Lackey Designs blog

What a Septic or Dumpster Rental Website Needs to Bring Calls

2026-11-05T17:00:00Z

Nobody browses a septic company's website for fun. They have a tank that needs pumping, a renovation that needs a dumpster, or a wedding that needs portable toilets, and they want to know three things in about ten seconds.

A site that answers those three questions fast gets the call. A site that makes the visitor hunt sends them to the next listing.

We have built sites for dumpster rental, septic and hauling companies in Wisconsin, and the ones that bring in work share the same parts. Here they are, with what we did for River City Disposal and Toombs Septic Services and why.

Two of the sites we built

River City Disposal

Every dumpster size and service on its own page with what it is for, and a way to get in touch on every page.

Visit the site
Toombs Septic Services

Every town in Northwest Wisconsin by name, licensing front and center, and a page each for septic service and portable toilets.

Visit the site

Want this built for your company? Call 317-572-7457 or send a few lines about what you haul, pump or rent and the towns you cover. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Get a Free Estimate

1 The service area, on the homepage, by town name

The first question is always "do you come to me." Put the answer on the homepage: the counties and towns you serve, by name, in text that Google can read. Toombs Septic Services covers Northwest Wisconsin and the site says exactly where, so a search from any of those towns finds them. A map is a nice addition. A map alone is not enough, because Google cannot read a picture of a map and neither can a person in a hurry.

2 A page for every size and every service

River City Disposal rents dumpsters to homes, businesses and construction sites in River Falls, Wisconsin, and the site lays out every dumpster size and service with what each is for: a bathroom remodel, a roof tear off, a whole house cleanout. Customers arrive knowing what they want, which makes the call short and the quote accurate. The same goes for septic: pumping, inspections, repairs, portable toilets and hand washing stations each get a page, because each is a separate search and a separate customer.

3 A size guide with real photos

The question every dumpster company answers twenty times a day is "what size do I need." A size guide with a photo of each container on a real driveway, its dimensions, roughly what fits in it, and the jobs it suits saves your phone time and gives Google a page that ranks for "what size dumpster for a kitchen remodel." Use your own containers and your own trucks. Customers want to see what will show up at their house.

4 A rental or service request form that works on a phone

River City Disposal on a phone: the number and the request form are never more than a tap away.

Many customers call. Many others are planning at 10pm and will not. For them, a request form on every page: name, phone, address, the size or service, the dates, and a place for a note. You confirm the price and the delivery window by phone or email. River City Disposal's site puts a way to get in touch on every page, and that is the rule: never make a customer go looking for it.

5 Click to call at the top of every page

Most visitors are on a phone, often standing in the driveway looking at the problem. The number belongs at the top of every page, large enough to tap, and it dials when tapped. This is the single most important element on a service company's site, and it is astonishing how many sites hide it on a contact page.

6 A page for each town you want to be found in

Service area pages are how a company in a rural county gets found across it. A homeowner in a small town searches for septic service in that town, and Google shows the page about that town. Each page should be about the place: the kind of properties there, the services you do most there, a job you did there, and how far you are from it. Pages that are copies of each other with the town name swapped do not rank and do not convince anyone.

7 Licensing, insurance and what you do with the waste

Customers in this industry have real questions about trust: are you licensed, are you insured, where does it go. Toombs Septic's licensing is front and center on the site. River City Disposal explains its recycling commitment. Put the license number, the insurance and the disposal practices where a careful customer will find them, because the careful customer is the one who calls back for the next job.

8 Reviews that mention the town

Google reviews decide how you rank on the map, and reviews that mention the town and the service ("pumped our tank in Hudson the same day") are the ones that move it. Ask after every job, by text, with the direct link. We have a script in how to get more Google reviews. Put the best ones on the site with the customer's first name and town.

9 Seasonal pages and a banner you can change

This industry runs on seasons: spring cleanouts, summer events, fall pumping before the ground freezes. Each seasonal service gets a page, and the homepage gets a banner that changes with the season. On our hosting and maintenance plan, you text the change and it is made in under 48 hours, so the site keeps up without you learning an editor.

10 A Google Business Profile that matches

For a service area business, the profile is the map listing, and it ranks on three things you control: a complete profile with the service area set to your towns, the same name, address and phone number everywhere you are listed, and a steady flow of reviews. We set up and tune the profile as part of every site we build in this industry, and ongoing local SEO starts at $600 a month for owners who want to keep pushing.

The hauling version

Toombs Trucking hauls grain and ag lime in Wisconsin's farm country, and the same principles apply with different words: the services listed plainly, the area covered by name, a way to schedule, and the case for safety and reliability made up front. Whatever you haul, pump or rent, the customer's three questions are the same.

What it costs

A custom site, from $5,000. Built around the ten parts above.
The Small Business plan, $200 a month. The writing, hosting and changes included.
Grow Together, nothing up front. Paid 10% of the sales the site brings in.

Most sites launch in 4 to 8 weeks.

Get a Free Estimate

The full picture of what drives the price is in how much a website costs, and the list of what any service company's site needs is in what a contractor website should include.

Run your current site through the free website grader first if you have one. Then tell us what you haul, pump or rent and the towns you cover. That is enough to start, and Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What waste and septic owners ask before they build a site.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: They can request one. A rental request form takes the size, the delivery address and the dates, and you confirm the price by phone or email. River City Disposal's site lists every size and service, so most customers already know what they want when they ask.

: For every town you want to be found in, yes. Toombs Septic lists its service areas across Northwest Wisconsin, and a page about a town is what Google shows when someone there searches for septic service. Write each one about that place so they are not copies.

: A custom site built around calls and rental requests starts at $5,000, or $200 a month on the Small Business plan with writing, hosting and changes included. Grow Together asks for nothing up front and is paid 10% of the sales the site brings in.

: Your trucks, your containers, your crew and your yard, taken with a phone. A clean dumpster on a real driveway in your county beats any stock photo and tells a customer what will show up at their house.

: A complete Google Business Profile with your service area set to the towns you cover, matching name, address and phone everywhere you are listed, the town pages on the site, and reviews that mention the town. Ongoing local SEO starts at $600 a month.

: Yes. Portable toilets for summer events, spring cleanouts, fall septic pumping: each gets its own page, and on our maintenance plan a seasonal banner or price change is made in under 48 hours when you text it over.

How Much Does SEO Cost for a Small Business? (2026)

2026-10-28T20:32:33Z

SEO is the service small business owners are most often sold and least often able to evaluate. The pitch is always the same: page one of Google. The price is anywhere from $99 a month to $5,000, and the owner has no way to tell what separates the two except that one feels too cheap and the other feels too expensive.

This article puts real numbers on it. Lackey Designs has done SEO for small businesses since 2006, our plans are published on our pricing page, and we are often called in to repair the results of cheaper plans. So we can tell you what the money buys at each price, how long it takes to work and how to spot a plan that is not working while there is still time to stop paying for it.

The short answer

For a small business competing in a local market, a real SEO plan costs $500 to $1,500 a month in 2026. Our plans start at $600 a month. One time projects such as an audit and fix of an existing site run $1,000 to $5,000. Anything under $300 a month is almost always automated reports and directory submissions, which is not nothing, but it is not SEO.

Why SEO is priced by the month

Owners sometimes ask why SEO cannot be bought once, like a website. The answer is that search results are a competition, not a product. Your position depends on what competitors do, what Google changes and what you publish, and all three keep moving. A site that was tuned once and left alone slides as the pages around it improve. So SEO is sold as a retainer, with a set number of hours a month spent moving your site forward, and the price reflects the hours.

That is also the key to understanding the price bands. At $600 a month you are buying a certain number of hours of skilled work. At $2,500 you are buying four times as many. Whether you need four times as many depends entirely on your market.

What you get at each price

Under $300 a month: listings and reports

At this price the provider cannot afford to spend real hours on your site. What you typically get is submission to directories, an automated monthly ranking report and perhaps a few generic blog posts. For a business in a small town with little competition, this can be enough to appear on the map. For anyone else, it is a monthly fee that produces a PDF.

$500 to $1,500 a month: a local campaign

This is where most small businesses belong, and where our plans start. The money covers:

Keyword research to find the words your customers actually use, and the local versions of them.
A technical and on page audit of the site with tools such as SEMrush and Screaming Frog: titles, headings, sitemaps, speed, mobile, broken links and the dozens of small things that stop a good site from ranking.
Google Business Profile work: claiming, completing and tuning the profile, keeping your name, address and phone consistent across the directories that list you, and getting reviews onto it.
Content: a page for each service and each area you serve, and regular posts that answer the questions customers search for. Pages with substantial, useful content tend to rank better than thin ones, and most small business sites have thin ones.
Links from relevant local and industry sites, earned by being worth linking to.
Tracking through Google Analytics and Search Console, so results are measured in calls and form fills and not just rankings.

$1,500 to $5,000 a month: competitive markets

A personal injury firm in a large city, an e-commerce site competing nationally or a business in a niche where every competitor already has an SEO team needs more hours a month: more content, more links, more technical work. The tasks are the same as the local campaign. There are just more of them, and the competition for each ranking is harder.

What results look like, and when

Honest SEO providers do not promise page one by a date, because nobody controls Google. What we can tell you is the usual shape of a campaign.

Weeks 1 to 4: the audit and the fixes. The site gets faster, cleaner and more complete. The Google Business Profile gets finished. Nothing much moves in rankings yet.

Months 2 to 4: local results start to show. The profile appears on the map for searches it did not before, and pages that were close to ranking move onto page one.

Months 4 to 12: the competitive terms move as content and links accumulate. This is where most of the leads come from and where owners who quit at month three never arrive.

Merriment ABA, an in-home therapy practice serving Hamilton County and the north side of Indianapolis, came to us after struggling with search visibility for years. Within a few months of the audit and the fixes, their site climbed the rankings and organic traffic rose with it. That timeline is typical when the site is sound and the market is local.

Warning signs of an SEO plan that is not working

You do not need to understand SEO to tell whether yours is working. Watch for these:

The report is all rankings and traffic, and never mentions leads. Ranking for a term nobody searches is easy. Phone calls are the measure.
You cannot name one thing that was done this month. A real plan produces visible work: new pages, rewritten titles, a finished profile, fixed errors.
A guarantee of page one. Nobody can guarantee this. Anyone who does is either guessing or planning to rank you for your own business name.
Links from sites you have never heard of in languages you do not speak. Bought links in bulk are the fastest way to a Google penalty, and the cleanup costs more than the plan.
You do not own your Google Analytics, Search Console or Business Profile. If the provider owns them, you lose your data and your map listing when you leave.
Blog posts that read like they were written by nobody, for nobody. Google has gotten good at ignoring filler. So have your customers.

SEO, Google Ads or both?

