Michael Bellina — June 19, 2017 
I know you have seen the ads for Wix and SquareSpace and GoDaddy and others touting easy, do-it-yourself, “professional looking websites” that will fit any company budget. Truthfully, they are not lying, you will have a website when you are done. What they don’t tell you is that you will be the only one looking at it.
Creating a professional looking website is really simple these days especially with the services mentioned above. They have great drag and drop design features and stunning templates created by some really talented artists. If you have any technical prowess, you can most likely create a website. However, let me ask you, how are you getting people to visit your site?
So, you tell me that they have great SEO features like keywords and meta tags and you can put in a search term and they will tell you if your site is optimized properly. Great! Did they tell you how competitive those terms are and that you will have to compete against established companies like Amazon and Target for those search terms? Probably not.
What if your search engine optimization isn’t working and you are not appearing on the first page? Do they instruct you on some other techniques like AdWords or Social Media Advertising? Speaking of Social Media, do these sites help you create content to post to social media and help drive traffic to your site? Most likely, not.
My point, if you haven’t guessed by now, is that creating a website whether you spend $ 100 or $ 10,000, isn’t going to do much for traffic. Traffic is what leads to sales and driving traffic is what makes an online business or any business looking to make money from their website, successful. These ads that tout “professional looking websites” for practically the equivalent of a ham sandwich, leave out the important part, driving traffic.
I am not going to be smug and tell you that you get what you pay for because that is not the case. You paid for the website and my guess is that you are happy with it. What I am saying is that the “professional looking website” is only step one of a long marathon of steps to generate business online. Even if you have good traffic there is a good chance that you are not converting nearly enough as you expected or wanted with the launch of the new site.
What these companies aren’t telling you is that you still need guidance on driving traffic and converting that traffic into sales. These are two different ends of the spectrum. Many companies have perfected the technique of getting people to your site but getting those people to purchase your product or service requires different sets of techniques. Trust me, you need both.
My suggestion, moving forward, is that the money you have saved by creating a “professional looking website”, you may want to put it aside to hire a company like ours to help you with step two of the process, driving traffic and step three converting that traffic into sales. Otherwise you may be the only one enjoying your professional looking website.
This article was originally published at www.migmanmedia.com.
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