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Your business may operate online or offline. Creating a website is crucial at this day in age because most of the people go digital. As a business owner, you need to invest in this platform as this will give you the revenue that you desire.
But what about the website Maintenance Cost in 2020, How Much Should You Pay?
Did it ever cross your mind and wonders how much is the average cost per month or per year a company spends on digital marketing and website maintenance? Is it worth it?
How much do you expect to pay the digital marketing company of your choice?
We will talk about that in this article, so join us as we explore the website costing and how it affects someone’s business.
How Much does a Website Maintenance Cost?
This is a quick view of what you can spend (on average) for website maintenance. We are not saying that this amount is accurate in all cases, but this is a rough estimate on what you should be looking at.
Do You Need a Website?
Most people will say that every business should have a website. Having a website is not as simple as it sounds. Some complexities are involved in it. The vast majority of the companies would benefit from having a web presence of some form.
Answer these questions first. What do you want to do? Are you creating a website because your competitor has one? Are you building a website because everybody is doing it? What do you want your website to do?
You need to have a good reason for why are creating a website just like any other facets that you do for your business. It is an extension of your company. It is offering. It would help if you tracked how useful the website is. What is it meant to accomplish?
You can follow that by using tools like Google Analytics, where you can measure visitors and where they go. You can see if your audience goes to the pages that you want them to go to and how long are they spending there, and so on.
You can also measure how successful your website is by the number of conversions. Conversion is not just purchased. It can also come in the form of awareness, depending on what type of action do you want to accomplish. If you are an online store, you want to have more sales and conversions. Small businesses can also track their success in this way.
When you are hiring a digital company for website maintenance, you need to make sure that the website is a good investment for your money and your business. It should do something productive for your company.
Social media is essential to any business, but it should not be your only approach. You need to own your content. If you do not have your website, and you are just relying on these social media, you will not have control over the changes that they want to impose.
You’ll need your social media should drive your customers to your main website.
Define your long term goal for your business when you think of your business website. Content must be unique as to attract more customers. Your site should display all of your contact information so that your customers can quickly get in touch with you.
You need to set your website to be flexible for it to adapt to changes coming in the future quickly. According to one of the articles that I read, at least 30 per cent of customers will not consider a business with no website.
If you want to establish an online store, you need to have a strong business website.
You need a business website to position your authority. You need to give knowledge to your customer about what you do and what you offer.
When you are in power, it will make it easier for you to control your brand. Social media is essential but do not make social media as your website.
Get your content ready because content plays a vital role in creating a useful website. This idea goes for both small business and large business.
Things You Should Do in Maintaining Your Website
We want to help small businesses grow with our marketing design and techniques. A lot of SEO companies in Australia offer content management depending on the type of website a customer needs. Maintaining a website can be easy with a company that can be trusted with your digital marketing needs.
The website maintenance cost depends on what do you want your website to do. Web design is one factor, but you also have to consider things like hosting plan, how to optimize your search engines, how to embed your social media accounts to your website, and things like that.
There so many questions a business owner can have about site hosting cost. We are here to be open-source and share with you all our knowledge about maintaining your site and how you will custom built it to make it beneficial to your business.
Anybody can build websites, but not all website can produce the highest amount of sale, lead generation, and customer support possible. Your website is your number one salesperson. That is why you need to invest in content management and custom-built design.
Your websites should work 24/7 and should not call in sick. It has to have your perfect sales pitch every single time. The small business website should make sure that websites are converting all traffic at the highest rate. It needs to be an open-source of information about you, your product, or the service you are selling.
- Websites should pass the 2.5 seconds rule. Studies show that when somebody clicks to a website, they will give you about 2.5 seconds before they hit the back button if they do not find what they are looking for. Your pages should show the information on your websites within 2.5 seconds. In that period, your web design should have offered an explicit knowledge about who you are, how to contact you, what you do, and how to move to the next step. Take a good look at your websites and see if you can come up with that answer that quick.
- Go to Google and search for your competitors. Click on their websites and compare them to your websites. From there, decide from a customer’s standpoint if you will pick your product over your competitors. Do you think your web design looks the best? Are all the pages of your website useful to convert traffic to conversions?
- Keep your content management useful. New website should display less complicated details, and they have to make sure that they will not overwhelm your traffic. Your website builder should leave the design smooth and straightforward. The content should be short, concise, and enticing. The design should be catchy and powerful. Please do not give your customer a tidal wave of content because they do not care. Summarize your wow lines and incorporate that to your content and design.