Owners often ask whether they should spend on SEO or on Google Ads, which also start at $600 a month with us. The honest answer is that they do different jobs. Ads produce leads this week and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months to build and keeps producing after the work is done. A new business that needs the phone to ring now usually starts with ads and adds SEO as it can. An established business with some rankings already usually gets more from SEO. We explain how the two fit together in Web Marketing 101.

Before you spend anything

Run your site through our free website grader. It scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, SEO, accessibility, security and whether AI search tools such as ChatGPT can find you, with no email required. If the technical score is low, that is the first money to spend, because no amount of content or links will lift a site that Google struggles to read.

When you are ready to talk, tell us about your business and what you want the phone to ring about. Jason replies in under 24 hours with what we would do first and what it would cost, in writing. Our SEO service page has the full list of what a plan includes.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask before they sign an SEO agreement.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Most small businesses competing in a local market spend $500 to $1,500 a month. Below that, there is not enough time in the month to move anything. Above it, you are usually in a large metro market or a competitive national niche. Our plans start at $600 a month.

: Local improvements, such as a tuned Google Business Profile and fixed on page basics, can show within weeks. Rankings for competitive terms take months. Merriment ABA, an Indianapolis area therapy practice, saw its site climb the rankings within a few months of starting with us. Plan on six months before judging a campaign.

: Both. A one time audit and fix of the site's technical and on page problems is a project. Ranking and staying ranked, as competitors and Google change, is ongoing. Most of the value comes from the ongoing part.

: The basics, yes: a complete Google Business Profile, accurate listings, a page for each service, and useful content written regularly. The work that moves competitive rankings takes tools, time and experience most owners would rather spend on the business. Our guide to writing an effective blog is a good place to start on your own.

: SEO earns a position in the unpaid results and keeps paying after the work is done. Google Ads buys a position at the top and stops the moment you stop paying. They work well together: ads bring leads now while SEO builds. Our Web Marketing 101 post explains the two in more depth.

: Leads: calls, form fills and quote requests, with the ones from search separated out. Then rankings for the terms that matter, organic visitors, and the work done that month. A report that is only rankings and traffic is measuring the wrong thing.

Website ADA Compliance: What a Small Business Must Do

2026-10-15T17:54:26Z

Most small business owners hear about website accessibility for the first time from a demand letter. A law firm writes to say the site cannot be used by a person with a disability, cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, and proposes a settlement. The owner, who has never thought about it, searches for what the ADA requires of a website and finds a wall of legal and technical jargon.

Here is the plain version: what the law requires, the standard everyone actually uses, the fixes that matter most, and the shortcut that does not work. This is general information from a web design studio, not legal advice. If you have received a letter, talk to a lawyer.

What the law says

The ADA was written in 1990 and does not mention websites. Courts have since treated the websites of businesses that serve the public, stores, restaurants, firms, practices, as places that must be accessible, and the federal government has adopted a specific web standard for state and local government sites. There is no equivalent rule naming a standard for private businesses, which is why the area feels uncertain. In practice it is not: when courts and settlements describe what an accessible website is, they point to the same standard.

The standard: WCAG 2.1 AA

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the organization that sets web standards, define accessibility in testable terms. Version 2.1 at level AA is the one courts, settlements and the government rule reference. It is long, but it rests on four ideas: content can be perceived (seen or heard or read by a screen reader), operated (with a keyboard, not only a mouse), understood (readable, predictable) and robust (works with assistive technology). Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA is the practical definition of ADA compliance for a website.

The fixes that matter most

Most accessibility problems on small business sites come from a short list. Fixing these covers the majority of what a demand letter cites.

1. Text people can read

Light gray text on white, tiny type and text over busy photos fail the contrast rule and fail older customers. Text needs enough contrast against its background, needs to be resizable without breaking the layout, and should not be locked inside images.

2. Descriptions on images

Every meaningful image needs alt text, a short description a screen reader can read aloud. A photo of your crew is "The Lackey Designs team at the Fishers studio," not "IMG_4472.jpg." Decorative images are marked as decorative so they are skipped.

3. A site you can use without a mouse

Put the mouse down and press Tab. Can you reach every link, menu, button and form field? Can you see where you are? Can you open the menu and submit the form? Many sites fail here because of a menu or a slider that only works with a mouse. Keyboard access is also what most assistive technology relies on.

4. Headings in order

Screen reader users navigate by headings the way sighted users skim. A page needs one main heading, then subheadings in order, used for structure rather than for making text big. This is also exactly what Google wants, which is one of several places accessibility and SEO overlap.

5. Forms with labels and clear errors

Every field needs a visible label tied to it in the code, not just placeholder text that vanishes when you type. When something is wrong, the error message has to say what and where. A contact form that cannot be completed by a screen reader is a lost customer and a common complaint.

6. Links that say where they go

"Click here" and "Read more" mean nothing read out of context. "Request a free estimate" and "See the web design portfolio" do. Links should also be visibly distinct from surrounding text, not only by color.

7. Video with captions, audio with transcripts

If the site has video, it needs captions. If it autoplays with sound, it should not. If it moves, there should be a way to pause it.

8. No surprises

Nothing should open, move or change without the visitor asking. Popups, auto rotating sliders and content that shifts as the page loads are both accessibility problems and the things everyone hates.

The shortcut that does not work

You will be offered an accessibility overlay: a line of code that adds a toolbar to the site with options for contrast, font size and a screen reader mode, and a promise of compliance. Do not rely on it. Overlays do not fix the underlying problems, they often interfere with the assistive technology people actually use, and businesses running them have still received demand letters and been sued. The accessibility community has been clear about this for years. Accessibility is built into the site's code, or it is not there.

Building it in versus bolting it on

Making an existing site accessible is a repair job: an audit, a list of problems, fixes to the code and content, and a retest. For a small, well built site it is a few hundred dollars. For a large site on a heavy page builder it can be thousands, and sometimes the honest answer is that a redesign costs the same and fixes everything else too.

Building accessibility in from the start costs almost nothing extra, because the choices are the same choices a careful designer makes anyway: readable type, real structure, labeled forms, described images, keyboard friendly menus. That is how we build every site, and it is why the same site tends to score well for SEO and for speed. Our ADA compliance service covers audits, fixes and the design changes that follow.

What to do this week

Run the site through our free website grader, which includes an accessibility score and takes a minute.
Try the keyboard test: Tab through the homepage, open the menu, submit the contact form without touching the mouse.
Look at the site on a phone in bright sunlight. If you cannot read it, neither can anyone else.
Check that every image on the homepage has a description, and that the contact form fields have visible labels.
If you have an overlay, do not treat it as the answer.

If the grader comes back low, or you have a letter in hand, send us the site's address. We will tell you plainly what it would take to fix, in writing, and Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask after the first demand letter, or before it.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Courts have repeatedly treated the websites of businesses open to the public as covered by the ADA, and demand letters go to very small businesses. The safe assumption is yes. This is general information, not legal advice; for your situation, ask a lawyer.

: There is no small business rule that names one, but courts, settlements and the federal rule for state and local governments all point to WCAG 2.1 at level AA. Meeting it is the practical definition of an accessible site.

: No. Overlays add a toolbar but do not fix the underlying code, and businesses using them have still been sued. Accessibility has to be built into the site: contrast, structure, alt text, keyboard access and forms that work.

: Fixing an existing site runs from a few hundred dollars for a small, well built site to several thousand for a large or poorly built one. Building it in from the start costs little extra, which is why every site we build is designed to be accessible.

: Yes, in practical ways. Alt text, heading structure, descriptive links and readable content are things Google uses too. An accessible site is usually a better organized site, and both people and search engines prefer that.

: Our free website grader includes an accessibility score. For a deeper look, free browser tools report contrast, missing alt text and heading problems, and the best test is to put your mouse away and try to use the site with the keyboard alone.

WordPress vs. a Static Website for a Small Business

2026-09-29T20:25:58Z

Somewhere in your first conversation with a web designer, they will mention the platform. WordPress, or something else. Most owners nod and move on, because it sounds like a technical detail. It is not. The platform decides how fast the site loads, how often it breaks, how much it costs to look after and what happens when the designer is gone.

We build and host both WordPress sites and static sites. This site is static. Here is the honest comparison, so you can ask the right question when the platform comes up.

What each one is

WordPress is software that runs on the web server. When a visitor asks for a page, WordPress builds it on the spot: it reads the content from a database, runs the theme and the plugins, and sends the result. That is what lets you log in, edit a page and see the change immediately. It is also a lot of moving parts, and each part gets updated, breaks or gets attacked.

A static website is built once, in advance. The pages are plain files, and the server simply hands them over. There is no database, no software running for each visitor and nothing to log into on the server. Changes are made by rebuilding the site, which takes seconds and is usually done by whoever maintains it.

The clockwork and the stone. One has gears to oil. The other just sits there and works.

Speed

A static site is fast by default, because nothing happens between the request and the page. A WordPress site can be fast, but it takes work: caching, a careful theme, few plugins, optimized images, good hosting. Most WordPress sites we are asked to look at are slow because that work was never done, and it is the most common reason a site scores poorly on our free website grader. Speed matters because visitors on a phone leave slow pages, and Google measures the same thing.

Security

Most hacked small business sites are WordPress sites with an out of date plugin. That is not a knock on WordPress. It is the consequence of running software that is popular, extensible and often neglected. A static site has far less to attack: there is no login page on the server, no database and no plugin code running. It still needs an SSL certificate and sensible hosting, but the odds are very different. We explained why the padlock matters in HTTP vs. HTTPS.

Maintenance

This is where the difference shows up on the invoice. WordPress needs core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, a check after each one, backups, malware scanning and the occasional repair when an update breaks something. A static site needs hosting, a certificate, backups and someone to make content changes. Our hosting and maintenance plan is $200 a month for either, because we would rather price it simply, but the work behind a WordPress site is more, and that is part of why many of our new builds are static. What a plan should include is in what website maintenance includes.

Editing

WordPress wins here on paper. You log in, change the text, click update. In practice, most owners we work with do not want to log in. They want to text a photo and a sentence and have it done, and on our plan it is done in under 48 hours regardless of platform. If you truly want to edit pages yourself every week, WordPress or a static site with a simple editor attached both work. If you want to send the change and get on with your day, the platform does not matter.

Features

WordPress has a plugin for nearly everything: online stores, booking, memberships, forums, multilingual sites. If your site needs several of those, WordPress is often the practical choice. A static site handles forms, galleries, maps, quote calculators and most of what a service business needs, and connects to outside services for booking or payments. The question to ask is what the site has to do, not what it could do. Most small business sites need five pages, a form and a phone number that dials.

SEO

Google ranks pages, not platforms. A static site starts with a speed advantage and a clean structure. A WordPress site can match it with care and a good SEO plugin. The things that actually move rankings, a page for each service, useful content, a tuned Google Business Profile, links, are the same on either. What hurts is a slow, bloated site, which is a WordPress problem far more often than a static one.

