The advertisements are all over TV and they have been on the Internet since almost the beginning of the commercialization of the Internet:
You can build your own website with our online website builder tool for free — or for a small monthly fee.
And it’s true – you can, but what is the real cost?
I have been building business websites for over 15 years and I live on the Internet doing research an average of 6-8 hours a day for most of those 15 years. I can almost say with 100% certainty that I have NEVER SEEN an online website builder website at the top of the search engines. Only if you searched the company name would you find it – and even that is iffy.
Why?
- Self built online website builder tools are generally built to be very dumbed down so that anyone can understand how to use it. Because of that, they don’t always include all the backend tools that are necessary to achieve a top position in Google. And even if they do, the people using them don’t understand the importance of, or how to use them properly.
- You are locked into their system and website hosting with a monthly fee.
- You cannot take what you built and move it somewhere else because the website building tool is exclusive to them. You have to start over again.
- If you did get lucky and get some SEO on your self built website tool, if and when you go to another website builder tool, you likely don’t know about 301 redirects so that you don’t lose that positioning on Google – or most likely the tool doesn’t even offer it.
- Many times, self built websites come off looking like they were built in 1995 because the people building their website with them don’t understand modern website design and what will be attractive to their potential clients. Do you trust doing business with someone when their website looks like it hasn’t been updated in over 10 years?
- People don’t generally understand the little things that go into making your website easy to be found on the search engines – like Keywords, Keywords, Keywords.
If all you want is for your business website to be is a business card online, then perhaps you should use one of the many online website builder tools.
But if you want to actually drive new prospects, leads and sales from your website, then you are either going to have to spend 5-10 years learning it, or hire someone that understands it, and has a success record of accomplishing increased sales for their clients … like me! ;0)