Website ROI: How Investing in Your Website’s Design Can Pay Huge Dividends

Since the internet went mainstream in 1991, the role of the web site as a business tool has undergone an extraordinary evolution.

At first a novelty, little better than an online resume or a source of bragging rights, websites eventually became businesses in their own right. While service businesses dragged their feet, popular bloggers and forum owners discovered they could monetize their websites through ads and affiliate commissions.

E-commerce became a thing, along with the push-pull of picking a Shopify store, Amazon store, or a custom-built e-comm store. As customers came to expect a company to have a website to facilitate their comparative brand research, affordable DIY web builders like Wix and Squarespace became popular. Entrepreneurs looking to save a few bucks on costly web design faced a learning curve with these tools, as well as the reality that to remain relevant they had to keep updating their website.

SEO became top-of-mind, as well as big marketing budgets dumped into paid search ads. After all, what good was the website if no one could find it? But if they did find it, what could the website even do? Would visitors become customers while the site owner slept? Not with a thrown-together DIY site. Mobile browsing surpassed desktop browsing, rendering millions of websites obsolete in the process and in need of a redesign. The web funnel evolved—not just a website, but a “customer journey” that walked visitors deliberately from discovery to purchase. Cloud computing resulted in the rise of SaaS. Websites weren’t just a way to discover a product or service—the sites actually were the product or service, along with the accompanying mobile app.

Where does this leave us? The era of the DIY website is over, especially for new companies. A company that wants to design a website from scratch, or bring an outdated website back into relevance, needs to consider all of the following components:

• An automated customer journey that nurtures visitors from discovery to a conversion or a close.
• Robust, regularly-updated content relevant to the company’s warm market.
• A membership-based SaaS component, with an accompanying mobile app, that makes the website itself useful.
• An e-commerce component, even if it’s just to sell company swag.
• Robust customer interactions, including chat support functionality.

What does a bauble like this cost? In 2020 professional web design can run anywhere from $2,000 to $75,000; professional development and launching can cost, all-in and upfront, anywhere from $12,000 to $150,000.

Once the site is up and running, ongoing maintenance can range anywhere from $35 to $5,000 per month to keep the site running and relevant.

For many small businesses, this kind of price tag is understandably intimidating and a very big bite—which is ironic, because small businesses stand to benefit the most from automation and proven techniques of web conversion.

Every investment involves risk—get your website wrong, and you have wasted your money, which means that, like any investment, due diligence is essential. But the return on investment may justify the risk. Let’s take a look at what you get for your money as we explore how investing in your website’s design can pay huge dividends.

Why Does a Great Website Matter?

Some companies, especially small-cap professional service companies, wonder “Why bother?” Web sales never formed a big chunk of their business, and they don’t expect that it will in the future. Why invest so much money in something that will just need to be scrapped and redone in ten years when design aesthetics inevitably change, technology inevitably rendered obsolete?

Web 2.0—the user-generated content revolution ushered in by social media—compounded the problem. Everyone uses Facebook and Amazon anyways—why build out a big fancy website? Why not just hang your shingle on Facebook and Amazon for a fraction of the cost, leveraging a web presence that is already popular? Let Zuckerberg and Bezos pick up the web-design tab.

Do they have a point? Is the website more trouble than it is worth? Emphatically no. Here are two core reasons:

It’s the foundation of your marketing efforts.

Yes, you need a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon, eBay--wherever your buyers are coming to look for your business, you need to be there. But that doesn’t negate the need for a website, and a good one at that.

Content SEO

Boost your site's search rankings

When it comes to the most efficient forms of digital marketing, all roads lead to your website. This includes:

• SEO and Paid Search Engine Ads. 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. While paid search keeps pace with SEO in terms of ROI early on, over the long term the ROI of organic search increases exponentially.
• Social Media Ads. 52% of brand discoveries trace back to social media feeds, so it is worth money to position your brand in those feeds. Once they discover your brand, however, your Facebook or Instagram business profile is an inefficient sales conversion tool compared to your website because it is impossible to customize a buyer's journey on these platforms.
• Content Marketing. With overlap on SEO and social media marketing, content marketing usually points back to a website because it is impossible to blog or vlog on an Amazon or eBay page.

Understanding that all roads lead to your website underlines the importance of making your website pull its weight as a profit center of your business. Consider—if a redesign of your website could double your conversion rate, you could:

• Cut your marketing budget in half and generate the same revenue from half the traffic.
• Keep your marketing budget the same and double your revenue from the same traffic.