Cost

With us, the build is priced by the site, not the platform: custom websites start at $5,000 and the Small Business plan is $200 a month either way. Elsewhere, WordPress can be cheaper to build because so many designers use the same themes, and more expensive to keep because of the upkeep. Over several years the maintenance usually outweighs the build.

How to choose

Choose WordPress if you run an online store with many products, need plugins for booking, membership or courses, have staff who will edit pages weekly, or already have a large WordPress site that works and just needs care.

Choose static if the site exists to explain the business and bring in calls and forms, speed and security matter to you, you would rather send changes than make them, and you want the fewest things that can break.

Most small service businesses, contractors, firms and practices fall into the second group. That is why this site is static, and why many of the sites we have built recently are.

Already on WordPress?

You do not have to move. If the site works, we host and maintain WordPress sites and keep them updated, backed up and fast. If it is slow or fragile and you are planning a redesign anyway, moving to static is done with the same redirect process as any redesign, so the rankings carry over. The steps are in our redesign SEO checklist, and website migrations are part of what we do.

If you want a plain recommendation for your site, send us its address. Jason replies in under 24 hours and will say which platform he would choose in your position and why.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when a designer mentions the platform.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: A site whose pages are built once, in advance, as plain files that the server simply hands to each visitor. There is no database and no software running on the server for each page view, which is why static sites are fast and hard to hack. This site is one.

: No. WordPress runs a large share of the web and is the right choice when you need to edit pages yourself often, run a store, or use plugins for booking or membership. It does need steady maintenance: core, theme and plugin updates, backups and security scanning.

: Neither, by itself. Google ranks pages, not platforms. A static site has a speed advantage out of the box, and WordPress can be made fast with care. Content, structure and links matter far more than the platform.

: Usually through a simple editor or by sending the change to whoever maintains it. On our maintenance plan, you text or email the change and it is made in under 48 hours, which is how most of our clients prefer it anyway.

: Yes, if every page keeps its address or redirects to its replacement. We handle migrations with the same redirect process as a redesign, and the checklist is in our website redesign SEO checklist.

: The same with us: hosting and maintenance is $200 a month for either, with backups, security, SSL and content changes included. WordPress takes more work behind the scenes to keep updated, which is part of why we build many new sites static.

What Should a Contractor Website Include? 10 Essentials

2026-09-10T19:32:51Z

A contractor's website has two jobs.

Everything else on the site is decoration.

We have built sites for fence companies, landscapers, remodelers, tree services, septic companies, cleaners and dumpster rental businesses, and the ones that bring in work all have the same ten parts. Here they are, with examples from sites in our contractor portfolio, in the order a homeowner meets them.

Two of the sites we built

Croix Area Fence

A number at the top of every page, a fence designer that gives an instant estimate, and a five year warranty with its own section.

Visit the site
Toombs Septic Services

Licensing front and center, and a page for every area it covers across Northwest Wisconsin.

Visit the site

Want this built for your trade? Call 317-572-7457 or send a few lines about what you do, where you work and the jobs you want more of. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Get a Free Estimate

1 A phone number that dials, at the top of every page

Most of your visitors are standing in the yard looking at the problem with a phone in their hand. Your number belongs at the top of every page, large enough to tap, and it should dial when tapped. Not in the footer. Not on the contact page. Not as an image. If a visitor has to hunt for the number, the next contractor in the search results gets the call.

2 A quote request that is hard to miss

Some homeowners will not call. They are at work, it is 10pm, or they want to compare three quotes before they talk to anyone. For them the site needs a quote request form on every page: name, phone, the type of job, the address and a place to attach photos. Ground Breakers, a landscaping company in Beldenville, Wisconsin, puts a free quote request where visitors cannot miss it. Croix Area Fence goes further with a fence designer that lets the visitor lay out their fence and see an instant estimate without waiting for a call back. Build the version that matches how you sell.

3 A page for each service you want more of

A single "Services" page with a bulleted list does not rank for anything. A page about fence installation, written for someone who wants a fence, with photos of fences, ranks for fence searches. Start with the three or four jobs that pay best and give each its own page with what the job involves, what affects the price, how long it takes and photos of your work. Add the rest as the site grows. This is the single biggest difference between a trades site that brings in search traffic and one that does not.

4 A project gallery with your real work

Photos of finished work close more jobs than any paragraph. Respectful Remodeling's site lets homeowners look through completed projects before they ask for a quote, and that is exactly the order a homeowner wants: see it, then call. Use your own photos, taken on your own jobs with your phone. A before and after of a real deck in a real backyard beats a stock photo every time, and stock photos are the fastest way to make a contractor look like he has never held a tool.

5 Reviews, on the site and on Google

Homeowners hire contractors they trust, and nothing builds trust like other homeowners. Put your Google reviews on the site, with names and towns, and keep asking for new ones after every job. The reviews on your Google Business Profile also decide how you rank on the map, which for most trades is where the calls come from.

6 Trust signals: license, insurance, warranty

If you are licensed, insured, bonded, certified or a member of a trade association, say so, with the numbers, where a visitor will see it. Croix Area Fence's five year warranty has its own section of the site. Toombs Septic Services puts its licensing front and center. These are the things a careful homeowner is looking for before they call, and the things a competitor who lacks them hopes nobody asks about.

7 Service area pages for the towns you work in

A homeowner searching for a septic service in their town wants to know you come to their town. Toombs Septic lists the areas it covers across Northwest Wisconsin, so a search from any of those towns finds a page about them. Write each page about that place: the kind of homes there, the jobs you do there, a project you finished there. Pages that are copies of each other with the town name swapped do not rank and do not convince anyone.

8 A site that works on a phone first

Croix Area Fence on a phone, where most of its visitors see it.

Most of the visitors to a contractor's site are on a phone, and a site that was designed on a desktop and squeezed onto a phone is slow, hard to tap and quietly losing jobs. Design for the phone first: big buttons, a number that dials, a form that can be filled in with a thumb, and photos that load fast on a cell connection. We wrote about why in Responsive Websites: Why You Need One.

9 A Google Business Profile that matches the site

Your profile is the listing that appears on the map, and for most trades it produces more calls than the website itself. It needs to be claimed, complete and consistent: the same business name, address and phone number as the website and every directory that lists you, the same services, photos of your work and a steady flow of reviews. We set up and tune the profile as part of every contractor site, because a great website behind an unclaimed profile is a truck with no tires.

10 Someone who keeps it current while you are on the job

A contractor's site changes more than most: a new service, a price change, a new crew member, a gallery that should grow with every job, and seasonal work that comes and goes. You do not have time to learn a website editor and you should not have to. On our hosting and maintenance plan, which is $200 a month, you send a text or an email with the change or the photos and it is done in under 48 hours. The site stays current, backed up and secure while you are out on a job.

What you can leave out

Contractors are often sold things their customers never use. A blog you will not write. A chat widget nobody staffs. A mission statement. Stock photos of smiling models in hard hats. An animated homepage that takes six seconds to load on a cell connection. If a part of the site does not help a homeowner decide to call you, it is costing you money twice: once to build and again every time it slows down a visitor on the way to the phone number.

What it costs

A custom contractor site, from $5,000. Built around the ten parts above.
The Small Business plan, $200 a month. The writing, hosting and changes included.
Grow Together, nothing up front. Paid 10% of the sales the site brings in.

Most sites launch within 4 to 8 weeks, and the price and the launch date are in writing before anything is built.

Get a Free Estimate

Our full breakdown of website costs explains what drives the price.

If you already have a site, run it through our free website grader to see how it scores on speed, SEO and mobile before you decide anything. When you are ready, tell us about your trade: what you do, where you work and what kind of jobs you want more of. That is enough to start, and Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What contractors ask before they build or replace a site.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: A custom site built around quote requests starts at $5,000 with us, or $200 a month on the Small Business plan with design, writing, hosting and changes included. Grow Together asks for nothing up front and is paid 10% of the sales the site brings in. Our full breakdown is in How Much Does a Website Cost.

: Yes, for every service you want more of. A page for fence installation ranks for fence searches in a way a general services page never will. Start with the three or four jobs that pay best and add the rest as the site grows.

: For the towns you want to be found in, yes. A homeowner searching for a septic service in their town gets a page about their town, not a list. Write each one about that place so they are not copies of each other.

: From your phone, on the job. A before and after of real work beats any stock photo. Send them to whoever maintains the site and have them organized by type of job. Our clients on a maintenance plan text us photos and they are up in under 48 hours.

: Only if you book that way. Most trades quote first, so a quote request form with the job type, address and photos does more good than a calendar. Croix Area Fence went further with a fence designer that gives an instant estimate, which fits how fences are sold. Match the tool to how you actually sell.

: It helps. The map listing is your Google Business Profile, and it ranks better when the website behind it is complete, matches the profile's name, address and phone, and has pages for the services and areas on the profile. Ongoing local SEO starts at $600 a month.

What Should a Law Firm Website Include? (BMZ Law Example)

2026-08-21T20:55:07Z

When BMZ Law came to us, they wanted one thing: more inquiries. Not a prettier site, not a rebrand. More people filling in the form and picking up the phone. The site we built had clear calls to action and pages written for the clients they wanted to reach, and in their words, "We've seen a 40% increase in inquiries since launching the new site."

40% more inquiries
“We’ve seen a 40% increase in inquiries since launching the new site! The team was professional, attentive, and truly understood our business goals.”
Blake Zurbuchen, BMZ Law

Nothing about that site was exotic. It had the parts a small firm's website needs, in the order a potential client meets them. Here is that list, so you can check your own site against it.

1 A homepage that says who you help, in the first sentence

Most law firm homepages open with a photo of a courthouse and the word "Experienced." A potential client arriving from a search wants to know, within a second, whether this firm handles their kind of problem in their area. The first headline should say what the firm does and where: family law in Hamilton County, business law for Indianapolis companies, estate planning for Carmel families. Specific wins.

2 A page for each practice area

A single "Practice Areas" page with a list does two things badly: it ranks for nothing, and it speaks to no one. A separate page for each practice area, written for the person who has that problem, does both well. The estate planning page talks to someone who just had a child or a scare. The business formation page talks to someone with an idea and a question about an LLC. Each page explains what the firm does, how the process works, what it tends to cost and what to do next. This is the single biggest change in most law firm redesigns, and it is where the search traffic comes from.

3 Attorney bios that build trust

Clients hire a person. After the homepage, the attorney pages are usually the most visited on a firm's site, and they are usually the weakest: a stiff headshot, a list of bar admissions and nothing a nervous client can hold on to. A good bio has a real photo taken in your office, a paragraph about the kinds of matters you handle and how you handle them, the credentials, and a direct phone number and email. Clients should finish the page feeling they already know who they are about to call.

4 A consultation request on every page

This is what moved the needle for BMZ Law. Every page needs a clear next step, visible without scrolling, and it needs to be the same step everywhere: a phone number that dials, and a short form that asks for a name, a phone, the type of matter and a few words. Not a twelve field intake form. Not "contact us" buried in the footer. A potential client who has just read your practice area page is at the moment of highest intent, and the form belongs right there.

