DIY Websites

Recently I was contacted by a small business owner who is just beginning to get his business started in Columbus, Ohio. He already had a website in place, but said that he is not getting any traffic. He contacted me about search engine optimization services for his website so that he can be found in Google and the other search engines when someone is searching for the type of work he does. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of existing websites is one of the things that RBiZ Marketing does for its clients, so I evaluated his website. It was basic and didn’t have a highly professional look and feel to it, but that is expected whenever you are using a templated website-builder due to the generic nature of the layout and designs. More significantly it was not appearing in the first pages of the search engines when entering keyword phrases related to his business, in fact it was not appearing on the first twenty pages for most key phrases. Upon evaluation of his site, and calling the company that provided the website builder (content management system), there was no allowance to access the actual html code of the site. This means that we could not access the code in Dreamweaver and would not be able to complete the majority of the SEO services that are necessary to be completed within the code. Unfortunately we were not able to optimize the website for this small business owner. While we could have optimized the site content and completed a minimal level of optimization through the website builder, we recommended to the business owner that the benefits of paying us to do this would not have been significant. While code restrictions are common among proprietary content management systems, many others do allow for access to the code, thus providing the ability to optimize an existing site to be found in the search engines. In these cases, we are happy to take the project when we are confident that you will get a return on your investment for hiring us. The point is, when investing your time (Believe me, even templated DIY sites can take a lot of your time) and money in building a website you should take into account the value of your time as well as return on investment.

1. It needs to be found in Google and the other search engines in order to attract new customers/clients.
2. Be sure that the code can be modified in web editors such as Dreamweaver or Expressions.
3. The design of your site is a representation of your business, and usually the first thing that your customer/client will see, make sure that it represents you well.
4. Once you attract the visitor to your website, they will usually decide whether or not to stay within the first couple of seconds, be sure they like what they see.
5. The marketing message of your site is important, be sure that the appropriate message is getting to your clients. You may get it, but do they?

Whether you are building a new site yourself or having a professional web designer build it for you, be sure that these aspects are taken into account. Feel free to contact RBiZ Marketing for your Website Design, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and all Online Marketing needs.