By Steven Webster on
8/19/2008 12:14 PM
As businesses in our industry look everywhere to cut costs and manage expenses, one easy target is your marketing budget. Very often, decisions are made to reduce advertising and marketing expenses during tough times. Sometimes, in our business, what we see is a dealer making a decision to switch website providers based solely on reducing their monthly invoice. After all, a website is a website right?
Well, not exactly.
While it's relatively straightforward to look at the production costs for a TV ad or direct mail piece or even your long distance service and choose the lower priced option, changing your websites, if it's not done correctly, can have a big impact on your business and cost you far more than saving a few bucks each month.
Why? Well unlike other forms of marketing, websites grow roots. Changing sites is a lot like ripping out an established apple tree and planting a seedling. It takes time to grow and it won't provide nearly the fruit it did before for a long time. The reason for this is simple. The search engines like Google and Yahoo have spent the last several years getting to know you're website. They do this slowly to ensure that you’re site is a real business and has valuable relevant content. It can take a very long time for them to index everything. If you do it right and with consistency then you’re rewarded with higher search engine rankings than your competitors. Then one day, the search engine bots go to check in on your site’s content and it's not there anymore. All of your pages have changed and your entire site index on Google is invalid. Furthermore these bots notice that you are on a different server now. ...
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