5 Reviews, within the rules

Most state bar advertising rules allow truthful client testimonials, often with a disclaimer that results vary. Within those rules, reviews are the most persuasive content on the site, because they are the only words a potential client fully believes. Put your Google reviews on the site with the client's own words, and keep asking for them, since the same reviews decide how the firm ranks on the map.

6 An office page with the address, the map and the parking

A potential client searching for a lawyer near them is looking for the map listing and the address. The office page should have the full address, a map, directions, parking and the hours, and it should match the Google Business Profile exactly. A firm with more than one office needs a page for each.

7 Plain language throughout

The site is written for clients, not for other lawyers. Every sentence that a first year associate would understand and a client would not should be rewritten. This is harder than it sounds, which is why most firms benefit from a writer who is not a lawyer, and why copywriting is part of every site we build for a professional practice.

8 Answers to the questions clients ask on the phone

Every firm's front desk hears the same questions: what does a consultation cost, how long does this take, do I need a lawyer for this, what should I bring. Each one belongs on the site, as an FAQ on the relevant practice area page. They save the front desk time, they reassure the client, and they are exactly the questions people type into Google.

9 A site that is fast and works on a phone

A large share of visits to a law firm site are from a phone, often at a stressful moment. The site has to load fast on a cell connection, the number has to be tappable and the form has to be fillable with a thumb. Our free website grader scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, mobile, SEO and accessibility, and it is a quick way to see where a firm's current site stands.

10 Accessibility

Law firms are visible targets for accessibility complaints, and an accessible site is also simply a better site for older clients and clients with disabilities. Readable contrast, text that can be enlarged, images with descriptions, forms that work with a keyboard. We build this in rather than bolting on a widget, and we explain what the law actually requires in our guide to ADA compliance for a small business website.

What you can leave out

Stock photos of handshakes, gavels and columns. A news section that was last updated three years ago. Legal disclaimers in the body copy where a client is trying to read. An animated homepage. A chatbot nobody staffs. If a part of the site does not help a potential client decide to call, it is in the way.

What it costs and how it runs

A custom site for a small firm, from $5,000. Built around the ten parts above.
The Small Business plan, $200 a month. The writing, hosting and ongoing changes included.

Most sites launch within 4 to 8 weeks.

Get a Free Estimate

If you are replacing an existing site, every old page is redirected so the rankings you have carry over. Our websites for professional services page has more on how we work with firms, and the BMZ Law project is the example we point to first.

If you want the honest assessment of your current site before you decide anything, send us the address. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What attorneys ask before they replace the firm's website.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: A custom site for a small firm starts at $5,000 with us, with practice area pages, attorney bios and a consultation request built in, or $200 a month on the Small Business plan with writing, hosting and changes included. Our full breakdown is in How Much Does a Website Cost.

: For every practice area you want more of, yes. A page about estate planning ranks for estate planning searches in a way a general practice areas list never will, and it lets you speak to that client's situation directly.

: Yes, with a real photo, the attorney's background, the kinds of matters they handle and a direct way to reach them. Clients hire a person, not a firm, and the bio page is often the most visited page after the homepage.

: Yes, within your state bar's advertising rules, which generally allow truthful client testimonials. Google reviews with the client's own words are the most persuasive, and they also drive the map listing. Check your jurisdiction's rules on disclaimers before publishing.

: A complete Google Business Profile, a page for each practice area, an office page with the address and directions, and consistent name, address and phone across the directories that list law firms. Ongoing local SEO starts at $600 a month.

: Most of our sites launch within 4 to 8 weeks of the first conversation. Firms that have their bios and practice descriptions ready move fastest.

Pay Monthly Website vs. Paying Upfront: Which Is Right?

2026-08-06T19:05:25Z

Two business owners call us in the same week. The first has $6,000 set aside and wants a website she owns outright. The second has a great product, a new lease and no budget for the site until the business is earning. Both get a good website. They just pay for it differently, and the choice between paying monthly and paying up front matters more than most owners realize when they sign.

Here is how the two models compare, using our own published prices so the numbers are real: a custom website from $5,000, or the Small Business plan at $200 a month.

What each option includes

Paying upfront: the custom website

You pay a one time fee, from $5,000, and receive a site designed around your business. Hosting, security and backups are included, and ongoing support with content changes is added separately when you want it, at $200 a month. You own the finished site, the domain and every account from day one.

Paying monthly: the Small Business plan

You pay $200 a month and the plan covers the things a one time build often bills separately: branding, copywriting, design, development, hosting, daily backups, security updates and your content changes, made in under 48 hours. There is no large invoice at the start, no contract, no hidden fees, and you can cancel anytime. The accounts stay in your name.

The important difference is not the total. It is that the monthly plan includes the writing and the upkeep, and the upfront build includes them only if you add them.

What three years really costs

Owners compare $5,000 to $200 and conclude that monthly is cheaper. Then they compare $5,000 to $7,200 (36 months at $200) and conclude that upfront is cheaper. Neither comparison is fair, because they are not buying the same thing. Here is the like for like version for a typical five page site.

Upfront, over three years: $5,000 for the build, plus copywriting at $200 a page for five pages ($1,000), plus hosting and maintenance with content changes at $200 a month once you want support ($7,200). Around $13,200 if you want the same writing and support the monthly plan includes, or $6,000 if you write the pages yourself and never need a change.

Monthly, over three years: $7,200, with the writing, hosting and changes included.

So the honest answer is: if you will write your own content and rarely touch the site, paying upfront is cheaper. If you want someone else to write it and keep it current, paying monthly is cheaper for the first few years and the gap closes slowly after that. Pick the one that matches how you will actually use the site, not the one with the smaller first number.

When paying upfront is the right call

You have the cash and want the lowest cost over five years or more. Once the build is paid for, hosting is your only recurring cost.
The site will not change much. A professional firm whose services, team and hours stay put for years does not need a plan built around frequent changes.
You want to own the asset outright on the first day. Some owners simply prefer it, and that is a fine reason.
You are financing the business and want the website on the balance sheet as a one time expense. Ask your accountant, since the tax treatment of the two differs.

When paying monthly is the right call

You are a new business. $200 a month keeps the cash in the business where it earns more than it would in a website. This is the most common reason owners choose the plan, and it is why our websites for new businesses page leads with it.
Your site changes often. Seasonal services, new staff, price changes, a gallery that grows with every job. On the plan, you send a text and it is done in under 48 hours. On an upfront build without support, every change is a quote.
You do not want to write the pages. Copywriting is included. Most upfront projects stall at the content stage for weeks because the owner is the writer.
You want one bill and one phone number. Design, hosting, security and support from the same people who built the site, instead of a designer, a host and a maintenance contractor who each blame the other.

The questions to ask any monthly provider

Pay monthly websites have a bad name in some circles, and the reason is not the model. It is the fine print some providers attach to it. Before you sign with anyone, including us, get written answers to these:

Who owns the domain? It should be registered to your business, in an account you control. If the provider registers it in their name, you cannot leave without their cooperation.
Who owns the design and the content? If you cancel, can you take the site with you, or does it disappear?
Is there a minimum term? Twelve, twenty four and thirty six month contracts are common. Ours has none.
What does a change cost? Some plans include "maintenance" that turns out to mean software updates only. Ask whether a new page, a new photo or a price change is included.
What happens to the price after year one? Introductory rates that double are a known pattern.
Who answers the phone? A plan is only as good as the person on the other end when the site is down.

Our answers: you own the domain and the site, there is no minimum term, content and page changes are included, the price is the price, and you reach Jason directly. If you are comparing us with another provider and their answers are as clear, you are choosing between two good options.

The third option: nothing up front

There is one more way to pay that does not fit either column. Grow Together asks for nothing up front. We build the site and run the marketing, SEO included, and we are paid 10% of the sales the site produces. It is designed for new businesses with a good product and no marketing budget yet, and because we are paid only from results, we are as invested in the site working as you are.

Our recommendation

If you are starting out, or your site needs regular changes, or you would rather not write it yourself, take the monthly plan. If you are established, have the budget, and the site will mostly sit there doing its job, pay for it once. Either way, insist on owning your domain and your site, and get the price in writing before anything is built.

Still not sure which fits? Tell us about your business and we will say plainly which one we would choose in your position. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when they are choosing between the two.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: A website you pay for as a subscription instead of a one time project fee. The monthly price covers the build and, usually, hosting and upkeep. Ours is $200 a month and includes branding, copywriting, design, development, hosting, daily backups, security and content changes made in under 48 hours.

: No. There are no hidden fees and you can cancel anytime. The accounts for your domain, hosting and site admin stay in your name, so you are never locked in.

: That depends on the provider, which is why it is the first question to ask. With Lackey Designs the business owns its domain, hosting account and site. Some subscription builders keep the design or the domain, and the site cannot leave with you.

: Over many years, usually yes, because hosting alone costs less than a full plan. Over the first three years the two are close once you add copywriting and support to the upfront build. The right answer depends on your cash, your time and how much changes on the site.

: Yes. Tell us when the time is right and we will quote the move in writing. The site, the content and the accounts are already yours, so nothing has to be rebuilt.

: The Small Business plan can start with a redesign of your current site, or we can take over the site as it is and maintain it. Every old page gets a permanent redirect on a redesign so the rankings you have carry over.

What Does Website Maintenance Include? (And What It Costs)

2026-07-16T18:23:29Z

A website is the only piece of equipment most businesses own that they expect to run forever without service. The truck gets an oil change. The furnace gets a filter. The website gets launched, admired for a week and then left alone until something breaks, usually at the worst possible moment.

Website maintenance is the oil change. This article explains what a real maintenance plan includes, what each part is for, what it should cost and how to tell a genuine plan from hosting with a new name. We host and maintain both WordPress sites and static sites for our clients, so the list below is what we actually do each month.

The eight things a maintenance plan should cover

1. Hosting that is someone's job

Maintenance starts with knowing where the site lives and who is responsible for it. That sounds obvious, but a surprising number of owners cannot say where their site is hosted or who pays for it. A plan should include hosting, or state plainly that it does not, and the person maintaining the site should have full access to the hosting account. Ours includes hosting, domain setup and company email.

2. Daily backups you can restore from

Backups are the difference between a bad morning and a lost business. A proper backup runs automatically every day, is stored somewhere other than the server the site runs on, keeps several versions so you can go back to a specific date, and is restored from often enough that everyone knows it works. Ask any provider two questions: how often, and when did you last restore one.

3. Software updates, applied carefully

If the site runs on WordPress, the core software, the theme and every plugin release updates constantly, and most security problems on WordPress sites trace back to an update that was never applied. The catch is that updates also break things. A maintenance plan applies them promptly, checks the site afterward and rolls back when one goes wrong. On a static site there is far less to update, which is one reason we build many sites that way now.

