Today, we’re going to go through what’s the difference between a standard website and a high-quality website. So, there’s many things that go into building and creating a website that works well for a business. There’s also a lot of differences between a low-quality and a high-quality website, and unless you understand the core basics that go into building websites and the differences between a low-quality and a high-quality website, it’s very hard to justify the different proposals that are put towards businesses, from low cost to high-cost websites and everything in between.
So, what goes into building a new website? The standard inclusions — now, you should always get these; these are the bare basics you should always get. Core pages for a website for a business, these are non-negotiables. You should always have these pages, and we’ll go through them now, and I’ll go off an example website that I’ve just recently built.
So, here’s a website we recently built for a client. We’ve got core pages like the homepage, the services page, the about us page, and the contact us page. So, these are the core pages that all websites, for all businesses, for any service-based business especially, you need to have these core pages; that’s non-negotiable. You could have the about us page as a section on the homepage, but other than that, what I basically explained there is the bare minimum you should get from any website builder.
Your design should be well laid out; the colors should flow; they should be representative of the business, the brand, and all the copywriting should be easy to read, with colors making it easy to understand what’s written. So many times you see websites where the colors of the fonts just don’t allow you to read it because of the background color, for example.
Copyrighting needs to be unique and original for the company; it cannot be plagiarized, and you cannot copy it from elsewhere. You can use copywriting from elsewhere as a start to get you started for creating your own copywriting, but it needs to be unique; it cannot be copied or plagiarized, otherwise, it will be penalized by Google.
It needs to be mobile responsive; your website must be mobile responsive. Between 50% to 80% of all browsers on Google these days are using mobile phones, so this is a non-negotiable. All websites need to be responsive. Responsive — if anything, websites should be built around mobile first and desktop second.
So, I’ll give you an example here of another website we’ve just recently built. As you can see here, it’s automatically adjusting depending on the size of the screen for the device that’s viewing it. So, all websites need to be mobile responsive.
Okay, so what makes a high-quality website better than a low-quality website? The first one, and the major one, is high-quality websites rank higher on Google, and specifically, with inbuilt SEO, helping them to rank on Google. Low-quality websites generally don’t have any SEO built-in. For example, with meta titles, descriptions, site structure, content-rich pages, etc. Without that sort of inbuilt SEO, you get a very low chance of ranking on Google.
And I’ll give you an example here. So, here’s an example for a client of ours that’s them at the very top, Regional Liquid Waste. We built their website; they wanted to rank on page one of Google, ideally at the very top. They’re ranking number one now, which is fantastic. And as you can see here, we’ve got professionally crafted copywriting for the meta title and also the meta description. Now, that’s left out from so many businesses, and without that, Google has a hard time understanding what the page or the business website’s about, and therefore, struggles to rank accordingly. As you can see down here, we’ll scroll down to Steve’s Liquid Waste. He’s got no meta title and the description that’s not set. Google’s just pulling that from their website. So, they’ve got no title or description set for their meta tags, so that’s really hurting them as far as Google is concerned.
This company here has been around a lot longer than this company here, and so they should be at the top, but they’re not because they haven’t — they’re lacking their SEO. Well, if we go into their website and have a look, it’s very small, so it’s content-lacking. There’s only two pages, and there’s no more navigation up here. There’s no About Us page; there’s no contact us page; there’s no contact form; it’s lacking a lot of things. There’s no privacy policy or terms and conditions; it’s lacking a lot of things that Google is expecting and wanting, and therefore, that’s why they’re not ranking high on Google. They’re lucky in the sense that they’re ranking at all on Google only because it’s low competition; there’s not many other companies that are actually competing highly on it as far as SEO. So, that’s why they’re appearing on page one. But if a couple of these other companies decided to kick up their SEO game and do some work on their website, here’s another one of our customers, Golden Plain Septics. If a few of these other guys here decide to kick up the SEO, Steve’s Liquid Waste wouldn’t even be there at all.
The next one would be higher conversions. If a visitor is landing on this website here and then they’re looking at Regional Liquid Waste, which is our customer ranking at the very top, Regional Liquid Waste has a much higher chance of converting customers because we’ve got specifically targeted copywriting with benefits, not just what they do, but also mainly how they benefit, what services they offer and do for their customers. That’s how you convert visitors into paying customers. It’s not just ‘We pump out your septic tank,’ it’s ‘We maintain your septic tank so it doesn’t get blocked, and we set you up with regular pump-outs every two years, and that way, we avoid any potential of your septic tank being blocked and overflowing.’ So, it’s the benefit, not just the pumping out of the septic tank; it’s the benefit that — and also, you can see here that we’ve got, ‘Make sure that every job gets done quickly,’ benefit, ‘cleanly,’ benefit, and ‘minimum disruption to your family or business,’ benefits. It’s all about leading with benefits. That’s how you convert.
