Something we have experienced a lot over the years is people coming back to us several months after a website launch to complain that they’re not getting much traffic. This is a topic that we always cover with clients before we’ve built anything, but catches almost everyone out. The solution is very simple, but perhaps misunderstood. So here’s an analogy to help explain it.
Let’s imagine you’re opening a new shop – a physical location. You can pay the shopfitters and builders as much as you like, splash out on all the very best fixtures and fittings, and stock it to the rafters with the absolute best, industry-leading stock. Your shop is officially the nicest, most beautifully designed, built and best-stocked shop in the world.
Trouble is, at this point the only people who know the shop is there are you and the people who built it. If, three months later, you’d had no one visit the shop other than your friends and family you’ve mentioned it to on Facebook, would you contact the builder of your amazing shop and question why you’ve had no customers? Or would you then – or even more likely right from the day it opened – look into advertising?
Hopefully, you know that you’d need to actually tell people it’s there in order for them to come and see it. You wouldn’t expect to open a shop and it just fill with customers with zero effort. There is perhaps a lack of understanding that the same concept applies when it comes to websites.
The generally held expectation is that if you build a website and wait a couple of days, Google will tell everyone you’re there and the money will come rolling in. There are an estimated 1.13 BILLION websites on the internet at the moment, with a reported 175 new websites created EVERY SINGLE MINUTE. Even as a web designer, Google doesn’t email me every time someone launches a new website to keep me up to date, so the general public certainly won’t know your new website is there just by it being launched.
The way in which a website is built is critical to the long-term success and performance you can expect. At agencies like bunnyduck.design, we spend a long time analysing competitors, making sure that not only does it look lovely from the front, but that all the boring stuff is done in the back end to ensure that best standards are met. This is simply Phase One of a website – actually building it.
Phase Two is even more critical. Advertising, telling people you are there, driving traffic to your pages. Through the two main processes – SEO and PPC – you’ll need a budget allocated to actually getting eyeballs on your website, who turn into customers and ultimately money in your pocket. Spending even just £100 on a website is a massive waste of time and money if you then never spend anything advertising it.
We offer a range of SEO and PPC options for clients to help boost their site once it is live. Scrimping on the advertising of your site is pointless, you may as well not build it in the first place. Get in touch with us today if you’ve got questions about this, because we want your website to be a success. By the time we’ve designed and built the sites we work on, we’re almost as knowledgeable and in love with your company as you are! We WANT to see you succeed, but you’ll only ever get a return on your initial website investment if you spend money on SEO and PPC. You wouldn’t buy a car, never put fuel in it and then get angry with Mercedes that it’s not doing what it should be doing.
More often than not, when we send out a bespoke website quote, the first thing we’re asked is “can you make it cheaper?”. As all of our quotes are tailored around the client’s individual needs, as a rule, yes we can reduce the cost – by taking out some of the parts we were asked to include in the first place. And generally, the first one people select to remove is the Phase Two costs. If you’re building a new house that generates all it’s electricity via solar panels, then ask the cost to be reduced by not having the solar panels, you’re going to get it cheaper but you’re not going to get any electricity.
So don’t spend money on building your beautiful new website and then keep it a secret. Shout about it from the digital rooftops with SEO and PPC budgets, and watch as the visitors increase and the ROI shoots through the roof.