Either way, doubling the effectiveness of your website directly correlates to a doubling of the ROI of your marketing budget.

Buyers come to your website to research and to buy.

It is defeatist and outdated to assume that your website doesn’t do any heavy lifting in closing sales.

In fact, you are at a strong competitive disadvantage if you neglect your website. You might be the best hard-closer of business in the world, but that doesn’t matter if 70% of your prospects never reach you—they choose a competitor instead, because your website is half-baked.

The average B2B customer looks at 10 websites before making a buying decision. Moreover, they are 70% along the way to their buying decision before they even reach out to the company, which is that silver-tongued hard closer’s first crack at them. If the web experience is bad, they won’t even reach out.

At the B2C level, 47% of consumers look at 3-5 pieces of content from a company before ever reaching out and stepping into the crosshairs of a sales team member. That’s 47% of your market that won’t even identify themselves as a warm lead until they have read 3-5 pieces of your content.

If that content isn’t there, kiss those leads goodbye right off the bat. 72% of internet marketers acknowledge content marketing as the most effective component of an SEO strategy.

Finally, it’s a fallacy to assume that your most serious buyers won’t buy online or at least start the buying journey online. 63% of all sales start online as of 2020, even if they don’t all finish there. Your lack of web conversions is most likely due to insufficient UX (user experience) or a faulty buyer’s journey, not because buyers uniquely refuse to buy your product or service online.

How to maximize the value of your website

The headline here is this—professional web design may be expensive, but it is worth it. The COVID-19 lockdowns alone relocated so much commerce to the internet that the importance of a good website is past the point of dispute.

The news gets even better—business website culture isn’t stumbling around in the dark anymore. Imagine heart surgery at the very leading edge of the profession—doctors stumbling around in the dark, trying to learn as they go. A lot of people would die on the table, especially if some charlatan doctor tempted them with half the price.

This is what business web design used to be like. Throwing money at internet marketing was like throwing money into a black box. Would it work? Who knows. Every service provider had a different approach, few of them with the reputation or the numbers to back it up.

Not anymore. Internet marketers are no longer stumbling around in the dark—well-trodden paths have been beaten in nearly every industry, methods that have been proven to work by examination of consumer behavior. Talented and experienced internet marketers can build predictable web-based customer journeys that actually work—and if it doesn’t work analytics will tell them what is broken so they can fix it.

Here are proven ways to increase your ROI on your website:

Use your website to target customers by location

Narrowing in on the location of your customers may pay outsized rewards depending on the business. For example, a lawn service company that only books in the greater Phoenix area has no incentive to draw web traffic in Iowa.

You might think that geo-targeting customers is less important for Cloud-service companies that serve a global marketplace, or a blue-chip brand with a national presence.

However, even geographically unrestricted brands can benefit from geo-targeting customers, if for no other reason than the fact that search algorithms favor local searches. 

Consider a cloud-based legal services company. They may be able to offer services in all 50 states, but a big portion of their warm market might be searching for “lawyer in Jacksonville” or “lawyer near me.”

Creating geo-targeted websites allows national or Cloud-based brands to pop up in local search engine results pages (SERP), including location-specific places like the Google map-pack (the businesses that appear in map results at the top of Google SERPs).

For multinational or Cloud-based companies, even geotargeting the country helps significantly. Country-specific websites with targeted, country-specific content convert at a 12%-18% higher rate than geographically generic websites.

Create pages that cater to different buyer personas

Many internet marketers think not in terms of customers, but in terms of “customer personas,” a generic avatar of the kind of visitor that has the highest buying temperature for your product. Is your warm market usually of a particular age? Sex? Financial status? Have certain hobbies? A certain career?

Some marketers use AI software to digest customer data and produce actual avatars that campaigns can be designed around.

If your organization has more than one distinct buyer persona, it makes sense to adapt separate customer journeys for each one. This boosts your SEO by adding index volume, content, and long-tail keywords that target those specific buyer personas.

It also helps reduce your marketing budget, especially if your buyer persona can be reproduced in a social media ad campaign or other data-targeting campaigns.

For example, let’s say you have two core warm markets—male business owners in Florida over the age of 50, and 18-35-year-old women in Ohio who like classic cars (I can’t imagine what you might be selling, but let’s just do the thought experiment).

Those two buyer personas can easily and inexpensively be targeted in two separate social media campaigns, each one directing the right users to the buyer’s journey customized to them.