- Ensure easy and smooth navigation. This is why you are paying for website maintenance cost. The website builder is all professional to know about what your websites need. When traffic lands on your website, they should figure out how to get what they want in one go. Your design should be simple, easy, and self-explanatory. Your website builder has to have a conversion funnel in place so that they can drive your traffic to your call to action. If your eCommerce website has a clear path for conversion, it will be straightforward for you to increase your conversion rate.
- Websites with high conversion also have high trust. People will not buy from you or hire you if they do not trust your business or if your domain name looks bogus. Website builder knows how to give you this. Your website has to show feedbacks and commendations from previous customers. Show your achievements over the years. By having a website design that offers reviews, you are displaying transparency to your customers.
- Test and check your website on mobile. So many business owners get caught up one time at work looking at their website on the computer, but they are failing to test it on mobile. You have to check how your website is shown to multiple devices to know if the design still looks fantastic. Your website maintenance company should ensure that your website loads well, the design looks good, and you call to action is visible.
- Ask your website maintenance company on how much extra will it costs you for multichannel retargeting. This is one of the e-commerce revolutions. Ninety-seven per cent of your traffic will not convert the first time that they come to your site. Most of the one time goers are doing their research before they get your call to action. You need to retarget all traffic from multiple channels for them to see you and you are always on top. Your design should stick to their memory so that when they are ready to convert, you will be the one to get the conversion.
- Your pages should show strong ad copy regardless if it is paid or organic. Both are keys to a highly effective website. Your website maintenance company should drive targeted traffic to your website that will do your click to action. Your traffic can find you easily to whatever search engines like eCommerce website or WordPress website.
Effective Website Maintenance
Creating a new website and website maintenance service is not as simple as you imagine it. Website maintenance does not end after you publish it.
Server management, an improvement on web design and content, optimization of search engines, studying analytics, plugin updates, is only to name a few of why do you need to trust the experts.
Choose a digital marketing company that is competitive enough to give you the value of how much your website cost per month and per year. Both big and small business needs to maintain a site as an extension of their business.
Part 1: Web Design
This is the primary focus of website maintenance, especially for eCommerce website and WordPress website.
It would help if you considered a lot of things for you to come up with perfect website content. The website maintenance team should consider the following:
- Visuals – designing your website is continuous maintenance apart from the domain name. A website can quickly become outdated in a matter of years. A website cost can vary depending on how you want your pages to appear. Every change and every price should contribute to improved customers experience and conversion rates. Your website should show clean lines, organized contents, striking photos, exact click to action, and value propositions.
- Copywriting – This is the most valuable skill that you can learn in developing web pages. It would be best if you had a compelling domain name and you can ask you SEO company on how much does it cost per month and per year. Language standard is continuously changing and so as your content. It should offer answers to your customer’s questions.
- Drive to call to action – it is as simple as it sounds. Each page of your website has to serve a purpose to maximize the costs that you’re paying the website maintenance company per month or per year. Expect to pay for every service because nothing comes cheap when it comes to website cost. Maintain a call to action option on every page of your website. Your content should be clean, clear, and straightforward.
- Conversion Rate Optimization – your main goal is to maintain a website that drives as many traffic as possible because it is part of the costs that you pay for your eCommerce website. Your conversion rate optimization should find ways on how to convert traffic into actual customers. This is another dimension of website management that requires undivided attention. Small alterations and improvement can result in a significant change. It would be best if you considered that website design is continually evolving, and your conversion rate optimization has to grow with it. Remove the common pain point from your user’s experience and remove purchasing barriers from the pages of your website. Your leads will reward you for it.
- Lead Sales Funnel – capturing leads for small business can be done in numerous ways from the website. The most popular method is through contact forms. Online chat support that pops up on pages is becoming popular too. Monitoring lead captures one of the crucial parts when you maintain a website. You have to put much effort into monitoring your website maintenance cost also. Timing is everything when it comes to capturing lead’s information.
- User Experience – your users evolve. Today will not be the same as it was ten years ago. What works before may not work now. You need to keep your pace with your user’s experience. You need to track your website’s visitor metrics to learn if there are content flaws, especially for e-commerce.
Part 2: Maintenance of the Website
This is the part that most website company hates. Most of the website maintenance cost is for this part. This part defines the price of the maintenance cost.
