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7 Reasons Why Your DIY Website Could Be Hurting Your Business

Thinking of creating your own website or paying an inexperienced family member/friend/neighbor’s kid to help you out?  You might want to think again! Sure, it seems like a cheaper way to get started, but that DIY website could cost you potential clients. Here’s how:

    • You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: Web design isn’t just about making things look pretty. There are so many things an experienced website designer knows such as mobile optimization, accessibility, and user experience (UX) that can make or break a website. For web designers with an SEO and marketing background, this would also include building strategically designed websites with SEO and CRO, Search Engine Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization, respectively. 
    • UX and Accessibility: A website that isn’t user-friendly will cost you clients when they leave because they can’t find the info they were looking for, it’s cluttered, or it has an unusual navigation structure. Accessibility standards on the website need to be considered to make it accessible to people with disabilities.
    • Not Considering SEO: SEO is a process that helps a website show up better in search results. For a service-based business, this is usually local search results.  If you’re interested in your website showing up in search results, especially for your services and not just branded searches (your business name), you want a web designer who is also an SEO expert.
    • Not Designed with CRO: It’s important to design for conversion, or getting visitors to take action, on your website. Your website may lack clear call-to-actions, trust signals, easy navigation, page flow, external links opening in new tabs, and even the words and phrases that are used all affect conversion.
    • Badly Designed or Unfinished Website: While many DIYers do manage to create a nice-looking website they’re proud to look at, there are a whole lot of people who can’t figure it out and it ends up looking amateurish. Even worse is giving someone inexperienced a chance, but they can’t figure out how to finish it. Both look unprofessional and hurt your credibility.
    • Mobile-Responsiveness: Mobile has surpassed desktop for viewing websites. That’s why it is so important for a website to look great and function the same as on desktop. To be fully responsive, a website needs to resize or reposition elements on the webpage and what looks great on a desktop doesn’t always display properly on mobile. When it comes to WIX, tablet viewers get the right side of the website cut off because it displays the desktop version instead of resizing to fit the screen.
    • Platform Choice: The website is more likely to be built on a platform that isn’t suitable for long-term business growth because they’re using a platform intended for who don’t know what they’re doing. These platforms have limited SEO options, functionality, scalability, and customizability. This is why self-hosted WordPress (wp.org not wp.com) is the preferred option amongst SEO experts. In addition to being limited in many ways, they usually also cost more than WordPress hosting fees.

A word of caution. SEO and web design should be tightly linked to be successful, but not all professional web designers are also SEO specialists and even less are SEO experts. This is true even for web designers that charge $1000s for even small websites. The problem with this is that having a professionally built website without SEO is almost like having an expensive DIY website because it isn’t likely to perform well in search results.

We understand. It can be hard to know who to trust to build your website because the majority of professional web designers say that the website they will build comes with SEO. Question what this means. Many web designers only do the bare minimum in SEO, such as filling out the meta titles and descriptions on the backend and ensuring the site is mobile responsive. This could mean a website missing the initial keyword research, content optimization, and more.

A well-structured, SEO-friendly website built by an expert can help you get found by the right customers! But underestimating how important a professionally designed, SEO-optimized website can cost you visitors—and potential revenue!

Choose a web design and SEO business that can continue to provide website maintenance and updates and SEO even after the website is built. Contact Delphinium Marketing today to set up a time to chat about your business.