time to stand up against intuit websites. i’m sick of listening to their commercials imply that website developers are disorganized slackers who can’t finish a website in five months. ridiculous! a truly professional website is an extremely valuable brand asset that can be turned in a matter of 3-7 business days. it says all the right things, wows consumers with its great taste, demonstrates a deep knowledge of consumer wants and current demand, and ranks highly for a number of related google searches. if you’re a small business owner and any ole’ website will do, then run with intuit websites’ free trial for 30 days and save yourself some money. however, if you expect or NEED results — as in serious exposure and conversion of prospects to customers — then please rethink your position. you should be asking yourself “if this is such a great service, then why is it free to get started? the more valuable something is, shouldn’t it be harder obtain?” YES!
there are four main reasons why the service is free (followed by just $4.99 a month).
- first of all — you’ll be the one doing all of the work.
- secondly — where customers are less than impressed with your mastery of the written word and art direction, you will lose opportunities (making your website a detriment to your business).
- thirdly — you’ll be forced to do more work by email, on the phone or in person to earn business. people are going to have more questions and offer less trust where they are not instantly wowed by your generic intuit website with d.i.y. copy and art direction.
- lastly — consumers won’t be able to find you through any of the search engines unless they type in your business name. if they already know your business name, then you must have invested in serious advertising to date. if that is the case, then you wouldn’t believe that a free website service could give you what you want. you would have spent a great deal on marketing to date and have a greater appreciation of what it takes to be successful with it. intuit’s commercials make the false claim that you’re going to “get found” upon using their service — but this is simply not true. intuit websites provide none of the marketing work needed to rank highly on google, which is how you get people to “find” you online. they make sure your domain name is registered properly, which is how people find your website when they type in your business name. however, if they do the type of searches that we all do from day to day to find things we want or need, then they’re typing in things like “carpet cleaning atlanta” and “pizza manhattan.” while 98% of the consumers buy from the top 9 entries on page 1, you will be off the search grid — or lingering somewhere past the first 100 websites ranked. research shows that most consumers don’t click to the third page to view website #21 and beyond.
the bottom line? if you enjoy the surprise of getting a pie in your face, then intuit websites is right up your alley. they imply that you’ll gain customers and get the register ringing simply by doing a website through their service. impossible. they are over-promising to under-deliver, which will frustrate you pretty quickly. they will quickly turn back on their offer and ask “what did you expect for next to no investment?” to make up for shortcomings in the generic website you originally selected from templates and wrote, they will offer custom design and marketing attention (some are even hinted at on their offer page if you look carefully) that raise your investment to where it should have been if you went professional to begin the process. they won’t be able to cover the loss of time or botched opportunities in the interim.
so, how do you avoid this nightmare? you talk to a pro like me.
to give you a sense of reality per costs on a truly professional website, i charge a middle of the professional market fee for search engine optimization (seo) — $675 for most websites. this essential marketing service is what BEGINS the process of getting you ranked highly on google. logically, everyone wants to rank highly on google, so it should go without saying that doing no work in this regard through a free intuit service isn’t going to get or keep you competitive, right? seo involves tapping into google’s statistics for all searches related to your industry, shortlisting the most valuable traffic (this takes strong interpretative skill in reading between the lines in the data), and then embedding the final subset of search terms into about a dozen areas of your website (the places where google marches through its punchlist to see if you’re a match to searches for things like “carpet cleaning atlanta” or “pizza manhattan.”)
to touch upon the “interpretative skill” part in reading the google data, there is a big difference in someone searching “how to trim a tree” and “tree trimming service dallas.” the former could very likely be someone sniffing the subject so they can do the work themselves. the latter is clearly someone looking for a pro to do it — and showing that it matters that they are located in dallas. if you’re located in dallas, and you’ve optimized your website through someone like me, then you could be getting a valuable visit to your website very soon. with an award-winning writer and designer on your side, the visit will convert to a phone call — where you can begin to close the sale. there is still more at play with this type of marketing work, but this gives you a sense of it.
with intuit, the same visitor would need to have typed in your business name to find you — which is not realistic! what happens if you have a fairly generic business name? they could select the wrong “davis construction.” doing the marketing properly means that there is no confusion at the most critical of moments. it’s so competitive out there that you can’t afford to be a slacker when it comes to your website and marketing.
