes some understanding of the platforms to build and manage the site. Your ability to design and work with technology will drive how well you can do it yourself.

Custom HTML5

This is where the site is built page-by-page using HTML5 coding. Each page is developed and code written for it. This is typically the most expensive and customizable way to develop a site. This site can be hosted a variety of hosts. This is usually the most expensive type of site to build. Because you have to develop the front and custom code the backend of every page design. You also often need to write custom code for every piece of functionality you need on the site.

CMS / Content Management System:

There are a variety of platforms, but the most popular one is WordPress. This platform works based on a database and a page template that builds each page from the content in the database based on what the template directs. This reduces the cost of development and allows you to more easily add and change content. This site can be hosted a variety of hosts.

Dedicated E-commerce Platforms

These CMS sites, but are generally are hosting platforms that are designed to provide templates, hosting and e-commerce capabilities. These are platforms like Shopify and Big Commerce. You sign up on their hosting platform and work from their CMS platform.

This can help your e-commerce SEO because they are set up with tools specifically to help sell online.

Hosting Template Driven

–These are similar to the above E-commerce platforms, but these companies, but not focused as much on e-commerce, like Wix and Square Space allow you to DIY a site based on their limited set of templates, but you must host on their platforms.

Customization is limited and can be viewed by your some audiences as less sophisticated and beginner. Depends on what you are doing, the functionality you want or expect to grow into, as well as the audience you need to reach.

Website Ranking - How it affects performance.

This refers to the quality of the website. The quality is judged by search engines like Google and Bing. They use the quality ranking or rating as one factor in deciding where and in what order to serve up your site link when people organically search for the things you offer.

What do they use to evaluate ranking?

This is a constantly evolving standard. They use algorithms to crawl and index your site as to:

Site Content - Is the content up-to-date and maintained?

Site Structure - Is the site set up to function and provide a good user experience?

Site Relevance - Does the site have the information that best answers the search query and questions the user is looking for?

Online Reputation - How good are the online reviews for your company, products or services?

Inbound or External Links - How many other websites link to the information on your site? Are they quality sites?

Internal and Outbound Links - Does your site provide user-friendly links within the content to better and more efficiently help users learn and find what they want to know or need.

The Answer is YES!

But then to what level. The more important you rely on Search Engines to drive traffic to your site the more important it is to have quality SEO.

So all sites need to have the structural and content qualities of a well SEOed website. That is because the qualities or attributes that Google uses to judge SEO, are the attributes that affect the quality of the user experience when they visit your site. And the User Experience research shows directly effects time on site, bounce rate, conversion, and reputation.

In other words, how well your site performs and drives ROI.

Sometimes people talk about SEO in general terms that includes both Organic Search and Paid Search.

With a new site, you may need to use some Paid search SEM and Digital Display marketing to drive traffic, build a reputation and generate revenue to get you going.

FUNCTIONALITY:

This is the term we use for what you want the website to do and what you want your site visitors to be able to do on your site.

- Contact forms

- Blog

- Image galleries

- Reservations

- Buy things

- Event Calendar

- Pay online

Often it requires special programming or software (called plugins) that allow these

things to be performed. In some cases free plugins are available, but others cost a

licensing fee. Obviously, the better and more secure they are, the more they cost.

Can you SEO a new website to appear on the first page from day one?

Chances are, no. If you are in a category that has real competition it is not that simple. Sites that have history, steady traffic, good online reputation, and have already been indexed well on Google or Bing, have a leg up. No matter how well you have done the SEO on the site itself, there will still be work to do.

You will need to:

• Get great reviews online
• Get your business listed on all directories with website links
• Drive site traffic
• Develop external links, inbound to your site
• Stay content relevant to your customers
• Use social media
• Develop video content

SEO is not a one and done thing, it is an ongoing effort to keep traffic up, content relevant and See "What is SEO?"

Organic Search is the results that are returned from a search engine query when I use puts in search terms and hits return. And you do not have to pay for the organic search. But you do have to develop a site that can rank highly for the searches that are being made to find your type of product or service.

But to get high in the search results you do have to develop a site that can rank highly for the searches that are being made to find your type of product or service.

See What is site ranking for more info.