4. Security scanning and an SSL certificate

Antivirus and malware scans catch the infections that get through, and an SSL certificate keeps the padlock in the browser bar and the site on https. When the certificate lapses, visitors see a warning instead of your homepage, and the fix is trivial if someone is watching and expensive in lost customers if nobody is. We covered why the padlock matters in HTTP vs. HTTPS.

5. Uptime and performance monitoring

Someone should know the site is down before a customer tells you. Monitoring checks the site around the clock and raises an alert when it stops responding or slows down. The same checks notice when a form stops delivering or a page starts returning errors, which are the quiet failures that cost leads for months without anyone noticing.

6. Content and page changes

This is the part most owners actually need and the part most "maintenance" plans leave out. New hours, a price change, a staff photo, a new service page, a seasonal banner. On our plan these are made in under 48 hours and there is no per change fee. If a plan you are considering covers updates and backups but charges for every change, you have hosting with a different name.

7. Analytics and Search Console, owned by you

Google Analytics and Google Search Console tell you who is visiting, what they searched for and whether Google has found a problem with the site. A maintenance plan should set both up in an account the business owns and keep an eye on the Search Console messages, which is where Google reports broken pages, security issues and mobile problems before they show up in rankings.

8. A person who answers

Every item above is a process. The thing that makes a plan work is a person who picks up when the site is down on a Saturday, who you can text a photo to, and who knows your site because they built it or took it over. Our plan includes 24/7 support response, and the person responding is the one who maintains the site, not a ticket queue.

What website maintenance costs

Prices for small business sites fall into three bands.

Hosting only, $5 to $50 a month. A server and nothing else. Backups and updates are your job.
Updates and backups, $50 to $150 a month. Software kept current, backups taken, security scanned. Changes to the content cost extra, usually billed by the hour.
Full care with changes, $150 to $400 a month. Everything above plus your content and page changes, monitoring and support.

Our hosting and maintenance plan is $200 a month and sits in the third band: hosting, daily backups, security updates, SSL, analytics setup, 24/7 support response and content changes made in under 48 hours, with no contract and no hidden fees. The same care is included in the Small Business plan and in Grow Together, and you can compare all three on the pricing page.

Signs your site is not being maintained

If any of these are true, the site is on its own:

The browser shows "Not secure" or a certificate warning on your own site.
The footer still says a year that is not this one.
A contact form submission you sent as a test never arrived.
The site shows a WordPress or plugin update notice that has been there for months.
You cannot name where the site is hosted, or the last time it was backed up.
The person who built it has not replied to an email in weeks.

The last one has its own page, because it is so common. If you have lost touch with the person who built your site, read how to switch web designers without losing your site or go straight to our website takeover service. We take over abandoned sites for businesses anywhere in the US, secure the accounts and look after them from then on.

Maintenance versus a redesign

Maintenance keeps a good site good. It does not make a dated site modern. If the site is slow on a phone, hard to update, invisible in search or embarrassing to send people to, upkeep will not fix that and a redesign will. The quickest way to tell which you need is our free website grader, which scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, SEO, accessibility and security, with no email required. A high score with a stale footer needs maintenance. A low score needs more.

What to ask before you sign a maintenance plan

Is hosting included, and do I have access to the account?
How often are backups taken, where are they stored, and when did you last restore one?
Are software updates applied, and what happens when one breaks the site?
Is the SSL certificate renewed automatically?
Are content and page changes included, and how fast are they made?
Who do I call when the site is down, and when?
Is there a contract?

Our answers are on the hosting and maintenance page. If you would rather just hand the site over and know it is being looked after, tell us about it. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask about looking after a site once it is live.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: For a small business site, expect $50 to $150 a month for a plan that only covers updates and backups, and $150 to $400 a month for one that also makes your content changes. Ours is $200 a month and includes hosting, daily backups, security updates, SSL, 24/7 support response and content and page changes made in under 48 hours.

: Less than a WordPress site, but not none. A static site has no plugins to update, which removes the most common cause of hacks and breakage. It still needs hosting, an SSL certificate, backups, a working form and someone to change the content. We host and maintain both kinds, including this site, which is static.

: Hosting is the server the site lives on. Maintenance is everything done to keep the site working on that server: updates, backups, security, monitoring and changes. Many hosting plans include none of the second list, and the invoice does not make that obvious.

: You can, if you have the time and the site is simple. The jobs are not hard, but they are relentless: updates arrive weekly, backups must be checked, and a broken update at 9pm on a Friday is yours to fix. Most owners find that their hourly value makes a plan cheaper than doing it themselves.

: Daily, kept for at least two weeks, stored somewhere other than the server the site runs on, and tested by actually restoring one now and then. A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a backup.

: At first, nothing visible. Then an SSL certificate lapses and browsers warn visitors away, a form stops delivering, an outdated plugin gets exploited, or the host suspends the site for a missed renewal. The repairs cost more than the maintenance would have, and the site sends customers elsewhere in the meantime.

How to Write a Service Page That Ranks and Converts

2026-06-25T17:01:54Z

The service page is the page that does the work. The homepage introduces the business; the service page is where someone who needs a fence, a will or a website decides whether to call you. It is also the page Google ranks for the searches that pay: "fence installation Noblesville," "estate planning attorney Carmel," "web design Fishers." And it is the page most small business sites get wrong, with three sentences, a stock photo and a button.

Here is how to write one that ranks and converts, with a template at the end. We write service pages for clients at $200 a page and the copywriting page has the details. This is the method.

Start with the phone call

Before writing anything, write down the questions customers ask when they call about this service. What does it cost. How long does it take. Do you come to my town. Are you licensed. What is included. What happens first. Those questions, answered plainly, are the page. Everything else is decoration. If you answer them well, the page ranks because it matches what people search, and it converts because it removes the reasons people hesitate.

The words to use

Use the customer's words, not the industry's. People search for "fence company" and "fence installation," not "perimeter solutions." They search for "website design" more than "digital presence." Add the town, because local searches include it and because a page that says where you work is a page Google can match to a place. The main phrase goes in the page title, the headline and the first paragraph, and then you write like a person and stop counting.

The structure

This order works for a trade, a firm, a practice or a studio, because it follows how a visitor reads.

1. The headline: what and where

"Fence Installation in Noblesville and Hamilton County." "Estate Planning for Carmel Families." "Web Design for Fishers Small Businesses." The service, the place, and nothing clever. The visitor and Google both know what the page is about in one line.

2. The first paragraph: who it is for and what they get

Two or three sentences. Who you do this for, what the result is, and the one thing that sets you apart (speed, a warranty, a price, that the owner does the work). This paragraph is often what Google shows in the search result, so write it to be read on its own.

3. The action, above the fold

A phone number that dials and a short form, before the visitor scrolls. Everything below is for people who want more convincing. Many do not.

4. What is included

A plain list of what the service covers and what it does not. Customers are reassured by specifics and suspicious of adjectives. "Daily backups, security updates, SSL and content changes in under 48 hours" is worth more than "comprehensive, world class support."

5. How it works

Three to five steps from first contact to finished job. People hesitate when they do not know what calling will set in motion. "Tell us about the job. A written quote within two days. We schedule, we do the work, we clean up." That is it.

6. What it costs

A starting price if you can give one, a range if you cannot, and what moves it. "From $5,000; the number of pages and who writes the content are the biggest factors." A page with a price filters out people who were never going to hire you and reassures the ones who were. Our prices are on every service page and on the pricing page.

7. Proof

A photo of real work, a review with a name and a town, a result with a number if you have one. BMZ Law told us their site brought 40% more inquiries, and that line does more on a page than any paragraph we could write about ourselves.

8. Questions people ask

The phone call questions from the start, as a short FAQ. These are the exact phrases people type into Google, and a page that answers them can appear for each one.

9. The action again

For the people who read all of it. A sentence about what happens next and the form.

What to leave out

History of the company (that is the about page). Mission statements. Stock photos. Jargon. Three paragraphs about how important the service is before saying what you do. Anything you would not say to a customer on the phone.

Service page or landing page?

A service page is for traffic that finds you through search: deep, linked from the menu, part of the site. A landing page is for traffic you send from an ad or an email: one offer, one action, no menu. They often share an offer and a form, and a business running ads usually needs both. We explain the difference in what is a landing page.

The template

Copy this, fill in the brackets, and you have a first draft.

Title: [Service] in [Town] | [Business name]
Headline: [Service] for [who] in [Town] and [area]
Opening: We [do the service] for [who] in [area]. [What they get, in one sentence.] [What sets you apart.]
Action: Call [number] or request a quote below. [What happens next.]
What is included: [five to eight plain items]
How it works: [three to five steps]
What it costs: From [$X]. [The two things that move the price.]
Proof: [one photo, one review with name and town, one number if you have it]
Questions: [five questions customers actually ask, answered in two or three sentences each]
Closing: [One sentence.] Call [number] or send the form.

If you would rather not write it

Most owners get halfway through the template and stall, because writing about your own business is harder than running it. That is normal. Copywriting is $200 a page with us, or included in the $200 a month Small Business plan: we interview you, draft the page in your voice, and you correct what is not how you would say it. If you want to go further and have the pages rank, that is the content part of any SEO plan, from $600 a month. For blog posts rather than service pages, our guide to writing an effective blog covers the differences.

Run your site through the free website grader to see how the current pages score, then tell us which services you want more of. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when they sit down to write the pages.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Long enough to answer every question a customer would ask on the phone, which usually lands between 600 and 1,200 words. Pages with real substance tend to rank better than thin ones, but padding does not count. Every paragraph has to earn its place.

: Every service you want more of, yes. One page per service lets each rank for its own searches and speak to its own customer. A single services page with a list ranks for nothing in particular.

: The words your customers say on the phone, plus the town. 'Fence installation Carmel,' not 'premium perimeter solutions.' Use the main phrase in the title, the headline and the first paragraph, and then write naturally.

: Yes, and this template is built for that. If you would rather not, copywriting is $200 a page with us, or included in the Small Business plan. Most owners find that a draft from us with their corrections is faster than starting from a blank page.

: If you can give a starting price, yes. 'From $X' answers the question every visitor has, filters out the people who were never going to hire you, and is the single most searched phrase in most trades. Our prices are on every service page and on the pricing page.

: Google Search Console shows which searches the page appears for and how often it is clicked. Your phone and your form tell you the rest. If the page gets visits and no calls, the problem is the page. If it gets neither, the problem is the search.

How to Get More Google Reviews: A Script That Works

2026-06-02T15:56:41Z

Google reviews are the cheapest marketing a local business will ever do and the most neglected. They decide whether your business appears on the map for "near me" searches, they are the first thing a customer reads before calling, and they are free. Almost every owner we talk to has more happy customers than reviews, and the gap is never because customers refused. It is because nobody asked, or asked badly.

Here is the whole method: when to ask, how to ask, the exact words, where the link is, and what to do with the reviews once they arrive. We set up and tune Google Business Profiles as part of every site we build, and this is what we tell every client.

