Should MSPs Use a Website Builder

Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast with your host, Mike and Shelly Miller, your source for B2B business building information, where we talk sales and marketing and give you the insider secrets you need to know to grow your business. We want to help you attract leads and sales and show you how to align sales and marketing. So you get more sales faster, with less cost.

Mike Miller??00:29

So today the topic is, should you use a website builder to build your website for your business? And so there’s Okay, the popular ones are like Wix. And then GoDaddy has their website builder.

Shelly Miller??01:08

Yeah, a lot of the hosting companies do have website builders.

Mike Miller??01:11

Yeah, exactly. So should you use them?

Shelly Miller??01:17

Good question.

Mike Miller??01:19

So why do you have a website? I mean, I feel like that’s so without just going no.

Shelly Miller??01:29

Cuz then it would be a one minute podcast? No, you shouldn’t Yeah.

Mike Miller??01:33

Yeah. No, thank you for joining. We’ll see you next time. So why do you have a website. So the website, your website is the hub of all your marketing. What I mean is, it’s where you direct visitors, and engage them so that they understand more about what you offer and what your business offers. But also entertain as you engage through the use of top of funnel content, and provide solutions through middle of funnel content. When you do that, you you have engaged marketing automation. So you can’t do that with Wix, you can’t do that with GoDaddy, Website Builder. You need to like if you want your website to actually be profitable, and you want to use it as a business asset, then you need to build your website, yourself, or, you know, have someone do it. But basically, there’s you have two options, I think, and that is WordPress, and custom HTML.

Shelly Miller??02:53

I agree.

Mike Miller??02:55

Yeah. So and and the reason why is because those are both SEO friendly.

Shelly Miller??03:02

And there’s the point, right, yeah, you’re so limited, or don’t have the ability at all, when you have a website builder that you don’t get to use your website for all of the things that you need it to do it, it just doesn’t offer the functionality that you need it to do to that gives you the best, you know, marketing piece for your business and selling piece, your sales piece as well as marketing, your website does all of that. And a website builder does not help you do that?

Mike Miller??03:35

Well, right now. It’ll help you make pages, right to put something up. So if if you just want something there for people to see when they come to your website, then you could use a website builder.

Shelly Miller??03:49

Right. And we used to call those brochure sites. So basically, it was just a site. Yeah, just a site that said, you know, here’s my company, I am real, right? Yes, you know,

Mike Miller??03:58

right. But you have to realize your website is an island. And so your job is to drive to build bridges to it. And one of the major bridges is Seo. And website builders are notorious for not being SEO friendly. Like, you’re just building pages. And Google, you know, See, the thing is, is that you’re putting it into the hosting that they have. Even on GoDaddy though, you you you’re buying shared hosting and putting your their website builder version of your website, into your hosting. And that IP address is shared with, you know, hundreds of other customers. You know, I’m going into the weeds, aren’t I?

Shelly Miller??04:50

Yes. So but it’s the truth.

Mike Miller??04:52

Yeah, but it’s the truth. So but basically, it creates a whole lot of code. They create extraneous code. Have code. And if you look at the density of the text on the page to the amount of code, like Google sees that it has to strip through it in order to, to put your website in the search engine results pages. So what it does is it looks at, okay, like, think of it this way, how many words are there on the page? 15,000? Okay, how many words of text are there on the page? 600?

Shelly Miller??05:30

Yes, that’s exactly. And so it has to sift through 15,000 words.

Mike Miller??05:34

Yeah, essentially. So it doesn’t like that. It doesn’t like it’s never like that.

Shelly Miller??05:38

It likes lean, quick, directive. Text.

