Building your website can be super expensive. There is always some diamonds in the rough, but you need to research and do your homework. Here is the ultimate guide for 2016 on how you can save money building your website and then learn some easy techniques to opitimize your website for conversion.
Template Vs. Custom Design
Custom Designs make sense if you have a large budget and truly looking for some custom work. Custom designs can run you from $2,500-$50,000 pending the web agency that you work with. That is a lot of money for a business to put upfront so going the template route is the most affordable way. You can find affordable template designs and hosting options at PSDCenter. They offer themes for Farm Websites, Photography Websites, Insurance Websites, Lawn Mowing, Church Websites, and more.
SEO Onpage Optimization
The most important thing you can do is build your website with relevant content of the services you offer. Build dedicated landing pages for the different services that you offer. So if you are a photographer, build individual landing pages for wedding photography, proms, family portraits, and more. A great free resource you can use to learn SEO Optimization tips is: Moz. It has some great resources for your websites to rank.
A great tool you can use is SEMRush.com if you do have a budget to spend on competitor analysis.
Local Maps Optimization
Currently Google Treats their maps and organic rankings a bit different. The most important thing for ranking on the Maps section is making sure you are NAP consistant. (Name, Address, Phone) Make sure every directory that your website is listed on, matches what is on your website. You can pay a platform like Yext $500 a year to manage your listings or you can manually submit your citations yourself. The more citations you have of your business, the higher you will rank against your competitors.
Some Citations You Need to Submit To Are:
| Citation Source Name | Citation Source URL | Domain Authority |
| https://www.facebook.com/ | 100 | |
| Google Places (aka Google+ Local) | http://www.google.com/+/business/ | 100 |
| Bing – Places for Business | https://www.bingplaces.com/ | 27 |
| Hotfrog.com | http://www.hotfrog.com/ | 100 |
| Yahoo Directory | http://dir.yahoo.com/ | 100 |
| Yahoo Local | http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings/ | 100 |
| AOL Yellow Pages | http://yellowpages.aol.com/ | 99 |
| BizJournals | http://businessdirectory.bizjournals.com/ | 97 |
| DMOZ.org | http://www.dmoz.org/ | 97 |
| BBB.org | http://www.bbb.org/ | 96 |
| MapQuest | http://www.mapquest.com/ | 96 |
| Yelp | http://www.yelp.com/ | 95 |
| Booking.com | http://www.booking.com/ | 95 |
| tripadvisor | http://www.tripadvisor.com/ | 95 |
| Foursquare | http://foursquare.com/add_venue | 93 |
| Yellowpages.com | http://www.yellowpages.com/ | 93 |
| Angieslist | http://www.angieslist.com/ | 92 |
Marketing Your Website
Social is very important when setting up your website. After you have picked your template and got it up and running it is time to start building your social networks. Not all social networks are important to you but I suggest the following:
- Youtube
These are powerful networks and getting listed on these social networks will build you a solid foundation.
Conclusion
These are the basics that you must do to get yourself a competitive website in this day. You can have a competitive business website up and running in no time. Follow the steps above and you can save hundreds of dollars. Maybe you have an intern working for you, use them to follow this article and you will have your website ranking and bringing you in leads you need.