Why reviews matter more than you think

Three reasons, in order of how much money they are worth.

The map. When someone searches for a plumber, a lawyer or a web designer near them, Google shows three businesses on a map before anything else. Which three is decided largely by reviews: how many, how recent, how good, and what they say.
The call. A customer comparing two listings calls the one with 40 reviews at 4.8 over the one with 6 reviews at 5.0. Recency matters too. A listing whose last review is from 2023 reads as a business that may have closed.
The words. Reviews that mention the service and the town ("replaced our fence in Carmel, done in a day") tell Google what you do and where, in the customer's own language, which is the language other customers search in.

The numbers behind all three, from how many people read reviews to what a star rating is worth, are on our small business website statistics page, each linked to its source.

When to ask

Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is almost always right after the job is done and before the invoice. The contractor whose crew just finished, the firm that just closed the matter, the designer whose site just launched. Not a week later, not at year end. The same day, while the relief is fresh. The second best moment is when a customer says something nice unprompted. "Thank you, would you mind putting that in a Google review? I will text you the link."

How to ask

By text, with the direct link, from a person. A text gets read within minutes and the link opens the review box in one tap. An email works for office based businesses. A card with a QR code works at a counter. What does not work is "leave us a review on Google" with no link, because the customer then has to find your listing, find the button and remember why they bothered.

Where the link is

Open your Google Business Profile (search your business name while signed into the Google account that manages it), and look for "Ask for reviews." It gives you a short link that opens the review box directly. Ours is the g.page/r/ link on our testimonials page. Save it in your phone, your email signature and your invoice template.

The script

Text message, sent the day the job is done:

Hi [first name], thanks again for having us out today. If you have two minutes, a Google review would mean a lot to a small business like ours, and it helps the next homeowner decide who to call. Here is the direct link: [link]. Thank you! [your first name]

Email version, for office based businesses:

Subject: One small favor
Hi [first name],
It was a pleasure working with you on [the job]. If you have two minutes, would you leave us a Google review? It is the single thing that helps a small business like ours most, and it helps the next person decide whether to call us.
Here is the direct link: [link]
If it is easier, reply with a sentence or two and I will tell you where to paste it. Thank you.
[your name]

Keep it short, keep it personal, send it from a person and never from "the team." If there is no reply in a week, one gentle follow up is fine. More than that is not.

What to ask them to mention

You cannot write the review, but you can make it easy. "If you can mention what we did and where, that helps people find us" is enough. A review that says "great job" helps a little. A review that says "LCM Industries had Lackey Designs do our logo and website and the site explains what we do better than we could" helps a lot, because it names the service in the words a customer would search.

The rules

Google allows asking. It does not allow paying or giving anything for a review, including discounts and entries in a drawing. It does not allow review gating, which means asking only customers you know are happy and steering the rest to a private form. It does not allow reviews from your employees, your family or yourself, and it removes reviews it detects as bought. Ask everyone, offer nothing, and let the reviews be what they are. An honest 4.7 outperforms a suspicious 5.0.

Reply to every review

Within a day, by name, mentioning the job: "Thanks, Mike. The cedar privacy fence on the back line turned out great, and we appreciate you having us in Noblesville." Replies show the next customer that someone is paying attention, and they add words about what you do and where to your listing. Reply to bad reviews too, briefly and calmly: acknowledge, say what you did, take it offline. Future customers judge you by the reply more than by the complaint.

Put them on the website

Reviews on Google help the map. Reviews on your site help the visitor who is already there decide. Quote the best ones with the customer's first name and town, link to the full listing, and keep the section current. Every site we build has one, and our SEO work includes a review widget that pulls in the latest reviews automatically so the section never goes stale.

Make it a habit

The businesses with hundreds of reviews did not run a campaign. They ask after every job, every time, with the link, and they have for years. Put the text in your phone's templates. Put the ask in the closing checklist for every job. Two reviews a month is enough, and in a year you have a listing that wins the map and a page of proof in your customers' own words.

If the listing itself needs work before the reviews can help it, the profile, the categories, the service area and a site that matches, that is the first month of any SEO plan we run, from $600 a month. Tell us about your business and Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask about reviews once they start asking for them.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Yes. Google's rules allow asking. What they prohibit is paying or offering anything for a review, asking only happy customers while steering unhappy ones elsewhere, and reviews from employees or from the business itself.

: In your Google Business Profile, under Ask for reviews, there is a short link that opens the review box directly. Ours looks like g.page/r/ followed by a code. Put it in your text template, your email signature and your invoices.

: Enough to be recent and credible: a steady couple a month matters more than a burst of fifty. Google weighs recency, and customers reading a listing notice when the last review was two years ago.

: Every one, within a day, by name, mentioning the job. Replies show future customers that someone is listening, and they give Google more text about what you do and where.

: Reply calmly and briefly, acknowledge the problem, say what you did or offered, and take the conversation offline. Future customers judge you by the reply more than the review. If a review breaks Google's rules, you can flag it, but most are left up.

: Yes, and you should. Quote them with the customer's first name and town, link to the full listing, and keep them current. We build a reviews section into every site, and a review widget that pulls the latest ones is part of our SEO work.

Why Is My Website Slow? The Five Fixes That Matter

2026-05-14T17:18:29Z

You know the site is slow because you have watched customers wait for it, and because you have waited for it yourself in a parking lot on your phone. What you do not know is why, because the designer says it is fine on their computer and the hosting company says the server is fine. Both are probably telling the truth, and the site is still slow.

Here are the five things that make small business websites slow, in the order we find them when we audit a site, how to check each one yourself, and which fixes are worth the money. If you want the short version first, our free website grader gives a 0 to 100 speed score with the main problems listed, in about a minute.

Why it matters

Two reasons. Visitors on a phone leave slow pages, and most of your visitors are on a phone. And Google measures page speed for real visitors and uses it as a ranking signal, so a slow site ranks below a fast one with the same content. A site that takes six seconds to show anything is losing customers twice. The figures on speed, mobile use and lost visitors are on our small business website statistics page.

1 Images that are far too big

This is the cause on most slow sites, and it is the cheapest to fix. A photo straight from a phone is 3 to 5 megabytes and 4,000 pixels wide. The space it fills on the page is 800 pixels wide and should weigh 80 kilobytes. Upload ten of those photos to a homepage and the page is 40 megabytes, which on a cell connection is a long wait for a hero image.

Check: right click a photo on your homepage and open it in a new tab. If the image is bigger than your screen, it is too big.

Fix: resize every image to the size it is displayed at, save it in a modern format such as WebP, and load the ones below the fold only when the visitor scrolls to them. On the sites we build this is automatic: every image is served at several sizes and the browser picks the smallest one that fits.

2 Too many plugins and scripts

Each plugin on a WordPress site, and each third party script anywhere, adds code the visitor's phone has to download and run: a slider, a form builder, a chat widget, a social feed, three analytics tags, a fonts service, an accessibility overlay, a popup tool. Individually small, together they are often the biggest thing on the page, and several load before anything is visible.

Check: count the plugins on the site. Over fifteen is a warning. Then open the page and count the spinning, sliding and popping things.

Fix: remove what is not earning its place. Most sites can lose a third of their plugins with no visible change. Load the rest after the page is visible, not before. Be especially suspicious of anything that promises to make the site faster, which usually adds another script.

3 A heavy theme or page builder

Many WordPress sites are built on a theme designed to do everything, with a drag and drop builder on top. The result is a page that carries the code for hundreds of features it does not use, and a layout wrapped in a dozen layers of containers. The site looks fine and loads like a truck.

Check: if the site was built with a page builder, this is probably part of the problem. If the page still feels slow after images and plugins are fixed, this is the rest.

Fix: this one often cannot be patched. A theme that is slow by design stays slow. The honest fix is a rebuild on a lighter foundation, which is why speed is usually the best argument for a redesign, and why we build many sites static now. The comparison is in WordPress vs. a static website.

4 Slow hosting

Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server. At busy times, yours waits. Even when it does not, the server can take a second or more to begin responding, before a single byte of your page is sent.

Check: look for "time to first byte" in a speed test. Over about 600 milliseconds, and especially over a second, is the host.

Fix: better hosting, or a content delivery network that serves your pages from a server near the visitor. The sites we host are served this way. Our hosting and maintenance plan is $200 a month and keeping the site fast is part of it.

5 No caching and no compression

Without caching, a WordPress site rebuilds every page from the database for every visitor. Without compression, it sends text files at several times the size they need to be. Both are settings, not rebuilds.

Check: if the site is on WordPress and nobody has set up caching, it is not set up.

Fix: a caching layer, text compression and long cache lifetimes for images and scripts. On a static site this is largely built in, because there is nothing to rebuild: the pages are already files.

The things that do not help much

A faster computer in your office. Another plugin that promises speed. Upgrading the hosting while leaving 40 megabytes of images on the homepage. Turning off the one slider while leaving the page builder. Speed comes from having less to load. Everything else is rearranging the wait.

How to test properly

Test on a phone, over a cell connection, not on the office Wi-Fi. That is your customer's experience.
Use the free website grader for the plain score and the main problems, and Google's PageSpeed Insights for the full technical list. Pay attention to the mobile result, not the desktop one.
Note the number, make one change, test again. Start with images, because it is the cheapest fix with the biggest gain.
If the site is still slow after images, plugins and caching, the theme or the host is the rest, and those are the two that usually mean a rebuild or a move.

If you would rather have someone else find out, send us the site's address. We will tell you what is slowing it, what is fixable in place and what is not, in writing, and Jason replies in under 24 hours. Keeping a site fast after that is part of what maintenance should include.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when the site feels slow and nobody can say why.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Under about two and a half seconds to show its main content on a phone over a cell connection is the bar Google uses, and faster is better. Most small business sites we test take four to eight seconds, usually because of images and plugins.

: Yes. Google measures how fast pages load and respond for real visitors and uses it as a ranking signal, and more importantly, slow pages lose visitors before they read anything. Speed is one of the scores on our free website grader.

: It helps, and it is usually the first thing to try. It does not fix oversized images, a heavy theme or a slow host, so it is a patch rather than a cure. Speed comes from having less to load, not from loading the same amount faster.

: Sometimes. Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server and gets slow at busy times. Test the time to first byte with a free tool: if the server takes over a second to start responding, hosting is part of the problem.

: Image fixes and a caching setup are a few hours of work. A heavy theme or page builder often cannot be fixed without a rebuild, which is where a redesign comes in. Our hosting and maintenance plan includes keeping the site fast, at $200 a month.

: Our free website grader gives a 0 to 100 speed score with the main problems listed, with no email required. Google's PageSpeed Insights gives the detailed technical report. Test the site on a phone, not a desktop, because that is where most visitors are.

How to Switch Web Designers Without Losing Your Website

2026-04-30T14:35:34Z

Most owners do not decide to switch web designers. The decision gets made for them, when an email about a small change goes unanswered for three weeks, or a renewal notice arrives from a company they have never heard of, or the site goes dark for a day and comes back with no explanation. By the time they search for how to switch, they are not shopping. They are worried.