Mike Miller??05:42

Exactly. That’s why you can rank really highly on Google with a really basic layout, like 10 lines of code. And then 600 words, like that’ll rank,

Shelly Miller??05:56

right. And I want to point out here basic doesn’t mean, ugly, or that it doesn’t look great. It just means that the text has been our the code is lean, you know, it’s, it’s, it just directs what it wants the preview that or the, the design that comes through instead of adding so much extraneous code, because that’s what makes it what we call heavy. And then Google doesn’t like that. So that could be one reason why you, you know, don’t rank so why would you use a website builder? I mean, just that one, you know, one reason right there. And, and the, the limitability? I mean, there’s so many problems with trying to get it to do what you need it to do, or, I mean, you know, it seems pretty easy. You know, you also want to track people from your website. Yeah. So that seems like an easy Oh, it’s just make a facebook pixel. And we’ll put it on our website, well used a website builder, and that website builder isn’t clear about where you would add this pixel.

Mike Miller??06:56

Right. How do you add that to your footer?

Shelly Miller??06:59

There you go.

Mike Miller??06:59

You don’t? You can’t because there’s no functionality to do that. It’s the truth, you know, yeah. So you buy Crazy Egg and you want to integrate Crazy Egg into your website so that you can see heat tracking, right? Oh, you can’t? Because you used a website builder, right? So it’s like, you

Shelly Miller??07:18

know, or you can but you spend a week trying to find where you insert that.

Mike Miller??07:22

Yeah. And you got to call people and you might as well have someone do it. You know, if you’re going to spend three or four hours trying to do a simple thing on your website, now, and they sell it by saying that it’s so simple to update your website, right, man, get WordPress. It’s so simple to update your website, you know, learn it right WordPress, if you’re gonna do it yourself, otherwise, hire someone hire professional.

Shelly Miller??07:47

Well, you know how we use car analogies a lot? Yeah. So a website reminds me of like, the tires for your car. Yeah. So there’s all kinds of tires. And you could go and you know, you need new tires. You go, you can buy a cheap set of tires and get a donut. Yeah. Well, I’m going past that. So you get you buy a cheap set of tires. Yeah. And you, they work, they move your car. But they are built to last, you will find that you know, basically wasted that $400 because you’re going to be still sliding in there that you don’t have any traction, when you could have spent maybe 600 or 800. Even Yeah, and even though you know, while you’re sitting there who likes to buy tires. No one likes to buy tires, right? But the $800 tires will last longer.

Mike Miller??08:37

Yeah, exactly.

Shelly Miller??08:38

And they’ll do what you need it to do. And you’ll feel safe. Well, that’s to me a website. So if you buy a website, use a website builder and from your hosting company or anywhere. That’s the problem. It’ll work. it’ll, it’ll have your company logo, and maybe you know, your message, but people it isn’t for Google, and it’s not beneficial. So you know, like the cheap tires, it’ll work. But it’s, it’s, it’s not good enough, right? And you obviously care more about your business than to get a cheap pair of tires. So same deal. You need to you need a good website, this isn’t something you should scrimp on. You need it because you don’t just use your website for your logo and some text. You use it as a marketing piece. Like Mike said, you know, the hub of all your marketing, it’s the truth, but not only marketing sales, right? So if you look at it like that, it becomes extremely obvious why it’s so important that you have a website that works for you that’s built correctly that will accommodate all of the things you need it to do to make the most money from it.

Mike Miller??09:45

Yep, absolutely. And to go with the tire analogy, it’s a it is a donut. wicks is a donut. It’s it’s a retread basically. And let me just ask you, you know To use roofing, do you want a 10 year roof? Do you want to root for the 10 year warranty? Or do you want to get a 30 or 45? year? You know, it’s just How serious are you about your success? So if you’re in business, you should look at this as a business asset, because the whole purpose of it is to drive leads. Yes, attract people drive leads, if you have no way to attract people, or drive leads, it doesn’t matter if it’s a value at $19 a month. Right? Right. Because it’s a waste, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a waste of money. So,

Shelly Miller??10:40

right Plus, you have to put a lot of thought into your website, even if you buy you know, you do a website builder, you still have to put a lot of thought into it. So why not do it right the first time. If you do it right the first time, then you’re you’re not limping throughout the whole cycle of this website and still have to arrive at the same point, which is you got to buy another website now. Right? Because the first one you bought was, you know, inferior. Let’s put it that way.