You save a lot of money on data-targeted paid marketing by narrowing the audience from “everyone in the world” down to your most enthusiastic customers, especially if you can increase conversions by directing them to a buyer’s journey crafted just for them.

Targeted 10-15 specific buyer personas have been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 55%.

Optimize your website for technical SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization, some websites start out on third base, while others are trying to swing a bat with two arms tied behind their backs.

How a website is built actually plays a huge role in its SEO. Not all web designers and developers design websites to these best practices. The site may be beautiful, it may even convert like a champion. But it won’t do a dime’s worth of good if the site never appears in SERPs because your competitors have better technical SEO.

What does good technical SEO look like? Several components go into it:

• Readable by Search Engines. Search engines assign rankings based on a review of your site data by AI programs called “web crawlers,” which prowl the links of the internet looking for new websites and re-evaluating old websites. Search engines keep an “index” of every site they find, as well as a map of the links that connect those sites, in essence forming a “map” of the internet.

Search engines do this in different ways, but in order to be ranked and evaluated by the web crawlers, the web crawlers need to be able to find the website. Web crawlers can usually find new sites fairly quickly, usually within a few days, especially if other indexed sites link to that site. However, some sites are coded in such a way that they are uncrawlable, which of course stops SEO in its tracks.

• Submitted to Search Engines. If the site is discoverable but, for whatever reason, the web crawlers can’t find it, websites can be manually submitted to search engines for indexing. Team members should keep searching for the site in the target search engines, usually by entering the URL into the search bar, to see if it has been indexed, and submit it for indexing if necessary.
• Page Speed. Search engine web crawlers can actually detect the loading speed of your page. Slow websites will have high bounceback rates anyway, which is bad for conversions, but to make matters worse search engines will down-rank slower sites. Evidence suggests that the Google algorithm measures this in the time-to-first-byte data load speed.

Methods of decreasing page loading time include compressing HTMC, CSS, video, and picture files on the site, reducing redirects, eliminating Java script that blocks rendering, optimizing images, and speeding up your server response.

• Metadata. Metadata is data encoded into a website that is not visible on the browser screen. Popular examples include the site title and short description that appear on SERPs. Those titles and descriptions actually have to be added into site metadata. SEO best practices dictate to use targeted keywords in the metadata of every page and subpage.

Images and other site assets also have meta-tags within the site coding, which can also be filled with keywords rather than left generic.

• WCAG 2.1 Compliance. Web crawlers look for signs of ADA compliance in accordance with WCAG 2.1 standards. More on this in the next section.

Even if bolstering your technical SEO entails a costly retrofit, the expense may be worth it.

Reduce risk through ADA and Section 508 compliance

Many business owners and consumers know what it means to have a physical facility or building that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—wheelchair ramps, restrooms with big stalls and grab bars, Braille signs, door knobs that can be operated without fingers, etc.

Many people, however, don’t know what it means to have a website that complies with the ADA. Even fewer understand that, ever since the 2019 Supreme Court ruling in Robles vs. Dominos Pizza, any company that offers a non-accessible website can face a costly lawsuit.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires government entities to provide accessible websites, while companies both large and small have faced judgements valued at an average of $75,000 for a first offense.

It behooves every company to reduce this risk by retrofitting their websites to be ADA-compliant.

What does it even mean, however, for a website to not be compliant? After all, nothing stops people dependent on wheelchairs from browsing the internet.

WCAG 2.1, a standard promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium, outlines the standards of a compliant website. The affected classes include:

• The blind or visually-impaired. Many people with visual impairments use screen readers to browse the web—machines that essentially read the site aloud. If the screen reader can’t read the site or present it in a sensible manner, the site is not accessible. Additionally, lack of sufficient color contrast between text and the site background may make the site hard to read for people with colorblindness.
• The deaf or hearing-imparied. People with hearing impairments cannot hear video or audio content. Sites that do not provide closed-captioning or subtitles on their video or audio content may not comply with ADA.
• People with motor functions that prevent them from using a mouse, trackpad, or touchscreen. Many sites rely on “point-and-click” functions, but people with certain motor impairments may not have the fine motor skills needed for effective point-and-click. They may need to rely on keyboards to navigate the site.