The good news is that switching is routine when it is done in the right order, and a site built by someone you can no longer reach does not have to go with them. We take over sites in this situation for businesses anywhere in the US, so here is the order that works, including what to do if you have no passwords at all.

Step 1: Find out what you own

A website is really four or five accounts, and the first job is finding out which of them are in your name. Gather what you can. Nothing has to be complete yet.

The domain registrar. The company your domain name is registered with. This is the one account you cannot afford to lose, because everything else hangs from it. Search your email for "domain", "renewal" and the name of your site.
Hosting. Where the site's files live. Look for an old invoice, a welcome email or a recurring card charge from a hosting company.
DNS. The settings that point your domain at the hosting and your email. Usually managed at the registrar, sometimes at the host.
The website admin login. For a WordPress site, the address ending in /wp-admin/ and a username and password. For a builder, the account the site was made in.
Google Analytics, Search Console and your Google Business Profile. These should belong to a Google account the business controls, with the designer added as a user, not the other way around.

Write down what you have and what you do not. If the answer to most of these is "I don't know", you are in the majority, and it is still fixable.

Step 2: Secure the domain before anything else

If the domain is registered in your business's name, log in, confirm the email address on the account is one you control, turn on two factor authentication and check the renewal date. Done.

If the domain is registered in the designer's name, which is common, ask them in writing to transfer it to an account you create. Most will, even designers who have gone quiet, because a transfer costs them nothing. If they do not respond, registrars have account recovery and dispute processes for a business that can show it owns the name through invoices, trademarks or years of use. Start that process now rather than after the switch, because a domain that expires in a designer's abandoned account can be bought by anyone.

Step 3: Get a copy of the site

Before you change anything, make sure a complete copy of the site exists somewhere you control. If you have hosting access, your new designer can take a full backup of the files and database. If you do not, the new designer can usually copy the public pages, and the host can often release a backup to the business that pays the bill. Even a partial copy means the switch cannot leave you with nothing.

Step 4: Choose where the site goes next

Now you are ready to pick the new designer, and this is the time to ask the questions that would have prevented the current situation:

Will the domain, hosting and admin accounts be in my name?
Is there a contract, and what happens if I leave?
Who do I call when the site is down, and how quickly do changes get made?
Can you take the site as it is, or does it need to be rebuilt?

Our answers: everything is in your name, there is no contract, you reach Jason directly, changes are made in under 48 hours, and we host and maintain WordPress sites and static sites as they are. If a site was built on something else, we say plainly whether we can take it on or whether it is better rebuilt.

Step 5: Move the site without downtime

The move itself is the part owners fear most and the part that is most routine. The order matters:

The site is copied to the new hosting and tested there, at a temporary address, while the old copy keeps serving visitors.
Email is checked. Many business email accounts route through the same DNS as the website, and a careless switch takes email down with it. The new designer confirms your mail records before touching anything.
The domain is pointed at the new copy. Visitors start reaching the new hosting within minutes to a few hours, and the old copy stays up as a safety net until the switch is confirmed.
Backups, SSL, security scans and software updates start on the new hosting from the first day.
Analytics and Search Console are set up in an account you own, so you can see traffic and Google's messages yourself.

Done this way, no visitor sees an error and no customer notices anything changed except that the hours are finally correct.

Step 6: Protect your rankings

Moving a site to new hosting with the same pages at the same addresses does not change your Google rankings. Google sees the same site at the same place. What does change rankings is a redesign that launches with new page addresses and no redirects, which is the most common way a business loses the search traffic it spent years earning.

So if you are switching designers and redesigning at the same time, insist on this: every old page address gets a permanent redirect to its replacement, and the titles and content that already rank are kept. We do this on every redesign and the full process is in our redesign SEO checklist.

Step 7: Close the old accounts, on your terms

Once the site is live on the new hosting and has been for a couple of weeks, cancel the old hosting, remove the old designer's access from any account they are still on, and change any shared passwords. Keep the old backup. Then send the old designer a polite note that the site has moved. Most relationships end quietly, and a clean handoff protects you if a question comes up later.

After the switch: three ways to go

Switching designers and redesigning the site are two decisions, not one. Once the site is safe, you can:

Keep it as it is. If the site does its job, it gets hosted, backed up, updated and changed when you ask. Nothing else has to happen.
Fix what is broken. Expired certificates, broken forms, missing pages and stale content get fixed on the maintenance plan, and larger repairs are quoted in writing.
Redesign it. If the site is holding the business back, it gets redesigned without losing the rankings it has.

If you are not sure which, run the site through our free website grader. It scores speed, security, SEO and accessibility from 0 to 100 and tells you what is wrong, with no email required.

If the designer has disappeared entirely

Everything above assumes you can at least send an email. If the freelancer has stopped replying, the agency has closed or been sold, or the person who built the site simply moved on, the process is the same but starts with less. Our website takeover service exists for exactly this: we secure what you own, recover what we can, move the site to our hosting and look after it from then on, for $200 a month with no contract. Tell us what you know about the site, even if that is only its address. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when they are ready to move on.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Yes, but the domain comes first. Ask the designer in writing to transfer it to an account in your business's name. If they will not respond, registrars have recovery and dispute processes for the business that can prove it owns the name. We help with this as part of every takeover.

: Not if it is done in the right order. The site is copied to the new hosting and tested there first, and the domain is pointed at the new copy only when it is ready, so the old copy keeps serving visitors until then.

: Moving a site to new hosting with the same pages and addresses does not change rankings. Redesigning it at the same time can, unless every old address is redirected to its replacement. We do that on every redesign, and the full list is in our redesign SEO checklist.

: Start anyway. Most takeovers begin with partial access. Hosts and registrars can recover accounts for the business that owns them, and the site files can usually be copied once hosting access is restored. Tell us what you know and we will say what we can recover and what needs your signature.

: Once the site is on our hosting, hosting and maintenance is $200 a month with no contract. The written quote before any work starts says whether the move itself costs anything on top of that. Often it does not.

: No. If the site does its job, we host it, back it up, keep it updated and make your changes. A redesign is a separate decision you can make later, and our free website grader will tell you whether the site needs one.

Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Keep Your Rankings

2026-04-09T14:46:21Z

The biggest risk in a website redesign is not the design. It is launching a beautiful new site and watching the search traffic the old one spent years earning disappear in a week, because the pages moved and nobody told Google where they went.

It happens constantly, and it is entirely preventable. This checklist is the process we follow on every redesign, written for the business owner so you can hold any designer to it, including us.

Before the redesign starts

1. Make a complete list of every page on the current site

Not the pages in the menu. Every page: old blog posts, landing pages from a campaign three years ago, the staff page you forgot existed, PDF downloads, image galleries. Pull the list from the current sitemap, from Google Search Console's pages report and from a crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog. Then compare the three, because each will have pages the others missed. This list is the foundation for everything that follows.

2. Find out which pages actually bring in visitors

Open Google Search Console and Google Analytics and sort the pages by clicks over the last twelve months. Most sites discover that a handful of pages bring in most of the search traffic, and sometimes they are not the pages anyone expected. A single old blog post may be worth more than the homepage. These pages get protected: their addresses, their titles and the content that earned the ranking stay.

3. Note which pages have links pointing to them

Links from other websites, directories, your Google Business Profile and social profiles are part of why your pages rank. Search Console's links report shows which of your pages other sites link to. Those pages must either keep their addresses or redirect, so that every link still lands somewhere live after launch.

4. Record the current titles and descriptions

Export the page titles and meta descriptions of the current site. The ones on pages that rank are assets, not drafts. You will improve the ones that are not working and keep the ones that are, and you need the originals to compare against after launch.

5. Take a baseline

Write down the numbers you will judge the redesign by: organic visitors a month, the rankings for your ten most important searches, calls and form fills from the site. Without a baseline, every disagreement after launch is a guess. Our free website grader gives you a 0 to 100 score for speed, SEO, accessibility and security that is easy to compare before and after.

During the build

6. Keep page addresses where you can

The safest redirect is the one you do not need. If the new site keeps the same address for a page, nothing has to be done for it. Change addresses only when there is a reason: a structure that no longer makes sense, or an address that was never good. Then plan the new structure on paper before anything is built.

7. Map every old address to a new one

Take the complete list from step one and write the new destination next to every address that is changing. Each old page goes to its direct replacement, not to the homepage. A page about fence installation redirects to the new fence installation page. If a page has no replacement because the service is gone, send it to the closest related page. Redirecting everything to the homepage tells Google the old pages are gone and throws away what they earned.

8. Keep the content that ranks

Pages that bring in visitors keep the words that earned those visits. Improve the design around them, tighten the writing, add photos, but do not rewrite from scratch a page that is already working. Pages that have never worked are the ones to rewrite, and if you want new copy throughout, copywriting is available per page or as part of the Small Business plan.

9. Carry over the titles that rank, and fix the rest

Using the export from step four, put the titles and descriptions that rank onto their new pages unchanged. Then improve the ones that were not working. Write every title for the person searching, with the service and the place in it, and keep it under about 60 characters so Google shows the whole thing.

10. Build it fast and mobile first

A redesign is the one chance to fix speed and mobile problems at the root instead of patching them. Design for the phone first, since that is where most visitors are. Serve images at the size they are displayed, avoid heavy page builders and plugins, and test on a real phone over a cell connection, not on an office computer. This is where a redesign usually improves rankings rather than just preserving them.

11. Keep the structure Google already understands

Headings in order, one H1 per page, a clear menu, breadcrumbs, a sitemap, descriptive alt text on images and the structured data that tells Google what the business is and where it is. These are the parts of a site a visitor never sees and Google reads first.

12. Keep the new site out of Google until launch

While the new site is being built at a temporary address, it must be blocked from search engines, or Google will find two copies of your content and rank neither well. And the moment it launches, that block must come off, which is the single most common launch day mistake: a new site that quietly tells Google not to index it.

Launch day

13. Put the redirects in place at the moment of launch

The redirect map from step seven goes live at the same time the new site does, not the next week. Every old address should return a permanent (301) redirect to its replacement, in one hop. Chains of redirects, where an old address bounces through two or three others before arriving, should be collapsed into one.

14. Submit the new sitemap and remove the noindex

Confirm the new site is open to search engines, then submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console. This tells Google to recrawl the site now rather than whenever it gets around to it.

15. Check every old address

Crawl the old list of pages and confirm each one redirects where it should. Then crawl the new site and confirm there are no broken links, no pages returning errors and no page still blocked from indexing. Click the links from your Google Business Profile, your directory listings and your social profiles and confirm each one lands on a live page.

After launch

16. Watch Search Console for two weeks

Search Console reports crawl errors, pages that returned a "not found" and indexing problems within days. Fix anything it flags the day it appears. Some movement in rankings during the first couple of weeks is normal as Google recrawls. A sharp drop that lasts means something on this list was missed, and the redirects are the first place to look.