Mike Miller??11:05

Right. Exactly. Unless you’re, you know, so, like, let’s compare this to to Click Funnels, right, because Click Funnels has a website builder. And it’s not really SEO friendly. Because you’re just building a landing page. So So, you know, why not? Wix to do the same thing? Well, look at clickfunnels. Basically, the whole goal of it is to drive traffic from Facebook into a clickfunnels landing page, and then sell something. So right there, it has like a shopping cart that sells and delivers a product, usually a coaching product, right? A digital info info marketing product, okay. To do that, in Wix would be like, super difficult. Right? It is, you know, yeah. But what I’m saying is, is that if your website is an island, and your job is to build bridges to it, then what what’s the function of the bridge? Right? So SEO is a huge pipeline of traffic to your website. So is advertising paid advertising like Google? Pay Per Click, Facebook ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, you know, all the social channels. So you’re advertising to get people to your website, but what’s the action you want them to take? You want them either to pick up a lead magnet, a middle of the funnel or guide or attend a webinar? Download a course,

Shelly Miller??12:50

schedule a meeting schedule them?

Mike Miller??12:52

Exactly. You want them to do these things. So go ahead and get that done in Wix. You know what I mean? Good luck. It’s gonna be it’s gonna be a nightmare. Even for us. We’ve been doing it 21 years and, you know, no HTML, no JavaScript, no CSS inside now. And it’s a pain to use that tool. I’d rather do it by hand.

Shelly Miller??13:18

Oh, it’s it’s easier to code that by hand than to use Wix. Yeah, I know that Wix. You know, sells that it’s not? Yeah. We were trying to help out to an organization with their website. And unfortunately, we found out they had Wix. And it was a nightmare. We really, it took us a while and our team to try to get it to do what they needed it to do. And we should have just said, Ah, we’ll donate an entire site. The amount of time. The amount of time we all spent was ridiculous. So

Mike Miller??13:53

we didn’t know it going in though. No, but I will say, you know, I’m poopoo in Wix. But Wix is lightyears ahead of GoDaddy builder.

Shelly Miller??14:03

Oh, definitely. I mean it. Okay. So funny. If you if you are going to use a builder, it would go to Wix instead of a hosting companies builder. But just just, you know, if it’s a money issue, or it’s, you know, there’s something going on it, it’s worth it in the beginning, to just do what you need, and what’s best for you what will work best for you? Yeah, instead of, well, I’ll just try to do this on the cheap and then, you know, we’ll go from there.

Mike Miller??14:37

Exactly.

Shelly Miller??14:38

So it’s not one of those things you should scrimp on. That’s what we’re saying. You should buy what you need so that it works the best for you because then you’ll get the return on it.

Mike Miller??14:48

Exactly. Yeah. You can’t get the return on it. If you if you’re chintzy if you scrimp on it. You have to invest in it in order to get the return. You do Yeah, you know, and investing can mean many things. It can mean SEO as well as the website, but the website generally has to be SEO friendly. You also have to do content marketing, conversion rate optimization, landing page development, ads, right? All these go together. And that that’s what always makes me mad about people who are like, we’re gonna do content. Or we’re gonna do Facebook ads. Like, what did we say this last week? Yes, Facebook ads go into a homepage or to an about page where he’s talking about, like, you can’t just have a Facebook ad that goes to an about page, you’ve got to have a landing page, you’ve got to have a call to action, you know, with an offer you have to develop that offer. You have to do A B split testing on it. You can’t do it with a GoDaddy Website Builder.

