This article is for business owners, senior managers and digital marketing novices, who want to understand more about the process and costs involved in developing a new website or replacing an out-of-date one.

What Is The Aim Of Your Website?

A simple question, right? Well no, not really. This first step is where many website projects fail, especially for new businesses. First and foremost your website is not for you - it's for your customers. Keep this point in mind right the way through. If you need to understand how to produce any marketing content aimed at customers I suggest you look at or listen to "Building A Story Brand" by Donald Miller.

The best way to think about this question is to ask yourself: "Is my website a Brochure or does it need to Generate Enquiries?". The structure and content of your website will be different dependant on which of these two are your main goals. Content can be combined, but the emphasis is generally on one or the other. Don't believe me? Search the internet and look at modern websites and you will soon see the difference.

Related to this, we then get into social media. As well as your website, on which other platforms do you need to have a presence? You want to choose these based on your target audience - no point in being on Facebook if you are promoting products to early 20 somethings. They rarely use it. Do your research and understand your market.

It's Not A One-Off

Creating or replacing your website is not a one-off. Your new website is the start, not the end of your digital marketing journey. Be prepared for this. Once you have launched it you will need to keep producing content, meaningful content so people can find you.

Do Your Research (Or Let Your Website Builder Do It)

This is critical for ensuring your content is clear, consistent, simple and accessible to your target audience. It's estimated the average digitally connected person sees more than 4000 adverts online every day. You need to stand out to your audience by being relevant. So you need to think about your market, your goals, what they buy, how they buy it. What are your competitors doing? Part of this involves discovering Keywords. There are plenty of articles on the internet from experts about Keywords. Look them up. Just choosing your keywords requires digital marketing software. If they are difficult to rank for you probably want to avoid them. This is where marketing specialists really come into their own.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Traffic

If you have started looking into this field you'll see the term SEO often. Very simply, it's about ensuring your website and content can be found by search engines, and then ultimately by users of search engines. This field has changed dramatically over the last few years. At one point it was about having the right 'words' embedded in your website. This no longer works - at all.

Technology has moved on and it's now much more sophisticated. The format of your pages needs to be right - ever wondered why the likes of Word have Headings 1, Headings 2 etc. They have a purpose in website design and SEO. Your page titles and descriptions have to be of the right length, and for them to be found they have to be structured in a meaningful way. To make it more challenging, the likes of Google don't publish their rules either. To be clear, even if you get all of this right, you must have good content aimed at your customers, otherwise, you still won't be found.

One of the common misconceptions I come across is the belief that once a new website has been built and optimised, traffic (and enquiries) will rapidly increase overnight. This is not the case, it can take many months, depending on your budget. Manage your expectations and those of your decision-makers!! 

Neil Patel is a well-known expert in this field if you want to learn more. Just Google him, he ranks well!

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

You've got this far, and have a newly optimised site and the traffic is now starting to build. And yet viewers of your content are not converting to enquiries or sales. They aren't clicking on your Calls To Action (CTAs). There is a whole science called Conversion Rate Optimisation. You can do this by trial and error, but again modern software allows you to do this through structured and rapid experimentation (once you have sufficient traffic). It takes the guesswork - and personal opinion - out of the equation.

There's the ability to carry out A/B testing where you put out 2 (or more) different versions of the same page and see which works best by increasing conversions. The effects can be dramatic. One minor change such as the colour of a "button" can increase conversion by 50% or more for a page. Some changes are subtle, producing a 2 or 3% gain. But if you combine lots of these changes a major impact is achieved. One of the best guides is by Dr Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson "Making Websites Win".

Backlinks And Authority

Like SEO and CRO there's a whole technical field involved here. One of the things that gives your site authority (important for being found in search engines) are backlinks. These are links from other sites to yours. This takes time to build.

Beware: there are many individuals and companies out there that will offer to buy you hundreds of backlinks. Whilst they usually deliver on this, it's a quick fix that can cause damage to your website rankings. Google and the likes are wise to it. Their software is sophisticated. If it believes your links are not legitimate and relevant to your site content, it will reduce your site authority and therefore rankings.

Copyright

Remember, any images, videos or content you use that you haven't generated must comply with copyright law. You may think that you can just download content from the internet and include it. That's not the case - unless it's from a source that expressly gives permission for reuse, such as Unsplash.com

Building Your Site - Template Or Agency?

You've done your research, learnt more about how digital marketing works and now you have a choice. Do you build your own using a template-based service or go to the market and get quotes from agencies? There are several factors here not least your budget. In essence, its business decision and the criteria you need to way up are:

• Available budget
• How quickly you want to generate results
• How well established your existing site was
• How much capacity you have to do the work yourself/in-house
• Where your customers are buying from - sales staff or online
• Your business development goals

As you've seen above, doing this properly in the modern era of search engine driven marketing is a skill and requires extensive specialist knowledge. If you decide to outsource to an individual or agency, I would suggest you use the above points to aid any discussion with them and ask their approach particularly to keyword research, SEO, CRO and creating links, traffic and authority. If they promise immediate results be wary!

The Budget You Need

You can produce a website for as little £10 a month using a template service plus your own time. That may be sufficient to get you going. If you really want to make an impact the reality is you'll need an agency. How much will it cost and you won't be surprised if I give the old answer "it depends". For a simple build and migration of your existing site, or optimising its content, perhaps a few thousand pounds. If you really want to generate substantial traffic you are going to need a monthly budget on an ongoing basis. Simply put, the more you have the more you'll achieve, but you can certainly expect to spend between £1,000 and £5,000 a month depending on the traffic and enquiries you want to generate. Oh, and don't forget social media and paid adverts will require their own budget!

So there you have it - a whistle-stop tour of the factors you need to consider. So next time your marketing manager comes with a case to re-invest in digital marketing, you'll have a better idea of why the figures are what they are. And if they are too low, you may want to question it!

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