- Backups – you’ll need a back up to protect your site from anything that could go wrong along the way. If the inevitable happens, you will need to restore your previous version your site. Monthly backups should be part of the website maintenance cost that you are paying once per year or per month. Weekly backups are suggested, but it costs more per month. Daily backups are applicable if you change your site regularly for SSL certificate.
- Monitor Uptime – Expect to pay extra if you want your SEO company to monitor your site’s uptime. It should be up and running anytime as this should not be the reason why are you not generating sales. Always think about the costs and how much you are to maintain your site per month. SSL certificate plays an important role too.
- Browser Testing – There are different web browsers out there that your users can choose. The vast majority of people use Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, are only a few to name. You need to consider the user’s experience for each device and browser. Your site can look displaced in different browsers. Choose plugins that support the four major browsers to get the most out of the costs that you are paying each month to maintain your site.
- Analytics – This is finding out what is going on with your website. By doing so, you will be able to manage it effectively to minimize the costs that you have to pay per month. You need to know how your users are responding with your site. Google offers the most convenient way of tracking the movement of your site. Plus, it comes with no cost.
- Update – Sites need constant updates for plugins, themes, and many more. Updating the theme of your site is extremely important. There is more to it than visuals. You can get an affordable theme for $20 per page, but you cannot be too confident that this theme can be compatible as soon as the update surfaces. You need to get your theme from trusted developers who can keep up with various updates from all different sources.
- Plugin Updates – It is almost the same as theme updates. You need to keep the plugins for your site at the very minimum, and you have to very careful on which ones to use. You can find different plugins available in the store, and some are even offering it for free. You can also get one for as little as $20 per plugin.
- Content Management System Update – Updates protect your site from security breaches and from people who wants to steal data. It is a must that you keep everything on your website updated.
- Server Updates – Costs play an important factor in web designing and maintenance. Always bear in mind that you can go for companies that offer cheap servers. It will expose your site to a slow connection because the server is not maintained well enough to be on top. In web designing, costs define the work that is being carried out by the server.
Part 3: Website Search Engine Optimization
SEO makes your site healthy for Google.
- Loading Speed – it is a crucial contributing factor to the success of your site and pages. It would help if you always looked for ways to improve the loading speed of your site. Instead of hosting a video directly to your site, you can upload it using a third party server like Vimeo and embed it on the pages. The costs are there, but you can guarantee that your loading speed is at its maximum.
- Keyword Optimization – it is not as crucial to SEO as it is once was. Google had found a way of understanding the intent of your content behind the words that the bot can read from your site. It gives Google robots an understanding of what your site is all about. Some of the SEO tools cost so much per month that not all companies can afford it. If you want to get Ahref, you can expect to pay from $99 up to $999 per month depending on the plan that works best on your site.
- Updates of Algorithm – Algorithm handles Google search results. Every SEO in the world wait for every update hoping that there will be no effect on their site.
- Building Links – There are two types of link – internal and external. Off-page SEO is for advanced SEO results. It can cost much as compared to On-page SEO. On-page SEO focus on relevant external links that are used in your site. Each site and blog post should link to others whenever there is a natural opportunity to do so. The topics should be relevant and authoritative when you link these to your site.
Part 4: Performance of Your Site
You have to manage the following metrics to keep your site in an optimal state.
- Website Hosting – Hosting is crucial to your success. If you only consider the cost or how much are you spending on hosting, you are not looking at the bigger picture. Do not just choose the cheapest host, research and analyze if you are getting the best out of the costs.
- Management of Database – You need to do what you are doing. Website database uses different software that can be better to be left with the pro. It is different from SEO.
- Code Bloat – Site bloat takes place when the code of the site becomes messy and then later on damages the user’s experience. This is the effect of installing way too many plugins.
SEO is a long game, and one has to be patient. The principle behind SEO is simple, but it is not easy. It will take time and money to succeed.
We can say that SEO is unpredictable. It will help you rank effectively by keeping your information fresh and updated. It will help your business if you know how to pay attention to healthy link structures because it is an essential key in SEO strategy.
Show your visitor on how do you want them to navigate your site. Having a beautiful website that makes money is excellent. SEO companies in Australia have so much more to offer to business owners.
Please share this article and drop us a comment. Feel free to let us know if you think that spending on your company’s website is practical.
Are you getting the best value out of the website maintenance cost that you are paying per month? Join us on our next article and do not hesitate to let us know if you can think of a topic that you want to read about next time.
