Say no to overthinking website requirements
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When it comes to marketing, there are many people that like to overcomplicate the simplest tasks.
· Need to launch a paid marketing campaign? First, gather tens of thousands of keywords and put them into the most granular ad groups ever.
· Launching a website? Make sure that every guideline from Google is followed.
· Building a social strategy? Pull together the next 6-months of social posts.
In reality, none of this is at all necessary because the greatest marketing successes often result from the least predictable efforts. That one tweet that was fired off without thinking will outdo the tweet that took many iterations of collaboration to write.
Some of the best organic traffic pages I have ever created were the results of long-tail queries I never expected to drive any conversions.
Do you even need a website?
However, the overcomplication doesn’t just begin with launching campaigns, I think it starts at the very beginning when it comes to even launching a website.
Many businesses automatically assume they need to have a website and a very complicated one at that. In my opinion, this is a huge waste of time, energy, and budget.
This may be an unpopular opinion in 2023, but there are businesses where a website isn’t even a requirement. A website should function as the Internet’s front door for a business, but in the case of local services, there are better options that require fewer resources and have a higher chance of converting customers.
For example, local movers will probably generate more conversions with a Google Business page that displays their phone number and their services than having a subpar website. When I have moved my own places of residence, I looked at movers websites and decided not to contact them after seeing a poorly designed website that put me off their services. (I was better off not seeing pictures of beat-up trucks and movers mishandling furniture.)
Amazon has discounted the paperback version of my book Product-Led SEO to less than $10.
The same line of thinking might apply to a restaurant, generating more walk-ins with a Yelp page than a complex website displaying the wrong information for a hungry person.
What kind of website do you really need?
Once a business decides they need a website, the owners again might overcomplicate this task and think they need to build something very custom. Aside from the huge cost and time it takes to build a custom website, maintenance can’t be neglected. Technology and plugins will change and with no one keeping tabs on the site, the site is at risk of breaking or being hacked.
For these exact reasons, I chose to build my website on Wix. (Note, Wix is not sponsoring this newsletter and this is an organic endorsement) Wix is certainly not as flexible as a custom website, however, I found that it met 99% of my objectives, and that missing 1% I was happy to give up in exchange for significant time savings and peace of mind. I would rather not have full access to every piece of HTML, but also not have to worry about constant updates and security issues.
WordPress is good too
Prior to Wix, I was using WordPress which is the next best solution for a site that needs more customization than Wix, but I found it to be too time-consuming for my purposes. My plugins would break with changes in my hosting, and too often I had to spend time figuring out on my own why my site went into maintenance mode. Additionally, my site never improved because if I wanted to do something new on my site like add a popup, it would take hours to figure out how to implement it.
This is just my opinion, but I think if most businesses were honest with themselves about what they needed from their website they would likely discover that this is another thing that they are overcomplicating.
A Wix (or similar tool) site will be ready to go in less than an hour, while the same can’t be said for most custom solutions.
I would rather start with the simplest solution and then make a switch if I need something more complex than start with the complex solution just in case, I might need something more custom later on.