Shelly Miller??15:57

No, you could. So obviously, from our tone, our tonality, yeah, say, this really grinds our gears. Yeah, so

Shelly Miller??16:04

many people will says Mike and Shelly Oh,

Shelly Miller??16:07

no, go, Well, I have everything I have the content I have, I’m ready to go. And then we you know, take a look at what they’re doing. And like Mike said, it happens half of the time. You have people that are paying good money for ads that go to the homepage, or the about page. Yeah, there’s no landing page. Oh, and then when you mention it, we’ve had people say, Well, I don’t I don’t know how to make a landing page. Well, yeah. Then why are you spending money on ads? Because Yeah, what what, hey, here’s my ad, hey, I’m this company. Yeah, call me sometime. I mean, you know, really, you? If you want an offer, it’s a bad offer. And it is in a ridiculous place. your homepage. I mean, this is this has been going on for years. And I can’t believe that we still see it continually on at least a monthly basis where, you know, you click you click an ad or you click a link from Google, the Google search and you are taken to their homepage.

Mike Miller??17:07

Yeah.

Shelly Miller??17:08

Everyone, then goes, click as in gone. bounced. I’m not I’m not staying here. I typed in that I wanted to see, what would be the best managed services provider for me.

Mike Miller??17:22

Yeah, you know, not or backup, and data recovery. That’s what I wanted. And I come to, we’re an IT services company homepage. Okay. But I got to make the assumption when you could have a landing page that was congruent. That talked about just that product.

Shelly Miller??17:42

And that’s how it should be period

Mike Miller??17:44

Yeah, because Google likes that. And you have you actually pay less per click. If your landing page and your ad are congruent. There’s a score. So right, and you’re wasting money and you’re wasting time.

Shelly Miller??17:59

Yeah, and I’m just gonna say it. If you if you don’t, it’s wrong. It’s ridiculous.

Mike Miller??18:05

Yeah. That’s,

Shelly Miller??18:06

I mean, it makes absolutely no sense why you would have an ad that that points to just your homepage. It’s It’s ridiculous. It, it is.

Mike Miller??18:15

Well, and you know what, that brings up a good point. Because so so there’s best practices in every industry, there’s best practices. And if you look at a best practice, you know, on a bell curve, it’s right in the middle. It’s like the average thing to do. Yes, it’s the basic thing to do.

Mike Miller??18:32

It is its basic,

Mike Miller??18:33

you can get better, you can do better than best practices. But if you’re not even doing best practices,

Shelly Miller??18:41

right, then then you then it’s obvious why you’re not getting the return that you should.

Mike Miller??18:45

Yeah. And plain that you’re not getting any results from your marketing.

Shelly Miller??18:49

Yeah. And I wonder why.

Mike Miller??18:52

Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, we, you know, this could be 45 minutes.

Shelly Miller??19:00

It could, but I think they got the gist.

Mike Miller??19:02

I do, too. I think that

Shelly Miller??19:03

I think it’s really clear how we feel about using a website builder and not using your website the way that it should be used, optimized to, to bring in leads. And that helps you grow your business instead of just a URL with your logo and some paragraphs of text.

Mike Miller??19:22

Exactly. And Shelly had mentioned, well, is this for all MSPs? Or is this just for the people who are making under $500,000 a year right, so who’s the Who’s this tart this topic for? And the thing is, is that we found like million dollar a year companies with Wix builders,

Shelly Miller??19:43

we have actually, you

Mike Miller??19:45

know, but they get all their, they get all their business from referrals, which is great, but also, you dangerous

Shelly Miller??19:56

well, and you could exactly then you have all your eggs in one basket and Just by having a good website, you don’t have to just count on referrals. Remember marketing and aligning sales and marketing our process. That’s the whole point of continually making money and never having an empty pipeline is you don’t just put all of your eggs in one basket, you don’t just depend on referrals. You have outbound sales, you have inbound sales, you have marketing and sales aligned, yes. So that you’re all on the same page. And this makes a cohesive marketing, you know, and sales system that basically keeps your business running, keeps it growing.

Mike Miller??20:40

Exactly.

Shelly Miller??20:41

And so if one source of income dries up, it’s okay. You have three or four or five, six others.

