Why does it matter who builds my business website?

Yesterday I took some time from managing our current projects to do a little competitive research. Something I do for clients but rarely do for our business. Our big thing right now is trying to show business owners why going with our agency is better in the long run than with a freelancer. One main reason we like to say is, “we charge more!” I know, it sounds like the opposite of what you want to say when trying to drum up new business. But…. there are SO MANY reasons why us charging more is good for our clients and for us… win win!

First, it isn’t that we charge more just to charge more. We charge what we have to in order to pay our bills, devote enough time to the project to get it done right, and of course like any business to make profit!

I started off as a solo freelancer, and you know what I did? Just about ANYTHING to make money and survive! I would take on any project at any price even if I didn’t know how to do it…. I would figure it out. I couldn’t say no to any project because I needed the money. But since I did that, I was doing my clients a huge disservice. I was not the right person for the job. I was charging bare minimum to scrape by and was desperate to find my next project because the one I was working on wasn’t going to pay my bills. It was my hobby, and these clients would have been better off finding an expert… or a team of experts. I was grateful they chose me but honestly, they probably shouldn’t have.

Fast forward to today….

We charge what we need to so we can build a team that is perfect for a specific project, devote the correct amount of time to it, and to make a profit so we can stay in business for the long haul! We want to be around in a few years when you want a redesign or decide you want to grow your business with SEO or Marketing. Simply put, we can now serve our clients with the level of service they need and be their partner in building a website that gets traffic, drives growth in their business and help them in reaching their business goals, rather than just building them a cheap website and have them cross their fingers that someone stumbles upon it someday…. hence the photos in this post!

While I was doing this competitor research yesterday, I found the websites of a few solo freelancers in the area. Finding their websites was so hard! Many of them claim to know SEO but their own websites don’t even show up in Google. After getting on their website, I found their portfolio and started clicking the links and opening them in new tabs. To my surprise, half of the tabs had an error. The websites no longer existed, and the businesses are no more. With the other half, I decided to plug their website into our SEO tools and guess what? Most had ZERO traffic! ZERO! All I can think of is that time spent to build this website and no one sees it. The investment of that hard earned money into having someone build this website so customers & clients can find their business, and it sits there unseen…. it’s sad.

Websites are not like baseball fields in a movie… Just because you build it, doesn’t mean “they will come.”

This led me to manually going through these websites to find exactly what was wrong. As someone who has been in the Website Design & SEO game a long time, I immediately saw 2 big “red flags” on all these websites. Most of this stuff is technical so I won’t go into detail and bore you, but I will still point them out. The first is that these websites were SLOW! The second, they were missing all the main elements that Google looks for to know what a website is about and what search results it should show up in. It is details like this that get skipped over when someone is building a website and charging less than they need to and should be. No, we don’t guarantee our clients that their business will succeed. But we do guarantee that if we build the website, we will do it right which will put them in a position to succeed!

So, why does it matter who builds your business website?

Well, ask yourself another question… Do I want to spend $1,000 on a website that no one will ever see and won’t help my business grow, or do I want to invest more in a website that will help me reach my business goals?