Can a custom professional website or real estate web design be less expensive than a web template site?
Two areas bear scrutiny in your website design investment decision: first, figure the overall website costs (initial design investment, monthly maintenance plus any pay-per-click (PPC) advertising expense and, second, your income derived from your professional or real estate Internet marketing.
In the experience of IMCD, the more customized a professional or real estate web design is, the faster and greater return on investment the website owner realizes on their Internet marketing outlay, while reducing costs in the long run.
Overall Website Investment for Search Engine Placement
Web templates keep the initial web design investment low, but usually generate a "business card" site. Web template sites, without any PPC marketing and minimal search engine optimization, magnetize their traffic from people seeing the domain name on a business card or other traditional printed advertisement. Often templates are database sites, that is, their content is dynamically created when visitors come to the site. The dynamic websites are faster to create, but they are not search engine optimized - their content is largely unseen by the search engine's indexing spiders.
Another drawback of real estate template designs is that often the website's graphics are stored on the template providers server - so every template picture on your site tells the search engine that your template providers website is popular and detracts from any search engine optimization you are doing on your website!
IMCD's custom and semi-custom web designs' keep the search engines directed to your professional or real estate website by storing your graphics on your website. They also load as faster and give you greater control over your content.
Custom Web Design - Initial Investment With Long Term ROI
Custom professional web designs and real estate websites usually start in the $4000 to $5000 range. Your IMCD custom web design investment covers the creation of more market-specific web content, greater search engine optimization and monitoring, and graphic design customized for your market. Attractive and professional graphic design with balanced Flash animations or slide shows is an key asset for capturing the attention of your website visitors.
The customization of your web content - both its search engine optimization and Internet marketing positioning - are also critical to successfully magnetizing visitors and converting them to contacts. Customized SEO and content authoring lead to higher "organic" search engine ranking. Organic search engine ranking is when your web design or SEO company has successfully optimized your website so it shows up high in the search ranking without relying on PPC ads.
Templates Extra Long-Term Cost - PPC Ads
Professional web designs and real estate websites that do not have keyword-rich web content or are not search engine optimized need to rely on PPC ads to gain visibility on the search engines' first page. PPC ads are a powerful tool in an Internet marketing promotion, especially in high profile markets or if you launch a new website into any market. However pay per click advertising does come at an additional expense.
Often PPC keyword marketing promotions can start at $500 a month and escalate to $4000 to $5000 a month, depending on the competitive nature of that keyword's market. The price of an area's PPC ads is set in the auction-like atmosphere of the pay per click advertising world. PPC ad costs can give you an idea of what the value of an organic search engine ranking is worth - having your website naturally returned high in the Google or Yahoo search rankings.
Sales Leads and Income - Your Return on Investment
Custom real estate website designs call for a larger investment up front, however, since 80% or more of home buyers use the Internet, an online presence is the only way to reach the majority of your markets 24/7. A custom website organically ranking on Google not only keeps your Internet marketing advertising budget costs down, but pays for itself with your growing income from the sales leads.
Time is always on the side of a custom website's search engine ranking. With unique "static" content (that is visible to search engines) and growing traffic pattern, usually within 6 to 12 months of launch a brand new professionally designed custom website starts appearing consistently higher and higher in the search engines' ranking.
Due to their high ranking in the search engines, many of IMCD's real estate website clients and other business web design customers have found that the sales leads from their custom web sites paid them back many times over their original web design invest.
Is it time for you to get serious about creating your own profitable Internet marketing solution and contact us about your IMCD custom web design?