Anybody can write ‘septic tank pump-out,’ or ‘We pump out your septic tanks; we’re the best; we’re the experts.’ It’s all about including benefits.
Tracking is another one. On all our clients’ websites, we install tracking and set them up with Google Analytics right from the get-go. Without tracking, you have no idea how your website is performing. You can have the best-performing website and not know about it, thinking your traffic is coming from Facebook, putting more money into Facebook, where it’s actually coming from, or your organic ranking on Google. You need to have tracking installed on your website, and we’ll just show an example now of what that looks like.
So, as you can see here, this is a customer of ours. You can see that organically, they’re getting 80% of their traffic from organic search; that’s from Google. They’re getting 18% from direct, so that’s people typing their website in directly. And then you’ve got organic social in the pink, which is only a very small portion. So, without tracking, you’re not knowing where your traffic or if any traffic is happening on your website or where the calls are coming from. So, with tracking and custom website reports like what we do here for our customers every month when we maintain their website, the customers know exactly how many calls, how many form submissions, and where that traffic is coming from for their website. So, they understand the performance metrics and the return on investment and so on. So, all websites must have tracking.
The next one is how a high-quality website gives you a much better ROI. If your website is never found on Google, your ROI is most likely going to be zero, unless you’re paying for ads and driving traffic directly to your website. Your website is most likely going to have an ROI of $0. You need to be on Google in order to be found. There’s no point in having a website that looks fantastic or is built out perfectly or really well if nobody’s landing on there. Google is where 90% of people are these days searching for services. You need to be on page one of Google for your main services. If your website does get traffic, for example, through paid advertising or whatnot, but has a low-quality design, then your conversion rate from visitors to becoming paying customers will be extremely low, with a low ROI to match. Even if you’re getting people to your website through paid traffic, it needs to be well-structured, well-designed to convert those people into paying customers. There are so many websites out there that are getting high traffic, but they’re also losing a lot of — they’ve got a higher bounce rate. So, a lot of people are just bouncing off because they take one look at it. You’ve got 3 seconds to impress people and to keep them engaged, and they’re off. So, you’ve got to keep people on there, keep them engaged, show them the services, convince them that you’re the person that they need to call for that service, and convert them. Without that extra conversion copywriting inbuilt, you’re going to lose people if you even get people to your website to start off with.
Next, one is how to justify an investment in a high-quality website. If a website costs $5,000, and your average job value is $1,500, then your website will pay for itself with just four jobs. It’s that simple. So, even though, at the outset, a $5,000 website sounds like a lot, if your average job ticket value is $1,500, you just need four jobs, and that’s paid for itself. You own the website; it’s just paid for itself. Anything more than that is a bonus. So, for example, if you get just one job a month through your website, then your ROI is $113,000 for the first 12 months, and then every year after that, it’s $188,000 a year, all just from a $5,000 investment.
So, now we go through a couple of examples of — we’ll have a look at some results from websites that I’ve built, showing you results from three different-tiered ticket item clients of mine. So, the first one is the low ticket customer, and by low ticket, I mean their average job invoice is $300. That’s how much they charge on average their customers. So, as you can see here, it’s a $300 average, and they’re getting on average, in the last three months from this video, they’re getting 39 new inquiries per month, and at $300 for each inquiry, they get a potential revenue of $11,700 a month. So, you can see how quickly a $5,000 website or a $10,000 website, even, will pay for itself very fast.
We’ll go to another example, which is a medium ticket. As you can see here, the medium ticket, the average ticket price is $1,500 an invoice, and over the last three months, they’ve had on average 11 new inquiries per month. So, that’s a potential revenue of $16,500. Now, obviously, they’re not going to close every single one of these inquiries, but even if they just close half, these websites are paying for themselves very, very quickly.
And the last example is a high ticket item of $5,000. As you can see here, over the last three months, they’ve had on average 33 new inquiries per month. This is a big business; they’re doing some big numbers. So, 33 new inquiries per month at $5,000 per inquiry, that’s a potential revenue of $165,000 a month if they closed all of those inquiries. Now, like I said before, they’re not going to close all of them, but they’re going to close a high percentage of them if they’re good at what they do and their prices are reasonable and affordable and on par with the competition.
Then you look at that; if you spend $5,000, even if you spent $20,000 on this website, if you just got half of that, that website’s paid for itself five times over.
So, to conclude, having a high-quality website will give you a high ROI; it’s that simple. And having a low-quality website is likely to give you a low ROI. So, if you want a high ROI for your business, if you want to increase your revenue by high margins, you want a high-quality website. Thanks for your time; I hope this video helped. If you’ve got any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Digital Marketer - Owner of Andrew Digital