Website Design
I know you know that your website is only the first step to the whole digital marketing thing.
But here is a really important fact!
The core of your online properties starts with a well-designed website.
You need a few things that are absolutely vital to the success of the online side of your business.
Please read more below to fully understand the importance of your businesses website.
You need really great keyword research.
The pages that are on your menu and those that are your core pages will obviously be about the products and services you offer.
But then you need keyword related page titles that are heavily optimised to drive extremely targeted keyword related buyer traffic to your website. Depending on your chosen niche you could literally have thousands of virtual queues of buyers out there all lined up (via keyword searches that they do all day) to come and look at the products and services your business offers them.
One of the very first things I will show you in a meeting is the keyword potential that your businesses services or products have out there in the search engines.
Your website must be designed to get sales.
The sole purpose of your website is to get your business orders. Yes, I agree that you need to have a lot of other aspects in place, like building trust, loyal followers, but all of that is there to get sales.
To do this correctly you will need to use keywords and more to drive targeted buyer traffic to your site and then allow those visitors ample opportunity to avail themselves of your services. I am talking about call-to-action buttons everywhere.
Your website should be built with WordPress.
90% of the time WordPress is by far the best choice for your website.
Reason number one is the Google bots – The search engines are set up to read and index your website based on a list of data points and your rankings in the organic search engines will reflect how well this is done inside the belly of the engine of your website. WordPress has plugins and a lot more designed to keep Google happy.
Reason number two is everybody can use WordPress – You should never tie yourself to the designer who built your website (even myself) Times change, and you would always hope that the next guy can pick up and work with ease from the point where the previous guy left off.
Better still, you or one of your staff could at some point take over the daily running of your website with ease. (we supply you with hundreds of training videos to cover each and every aspect of WordPress for you should you choose to run the site yourself after we built it).
Plus there are literally thousands of really professional templates that you could use as a guide when starting off your design. A lot of the “fancy” web designers scoff at templates, and I know it is because they can code a totally unique site, but that part could be achieved far easier and allow you to get on with building the parts of a website that matter. Search engine stuff, and silo structure stuff and more.
You need a silo structure.
Oh, I should add this first – IF you do not want your site to rank organically – IE you just want what I call a business-card-site, where you give out the links to your site to handpicked potential clients, then you do not need a silo structure.
But if you would love to get access to the millions of potential buyers out there organically, then you need a silo structure built into your website.
A silo structure is a set of categorically related keywords loaded into your site in a pyramid type of structure relating to importance. This allows you to publish content relevant or related to previous pages and then link them all together in such a way that Google and other search engines know exactly what you do. They (the search engines) will learn from your structured site exactly what you want them to know and will send you the best traffic accordingly.
It can take us up to a week or two to set up a large silo structure. On the other end, a small niche that would not need thousands of keyword layers in a silo might only take a day or two to do properly.
A basic summary of what your business website needs…
To be honest, I am typing this out of my head as I go along and I suspect that I might leave off a few important bits, but I think you will get the gist of it here.
- WordPress is probably the best framework to use.
- Core keyword or services pages need to be built (this page you are on is one of those).
- The menu and the website must navigate easily. Never leave a visitor searching for the next step.
- The entire website needs a near-perfect UX – User experience. Make it so smooth that they will love the process they follow to the order page.
- Your keyword research needs to be added to a great category and silo structure.
- All your images need to be sized correctly and have perfect meta data.
- You need to mix up your media – both visitors and Google love videos, images, infographics and more.
- You need to make pages simple and easily readable – People scan pages, so plan for that.
- Your SEO side must be as close to perfect as you can make it. Simple and complicated too.
- Your website needs decent hosting. THIS IS MASSIVE. You think that because you saw a lot of adverts for a hosting company on TV that they must be the best, right? Nope, definitely not.
- The website needs to load really fast. Both Google and your visitors have no patience at all. Your rankings will reflect this.
- Then the whole thing needs to integrate with your local search listings, with your Youtube channel, with your social media sites and more.
- Your website needs us to build it for you so you know we took care of all these details.
Answers to Your Questions
Do you have a free website package?
Yes, we do, but it is limited to one per week. It works this way – if you use our affiliate link for your hosting we will build the following site for you. (Contact us for the affiliate link)
We will install and configure WordPress onto your new domain.
We will set up 2x email addresses.
We will add all the necessary plugins (these would be plugins like security, spam control and a few more) This changes all the time as and when some plugins get released or become unsupported and we stop using them.
We install and configure the premium Divi theme.
YOU will supply us with all the necessary written content and images for your core pages.
The core pages that we will build for you are the home page, the about us page and your contact page.