Mike Miller??20:48

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, like, here’s a weird example of this. But I spoke with someone and they were like, we’re getting all our business from Instagram. And we’re basically following the businesses that we want to do business with, which is awesome. And they’re getting business doing that. But here’s the thing, at least 50% of those businesses, the only people who see that they liked one of their posts, or you know that this company was following your company is your social media person, right? Not the owner of the company, the social media person, right? All this stuff, right? So you’re building a relationship with what you think is the business, but it’s really the social media, social media person. And if that’s all you did, you would be vulnerable. What you need to do is connect with the owner of the company. So you’ve got to use multiple media, right? Because you can’t rely on the fact that just because you built a relationship on social with this company, that you’ve actually built a relationship on. So you know, with that company,

Shelly Miller??22:03

yes, good point,

Mike Miller??22:04

you got to do it multiple channels. And, and that’s what Shelly’s saying, you know, if you if you do it, you need to do it all. And if you do it all, you can’t chintz on any one thing, you have to understand that each piece is very important to your overall strategy, right? So like your website, your CRM, your marketing automation, these have to be really, you know, solid. Now, you don’t have to spend $5,000 a month on marketing automation, because there’s options other than Marketo. You know, even you could even do MailChimp, if you wanted to, and that’s affordable. And basically, that’s the cost of doing business.

Shelly Miller??22:51

Right?

Mike Miller??22:52

Yeah. And you’re not gonna get results if you don’t do it with some kind of quality.

Shelly Miller??22:58

Right. So basically, if you’re, if you’re thinking that you haven’t gotten a return on investment, from your sales and marketing efforts, you know, one place to look could be that you none of your, your, none of your effort, your marketing efforts, or your sales efforts are tied together, you’re just doing, I’ll just put this on the website, or I’ll just do social, just as you said. So make sure that if it’s a cohesive plan, a system that all works together, you really shouldn’t be feeling or you know, or seeing in your, in your checkbook, if you will, that your marketing and sales aren’t, or your marketing isn’t making the money that it should, right should have an ROI. You should have a return on investment with the marketing that you do. If you don’t you there’s a problem in your system, or you’re missing items in your system.

Mike Miller??23:51

Exactly. So or you don’t have it down yet. You know, like john Wanamaker said, I know that half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half Yes, well, that was the 60s. Today, you should be able to know what’s working and what’s not because it’s all digital, and it’s tracked digitally. So even if you’re doing advertisements on radio, you have to drive people somewhere. website is where you want to drive them to. That’s why it’s the hub of all your marketing all your marketing drives to your website, to your landing pages and to your offers. And you can track it. So you know, ah, I advertised on Facebook 400 people clicked the link 400 people came to my website 200 signed up 200 bounced within a minute, you know, within five seconds, you know, you’ve got these these numbers. And if you then put those people who signed up into your marketing automation, and then you follow them and then put them into your CRM when they become solid leads. I mean, you see how it all works like you’re tracking everyone from From their initial, you know, steps of learning about your business through the whole buyers journey all the way to purchase, you can track it if you’re if you become sophisticated enough. And the thing is, is that you can do it with off the shelf tools and you don’t have to spend more than 250 $300 a month,

Shelly Miller??25:21

right? But if you can’t figure it out, and you aren’t seeing those numbers that Mike is mentioning, and you don’t have those tools, jump on a call with us. Yeah, you know, we have we have a free strategy session. I’ll have the link in the description below. And we’ll help you find out where you’re missing. What needs where, where you need help.

Mike Miller??25:43

Exactly. And we’ll show you how it all works perfectly with the client magnet system. So perfect offer. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, jump on a call with us. We’ll show you how it’s done. We sure will. All right. Well. Thanks for joining. Thanks for watching and listening. And as always,

Shelly Miller??26:03

we’ll see you next Thursday. Thanks again for listening to the Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google podcast Stitcher, and wherever podcasts are sold. Plus, check us out on YouTube. Grab some marketing tips and insight and subscribe to our channel while you’re there.