With these requirements in mind, components of an ADA-compliant site include:

• Adequate color contrast between text and background.
• Compatibility with screen readers, including language tags in the coding that these programs require to identify the language of the site (English, Spanish, etc.)
• Proper header nesting so screen readers read the site in the proper order.
• Descriptive image meta-text so screen readers can read aloud what is depicted in the image.
• Descriptive link anchor text so screen readers can tell users where a specific link leads.
• Web forms that offer descriptive error messages in the required fields, so screen readers can identify the error and colorblind people can identify the error.
• Closed captioning and subtitles on all audio and video content.
• A UX that can be navigated entirely by a keyboard, with no exclusive dependence on “point-and-click.”

Test the site with actual users

For all the importance of SEO in peoples’ ability to find your website, nothing is actually more important than a user’s actual experience of the website. This user experience (or, UX in industry jargon) will determine whether the user enjoys your site, creates positive association with your brand, and strongly considers doing business with you.

Stats bear this out. 96% of users form an opinion about a site within the first 6-8 seconds of their visit, and 75% associate that opinion with a brand’s credibility. Basically, if you don’t offer an enjoyable web experience, 75% of users will assume your brand is unworthy of trust.

For this reason, any web design or development plan must include a testing period where neutral potential users interact with the site, in both its desktop and mobile formats, and give unbiased opinions about its strengths and weaknesses; where it exceeds the competition in terms of UX, and where it suffers by comparison.

User feedback also helps companies and their web developers identify blind spots and problem areas that they can then fix to tighten up the UX.

Harness the power of content

Even if you process no sales online, getting your website in order is worth it for the power of content marketing.

Why is content marketing so effective? Two reasons:

• SEO. Again, 72% of internet marketing professionals identify content marketing as the most effective SEO tactic. This is because content adds to the volume of indexed pages and the amount of written content on your site, two metrics that web crawlers use to rank pages (provided that they don’t detect signs of trickery, like keyword stuffing or lorem ipsum text). Web crawlers also uprank sites that have been updated recently—for example, a new blog or new piece of video content.

Content also helps SEO because, while some of your clients might be Googling “Best corporate attorney in Omaha,” many more might be googling “What’s the difference between a corporation and an LLC?” If they discover your blog on that subject—whether through paid search ads, organic SERP results, social media ads, or whatever—you now have their eyes on your brand.

• Brand Trust. Again, 42% of visitors will view 3-5 pieces of content before they ever even reach out to a company. Establishing yourself as an authority in your field makes those comparison shoppers more likely to convert.

How to estimate website ROI

Whenever you consider an investment in your business, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder “What return will I get on my investment, exactly?”

Investing in website optimization may feel like throwing money into a black box, but it doesn’t have to if you know what metrics to track. Tools like Google Analytics can offer you a peek behind the curtain at a website’s performance. You can install analytics yourself, but any online marketer worth the price of admission will know how to track these metrics.

What you need is a before reading and an after reading of the following metrics, in order to evaluate the success of your website redesign:

• Site Traffic—the raw number of visitors to your site.
• Lead Generation—how many visitors convert to leads.
• Lead Closing Ratio—how many leads actually complete a purchase.
• Average Lead Value—the dollar value of sales you generate, divided by the number of leads it took to generate those sales.

The industry average for a professional website redesign from a reputable company is 3x-5x improvement on those metrics after a redesign. Consider what budget would justify this expense when evaluating web design or development proposals.

Understanding the time it takes to achieve that ROI

In the Amazon Prime era of instant gratification, no one likes to wait—especially not to see a $5,000-$75,000 investment bear fruit. The longer it takes to start seeing results, the more a business owner might wonder if (s)he was duped by a charlatan web designer and bought the Brooklyn Bridge.

Reputable web designers should be able to produce results and stand by their work, but it isn’t a red flag if a web designer points out that it takes time for a redesigned website to blossom. They aren’t buying time to escape your wrath—they are merely stating a fact.

There are many reasons it might take time for the ROI of a website redesign to manifest:

• SEO is not instantaneous. Even after painstaking optimization, organic search ranking improvement can take up to 3-6 months to be fully realized.
• Audience targeting takes time. It may take months to hone in on your warmest market through the most efficient channels.
• The sales team must close. Especially if they must occupy a new position in the buyer’s journey, your sales team may need to acclimate to the “new normal,” as created by the new website, in order to actually close the new business.

On average, it takes about four to six months for the ROI of a website redesign to come to fruition.

Conclusion

There’s no denying it—redesigning or designing a contemporary website from scratch is not cheap, especially if you make the smart move and hire a company with a good reputation and that knows the best practices in your industry for making a website convert.

However, by picking the right designer and following some well-established roadmaps, a website redesign can more than pay for itself in terms of reduced risk, greater efficiency, and more sales.

 

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