We will install your legal pages. There are 4 of them – Disclaimer, Terms of Service, Privacy policy and the Copyright page.
We limit how long those pages will be (max 500 words and 2 images).
If you would like us to use a template there would be an additional fee.
We give you access to at least 60 free training videos that will allow you to learn how to edit and use your new website.
If you already have a hosting provider, then we will consider installing this for you for a $100 fee, as long as your hosting package has cPanel. Contact us to see if we have available spots.
There will be NO editing allowed at all and any changes or edits will fall under an hourly fee.
How many pages should a new website have?
You would need to start off with at least the 10 or 12 basic pages for any normal website when you get started. These would be the four legal pages, then a home page an about us page a blog page a services page or three and a contact page.
If you do not plan to rank for organic traffic then this would probably be enough pages.
If you plan to run advertising to bring traffic to your site then you should add a sales landing page per product to the site. (we have a separate service for landing page builds)
If your business is a local service that sells primarily within your local city and nearby surrounding areas then you would need to build a core of around 30 pages and then add a page a week (more or less – depending on what your service or product is)
If you are building either an affiliate site or an authority site then you will be looking at starting with at least 30 pages and then adding a page a day on average.
For more details on this question in relation to your specific business, you would need to contact me via the contact page to set up a meeting.
Is “blogging” still a thing?
Yes – blogs never went away, they just became an online business and are now called websites or authority sites.
They are almost always set up with WordPress because of all the powerful features that come with the platform.
Do you have any weird rules?
Yes, I am sorry to say that I can afford to be picky about what type of websites I build.
I do not build gambling, porn or bitcoin sites. No silly reason for that other than they all come with “penalties” in the online space that makes marketing them different to normal businesses.
I ONLY build with WordPress. I used to build HTML type sites with custom coding in the past, but the serious problems that those sites created for my clients made it silly to keep on doing them. Now I do what is best for my clients. No matter what you think you learned through a few online searches.
I ONLY use the Divi theme. There are a lot of sites built with their biggest competition – Elementor – and I have no problem with them, but my skills and experience are with Divi and it means that you as the client benefits from that.
I turn away businesses and refer them to others when I see that we might not be the best “fit” for each other. This business of building websites and doing digital marketing is a massive thing for your business and you need the relationship between you and me to be an easy one for things to work out for both of us. This is a good thing, I promise you.
I limit how many sites I build. This is not for any silly or cheeky reason, but simply that I do all the work myself. If – in some situations – I am fully booked up and you would still like to contract me to oversee the site built by a freelancer, then we might be able to reach an agreement there.
How much does a single-page website cost?
This is like asking how long is a piece of string. Meaning it will differ from site to site.
The short answer is as little as $100 to as much as $3000.
However, the “standard” one-page website with a maximum of 1000 words and 10 images will be far closer to the $100 option.
What will affect your price is how many edits and revisions you would like us to give you. This is really just a simple per-hour cost.
How many pages should an established website have?
There is no short answer to this question. Let me try and give you a few possible answers…
One – let the size of your biggest and best opposition website guide the choices you make in relation to the size of your won. If your biggest competitor is ranking all over the top of the search engine results pages with only 20 pages, then 25 pages are what you would strive for. Plus – naturally – the same level of backlinking and SEO quality.
Two – Sometimes a focused 15-page website with a very powerful social media marketing plan will be far more successful than any other option.
Three – Any affiliate marketing site, authority site, e-commerce site or review site will need to have a combined marketing plan with a constant flow of new posts and pages and still be coupled with a powerful social media package.
Four – A local services site need not necessarily be more than 20 or 30 pages with a strong GMB (local search) marketing effort to go with it. However, if you are in a large city with a ton of strong competitors, then a bigger website with pages in categories for each suburb or area will go a long way to set your site at the top of all search results.
Links to pages you might be looking for inside the Digital Garden website.
Contact Robert Bruce Anderson - https://digitalgarden.ca/contact/
Digital Garden Home page - https://digitalgarden.ca/
SEO page relating to Ontario or Brantford - https://digitalgarden.ca/search-engine-optimization/
Digital Marketing core page for small businesses - https://digitalgarden.ca/digital-marketing/
Mobile Marketing via apps or push notification marketing - https://digitalgarden.ca/mobile-app-agency/
Social media marketing packages and ideas page - https://digitalgarden.ca/social-media-marketing/
Website design and on-page SEO - Including keyword research - https://digitalgarden.ca/website-design-agency/
The blog or news section with all the latest marketing trends and tips - https://digitalgarden.ca/news-specials/
Branding for small businesses - https://digitalgarden.ca/branding-agency/
Local search business marketing (GMB) - https://digitalgarden.ca/local-business-marketing/