Why Web Designers Usually Can’t Help You
In my role as a business consultant, I see this sort of thing all the time – An entrepreneur needs a new website, or a re-vamp of an old website, and so hires a web designer to create one.
Then, after investing thousands of dollars and months of development, usually involving endless back-and-forth emails with the web designer, the entrepreneur finally launches the new website to the world, to the sound of… crickets chirping… Because nobody cares, and in fact nobody even knows!
It’s every entrepreneur’s nightmare, and it happens all too frequently.
The reason for this is simple – Most web designers simply don’t understand marketing. How could they? It’s just not their area of skill.
They usually know how to make a website look pretty, and they might even know how to get a shopping cart like Paypal to work, but rarely do they have the marketing knowledge required to create a website that actually converts visitors into paying clients.
But don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of good web designers out there and I’ve employed quite a few of them, especially when I owned and operated Qhub.com. And many of them are really great people who have impressive technical skills, but sadly that doesn’t translate into the skills needed to get you more clients. And that’s what’s important.
After more than 15 years as a successful business consultant, and over 24 years working here in Japan, I now know a thing or two about web design and the online strategies needed to succeed in business, and I apply those tools and strategies for my clients every day. I know what really works, and what really doesn’t work, when you’re trying to start up and run a small business. And a big part of that is attracting great clients online via your strongest marketing tool, you guessed it, your website.
For example, the company Potters Receptions employed me to re-design their website with an eye to increasing visitor traffic and therefore increasing wedding bookings for them. The site was pretty woeful when I took it over, and the web designer seemed to have been unaware of as some basic rules were being overlooked, like not keyword stuffing and like differentiating the meta descriptions for different pages. This meant that Google was not ranking Potter’s website very highly in the search results, which of course meant that potential clients weren’t finding it. This wasn’t the fault of the web designer – he simply wasn’t trained in search engine optimisation (SEO).
I kicked off the re-vamp of the site by establishing a baseline, and recorded just 750 visitors a month finding the site via search engine. Worse still, the site’s best keyword (the part of a web page’s meta data that helps search engines match the page to a search query) ranked in 27th place, way down at the bottom of the 2nd page of Google search results for that word. The rest of the site’s keywords ranked on the 4th, 5th, 7th, and 12th pages of Google search results… No wonder potential customers weren’t finding them!
By observing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and applying sound search engine optimisation techniques, I soon lifted the site to the first page of Google search results, with one of Potter’s main keywords ranking in 7th place. I also increased the total number of visitors to the site to 2400 a month, 1200 of them from organic searches, which was double the total visits the site was achieving when I first took it over. I also increased another key metric – time on page. This meant that the new visitors coming to the site were actually looking for the sort of content provided there, and were spending more time consuming that content.
The owners of Potters were suitably impressed, and the increased meaningful traffic to their website likely resulted in the increased wedding bookings that they were aiming for.
So, if you’re frustrated with NOT having your website bring you new clients, or if you’re perhaps too embarrassed about your current site to even tell people about it, then my team and I would love to help.
Imagine a beautiful, easy-to-find, client-attracting website that communicates your personality, your ‘brand’ and gives visitors a clear call to action. If you want such a website, just contact me with your ideas and I’ll make it happen.
“Hi Robert, just wanted to send a follow up to inform you how pleased I am with my product that you and Omar provided me with.”
– Corey Freeman, President of FreeClubFinder and yet another satisfied client
