Time to put the cards on the table.

After talking with lots of business owners about their sites I have come to a conclusion. I am going to share it with you now and it might offend some of the creative people in the industry, ready?

No one wants to do a website redesign simply for looks. There is an underlying purpose to it, something else that you think the site is lacking. It doesn't matter if a designer is coming up with designs that are out of the world, there is something else causing you to spend the time and make the investment in the new site.

The usual reason is that the site is not performing as expected and you want to change that. Performance can run the gambit from; legitimizing your business to potential clients, to converting leads, to selling your product. No one picks up the phone or creates a request for proposal and considers the time and money investment in a website redesign simply for a new look (if that is the reason, the concern is that the current look is causing you to lose business.)

Now that we have that established, let's focus on the thing that I hear most from clients; they want more leads from their website. I was speaking with a business owner the other day and he was telling me that he got a lot of compliments on his site. I asked him why he would want to go through a website redesign if it was getting compliments, his reply was that he wanted to update the look. Talking further it turns out that he wants more leads from the site. 

Most clients we talk to think that a website redesign will cause them to be suddenly overwhelmed with new clients, I am here to tell you that is not true. If you have 1000 people visit your site each month and you go through a redesign you will most likely (assuming the website designers do it correctly) you will probably continue to have 1000 visitors each month. You are probably wondering why the guy who works at a website design company would tell you that, right?

The conventional wisdom is that a website will convert 2% of traffic that comes to their site into some sort of business. What conversion actually means is a little different for each business, and that is factored into the 2% number. To make it clear, 2 out of every 100 potential clients who come to your website will do what you want them to do. If they fill out the contact form and you contact them to follow up on their inquiry and we assume that you close 20% of those interactions we are looking at the following numbers:

1000 x .02 = 20 leads x 20% sales close rate = 4 sales

Not bad, right? The bad news about averages is that they are just that, averages over a period of time. Unfortunately, the long run is longer than any of us usually plan for. Wait, before you go and turn off the renewal on your domain lease, I have good news. 

There is a way to get more traffic to your site so that you get more traffic and that will make this calculation go up. SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC advertising (pay per click) are the answer. They are not the same and they fix the same problems just at different speeds. PPC is quick results, SEO is the longer play.

Every business owner has a different understanding of what these strategies are, how they work, and what they cost. Most people have heard the horror stories of working with a bad SEO provider, I have heard some truly terrible stories. PPC is another topic that a lot of people have had bad experiences with. 

There are some people out there really trying to work the system which will lead to bad experiences once the search engines update and catch on to that exploitation, search engines can black list you. However, the majority of companies out there are working well within the ranges of best practices and won't be making their clients vulnerable to future updates.

Working within these best practices means that there are no guarantees; if someone is promising you the first spot on google for your industry, RUN. It also means that it takes time for the efforts to be seen, it is not a one time fix. It is an ongoing effort over the term of the campaign to make sure that the efforts are working and you are slowly and steadily moving up. 

When you have the traffic necessary to get to the leads that you would like and you are not converting at the rates mentioned above there is still work to be done, but that is a topic for another day.

This all becomes very importantly when you are thinking about timelines for a website redesign, Geof and I speak more about the timeline here. I was speaking with someone the other day and we talked about his website and his traffic and how to increase it, he said the statement I hear very often, "This sounds great but, I am too busy right now. Can we talk about this in a couple of months when I slow down." Riding out a period of slow time waiting for the phone to ring because you just invested into a shiny new website redesign will lead to you hating your website designer.  Plan ahead of time for your slow time, talk to people well in advance if you need to reduce those slow times, the checklist can help make sure that you are prepared for those conversations.

What this really all comes down to is that most companies spend the entire budget on a new site and leave nothing for these strategies to grow traffic. Does it make sense to save some of the budget for marketing to get more traffic? Isn't that what you are really after?