The True Cost of Changing Websites

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:07:00 GMT

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.

You see search engines look at things like IP address changes (an IP Address is an “address” or “serial number” for your web providers servers and switching providers means switching IP addresses) so when they see a server IP address change they know have to re-index the entire site. If you're new provider doesn't make this easy for the search engines with easily indexed URLs, redirects, and a host of other search engine optimization tricks then it can take months or even up to a year to regain your search engine rankings that you worked so hard to get in the first place. What is worse is if your new provider isn’t good at getting your website found then no matter the cost of the site your customers won’t find it.

Since roughly 80% of your prospects will visit your site before they come to your store and nearly half of them find your site based on keyword searches on sites like Google, this can have a huge impact on the number of prospects that can even find you see after making the switch. You wouldn’t move your dealership off of an expensive lot next to a major highway over to a country road in the boonies to save money on land and property taxes would you? Well, think of your website in exactly the same way.

Unfortunately, many dealers realize this too late, often a month or so after they have switched. Their web traffic and online leads drop dramatically and they begin to notice people aren't bringing flyers that they printed on the website into the store anymore. Certainly not the effect the dealer was hoping for.

So what can you do?

Well, first things first - talk to your current provider. Do they have lower priced plans that can help you through a tough financial situation? Often a company is willing to help if you explain the situation. If it's just not going to work then make sure to ask your new provider a few questions:

How search engine friendly are their websites?
Prove it - What kind of search engine rankings do they get for their customers?
If you switch to them how will they minimize any traffic losses
How long will the transition take?
How much will a switch improve or reduce your current search engine rankings?

If you switch to a provider who knows what they are doing, has proven search engine optimization results and can show you how they've helped dealers generate more traffic by switching to their platform it might be worth the short term hit in rankings and traffic.

In fact, it might even be worth spending a little more.

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