Picking up from where How to Evaluate the ROI for Your Website (Pt. 1) left off, here we will continue discussing the specific factors that need to be considered when assessing the return on investment for a business’ website.
In addition to calculating the initial costs of developing or redesigning a website, as you continue to evaluate the ROI for a website, you should also consider:
2. The Ongoing Maintenance Costs
With a website for your business, the investment is not over once the initial work to develop or redesign the site has been completed. In fact, for websites, you need to cover some ongoing maintenance costs that, at the very least, will include website hosting (this is typically available for a minimal cost).
Keep in mind, however, that there may be some additional ongoing maintenance costs that you may want to consider paying for. These can include the costs of:
- Ongoing content marketing, such as weekly or monthly blogging
- Email marketing
- Advertising.
If you end up contracting with a full-service Internet marketing firm (like Epic Web Results), these ongoing website maintenance costs will likely also be easy to identify (in that you will pay a single monthly fee for all of these services). Alternatively, if you work with various firms to complete these services month to month, then you will need to add up all of these costs to calculate what your monthly website maintenance costs are.
So, in terms of costs for determining the ROI for your website, you need to add the initial costs to your ongoing monthly maintenance costs. The remaining three factors we will discuss will highlight the various results that you will need to look at as you evaluate the ROI for your website.
3. The Traffic to Your Website
How many unique users are visiting your business’ website each month (or week, depending on how you want to look at these numbers)? As you evaluate the traffic to your website in your ROI analysis, here are some more things to consider:
- The bounce rate – It’s not simply enough to have users visit your website; you also want them to stay on your website for long enough to read (and ideally respond to) your site’s call to action.If people are coming to your site and immediately clicking off of it, you will have a high bounce rate, indicating that there may be some problems with the design, content and/or SEO for your site (as people likely are not finding what they are looking for with your site and, consequently, are immediately leaving).
- The ranking in search engines – The better your site ranks in search engines, the more traffic it will likely receive. With search engine rankings, however, you need to remember that it can take some time for sites to be picked up by search engines (after being first developed) and climbing in rankings requires an ongoing effort (in terms of SEO, content marketing, etc.).
If your website isn’t getting enough traffic and/or the traffic doesn’t seem to be increasing over time, there may be some problems with the design, content and/or SEO for your site, and more work may need to be done to improve traffic and get more people visiting your business’ site.
Don’t miss the conclusion to this blog series for some final thoughts on what you should know when it comes to determining the ROI for your website.
Effective Internet Marketing Solutions at Epic Web Results
When you are ready to develop or redesign a website for your business, you can maximize the return on your investment by hiring the skilled professionals at Epic Web Results. We are up to date with the latest advances in Internet marketing and SEO best practices, and we are highly adept at designing and maintaining optimized websites that will soar to the top of search engines.
To learn more about our customized, innovative Internet marketing solutions, contact the professionals at Epic Web Results by calling (800) 501-9724 or by emailing us using the contact form on this page.