17. Compare against the baseline at 30 and 90 days

Pull the same numbers from step five. Organic visitors, the ten rankings, calls and forms. A redesign done this way usually shows the same or better at 30 days and better at 90, because the new site is faster and better organized than the old one.

18. Keep the old domain and hosting for a while

If the redesign moved to a new domain or a new host, keep the old ones running with the redirects in place for at least a year. Links to the old addresses will keep arriving long after launch, and each one that still redirects is a visitor and a ranking signal kept.

How we do it

Every item on this list is part of our website redesign service: we list every page, redirect every old address, keep the titles and content that rank and check for broken links after launch. It is written into our custom website pricing, and it is the same process we use when we take over a site from another designer. Most redesigns launch within 4 to 8 weeks, and the price and launch date are in writing before anything is built.

Before you start, run your current site through the free website grader so you know what you are starting from. Then send us the address of your site and what you wish it did better. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask before they replace a site that still brings in some work.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: It can, and often does, when pages move to new addresses without redirects, content that ranked is deleted, or titles are rewritten without a reason. It does not have to. A redesign that follows this checklist usually keeps its rankings and improves them, because the new site is faster and better organized.

: A 301 is a permanent redirect: an instruction that an old page address has moved to a new one. It sends visitors and Google to the new page and passes along the ranking the old page had earned. Without it, the old address returns an error and the ranking is lost.

: Only on purpose. A title that already ranks is an asset. Improve the ones that are not working, and leave the ones that are. Check which is which in Google Search Console before the redesign starts.

: Google usually recrawls a site over days to a few weeks. Small movements in that window are normal. A sharp drop that lasts more than a few weeks means something on this checklist was missed, most often redirects.

: Yes, and it is the safest approach. If the new site keeps the same page addresses, nothing needs to redirect. We keep addresses where they make sense and redirect only the ones that must change.

: A custom website starts at $5,000, or the Small Business plan spreads the work over $200 a month. Every old page gets a permanent redirect on our redesigns, and most launch within 4 to 8 weeks.

How Much Does Social Media Management Cost? (2026)

2026-03-24T19:47:32Z

You know you should be posting. The bakery down the street posts every day and seems busy. Your last post was in March. The question is whether to pay someone to do it, what that costs and whether it is worth it for a business your size. Ours is from $200 a month per channel, the details are on the social media management page, and here is the honest picture of what the money buys at each level.

The short answer

Do it yourself, $0 plus your hours. Free, and usually the reason the last post was in March.
Scheduling tools, $15 to $100 a month. Software that posts what you write, when you tell it to. You still have to write it.
A freelancer or small studio, $200 to $800 a month per channel. Someone plans the month, writes and designs the posts, schedules them, replies, and reports. This is where most local businesses belong and where we sit.
An agency, $1,500 to $5,000 and up a month. Strategy, video production, influencer work, campaign reporting. Built for brands with an audience to grow across the country, not for a dentist in Fishers.

What a month looks like at $200 a channel

The calendar on the counter, with the colored dots. That is the product. On one channel, a typical month with us includes:

Account setup, once: the profile, the cover art, the hours, the links and the details customers look for first, tidied or created.
Content creation. Posts written in your voice and designed with your photos when you have them and brand graphics when you do not.
Scheduling. The month's posts planned and scheduled ahead, so the feed stays steady when you are busy.
Community management. Comments, messages and mentions answered by a person who knows your business, not a bot.
Advertising, when you want it: boosted posts and ads aimed at people near you, with the ad spend set by you.
A report on what was posted and how it did, written so you can read it in a few minutes.

The exact rhythm follows your plan and your platforms, and it is set in writing before anything posts. The example we use is a local bakery: a post about the new sign, a boosted post for holiday pies ordered by Friday, a reply to a customer who loves the cinnamon rolls, a market day reminder. Nothing clever. Steady, local and in the owner's voice.

What the price depends on

Channels. Each one is priced separately, because each one is a separate audience with its own format. Most local businesses need Facebook and Instagram and should stop there. Adding a channel you do not need is the most common way to overspend.

Frequency. More posts cost more. More posts are also not better. A feed with three good posts a week beats one with a post a day that nobody wanted.

Who makes the pictures. Your own photos, taken on your phone, make the best posts and cost nothing. If every post needs a designed graphic or a video, the price rises.

Ads. Management covers running them. The spend, paid to the platform, is on top and is yours to set. For a local business, a boosted post aimed at people within five miles can run on a few dollars a day.

When it is worth it

Social media management earns its $200 a month when it replaces hours you were spending (or guiltily not spending), when the business has a steady supply of real things to show (jobs finished, products made, events, people), and when your customers are the kind who check Facebook before they call. Restaurants, shops, event businesses, home services with good before and after photos, and anyone with a loyal local customer base all fit.

It is not worth it when the goal is leads from strangers who have never heard of you. Social keeps you in front of people who already know you. Getting found by people who do not is a job for SEO and Google Ads, both from $600 a month, and we would rather you spend there first. Our comparison of those two is in Google Ads vs. SEO.

When to keep doing it yourself

If you enjoy it, you are good at it and you actually do it, keep going. Nobody can post from a job site the way the person on the job site can. A scheduling tool and a monthly hour to plan ahead will get you most of the way. The time to hand it off is when the gap between posts is measured in months, not days, or when replying to messages has become a chore nobody owns.

What to ask any provider

Which channels, how many posts, and is that in writing before you start?
Who writes the posts, and will they sound like me?
Who replies to comments and messages, and how fast?
Do the accounts stay in my name?
Is ad spend included or separate, and who controls it?
What does the monthly report show, and can I read it in five minutes?

Our answers: your channels at $200 a month each, the rhythm set in writing, posts in your voice from your photos, replies from a person who knows the business, accounts in your name, ad spend separate and yours, and a report you can actually read.

Where the website fits

Every post that works sends someone to the website, and if the site is slow, dated or hard to use on a phone, the post did its job and the site threw it away. Before spending on social, run the site through the free website grader. Then tell us about the business and which channels your customers use. Jason replies in under 24 hours to set up a call, and the plan is in writing before anything posts.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask before they hand over the accounts.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: For a local business, $200 to $800 a month per channel covers planning, writing, scheduling, replies and a monthly report. Ours is from $200 a month per channel. Agencies serving larger brands charge $1,500 to $5,000 and up, which buys video production and campaign strategy most local businesses do not need.

: It is set in writing in your plan before anything posts. A typical month on one channel is several posts, a boosted post or ad aimed at people near you when you want one, and replies to comments and messages. Steady beats frequent.

: No. Be where your customers are and nowhere else. For most local businesses that is Facebook and Instagram, sometimes one more. Each channel is priced separately, so adding one you do not need just costs money.

: When it replaces hours you were spending or not spending, and when the business has photos and news worth sharing, yes. When the goal is leads from strangers, Google Ads or SEO usually does that job better. Social keeps you in front of people who already know you.

: Yes, from your business's own accounts, which stay in your name with you as the owner. We are added as a manager, and if you ever stop, you remove us and keep everything.

: Not directly. Google does not rank your site higher because you post. Indirectly, posts send visitors, reviews and attention your way, and a lively profile reassures the customer who found you on Google and checked Facebook before calling.

What Is a Landing Page, and When Does a Business Need One?

2026-03-05T18:59:22Z

"Landing page" is one of those terms that sounds like it should mean any page someone lands on. It does not. It means something specific, it does a specific job, and most small businesses that run ads or promotions without one are paying for clicks that wander off.

Here is what a landing page is, when you need one, what goes on it and what it costs. Ours start at $500 and the details are on the landing pages service page.

What a landing page is

A landing page is a single page built for visitors who arrive from one specific place, usually an ad, an email or a social post, and designed to get them to do one specific thing: call, request a quote, book, sign up, buy. It has one message, one offer and one action, and it usually has no menu, because every other link is a way to leave.

Compare the homepage. The homepage has to serve a customer, a job applicant, a supplier and someone who just wants your hours. It has a menu with twelve options because it must. That is the right design for a homepage and the wrong design for someone who just clicked an ad for a spring gutter cleaning special and wants to book one.

The paper with one rectangle on it. That is the whole idea.

When a small business needs one

Google Ads. This is the big one. An ad for "fence installation Carmel" should land on a page about fence installation in Carmel with a quote form, not on a homepage that also sells decks, gates and repairs. Two things happen when the page matches the ad: more visitors convert, and Google rates the ad's relevance higher, which lowers what you pay per click. A landing page is the fastest way to make an ad budget go further, which is why it is part of our Google Ads management.

A promotion or a season. The fall special, the holiday booking push, the grand opening. A page that exists for the length of the campaign, with the offer and a deadline, and then comes down.

A new service you are testing. Before you add a section to the site and a page to the menu, a landing page and a small ad budget will tell you in a month whether anyone wants it.

An email or social campaign. The link in the email should go to a page that continues the email, not to a homepage that restarts the conversation.

An event, a webinar, a download. Anything with a sign up.

What you do not need a landing page for: ordinary search traffic. Someone who searches for "septic pumping near me" should find a full service page on your site, with depth, reviews and the rest of the site behind it. Landing pages are for traffic you are sending; service pages are for traffic that finds you. We wrote about those in how to write a service page.

What goes on it

From the top:

A headline that repeats the promise. If the ad said "Fence installed in two weeks, free quote," the headline says that. The visitor should never wonder whether they are in the right place.
One or two sentences on what they get. Plain words. What you do, for whom, and what makes it worth their call.
The action, right there. A short form and a phone number, above the fold. Name, phone, one question. Every field you add costs you responses.
Proof. Two or three reviews, with names and towns. A photo of real work. A license or warranty if it matters in your trade.
What happens next. "Jason replies in under 24 hours" is on every page of our site for a reason. People hesitate when they do not know what filling in a form will set in motion.
The action again at the bottom, for people who read the whole thing.

And nothing else. No menu, no sidebar, no links to the blog, no social icons. One page, one path.

What makes one work

Match. The page says what the ad said, in the same words. This is the most common failure and the easiest fix.

Speed. You are paying for every visitor, so a page that takes five seconds to load on a phone is burning money before anyone reads it. Landing pages should be the lightest pages you own.

A phone first layout. Most ad clicks are on phones. The number dials, the form fills with a thumb, the button is under it.

Tracking. Every call and form from the page is counted and attributed to the campaign, so at the end of the month you know what a lead cost. Without this a landing page is a guess.

Testing. Once it is running, change one thing at a time: the headline, the form length, the photo. A page that converts 4% instead of 2% halves your cost per lead without touching the ad budget.

What it costs

A landing page from us is $500 and up, which covers the design, the writing, the form, the tracking and the connection to your ads or email. The full picture of what drives web prices is in how much a website costs. If you are weighing ads against SEO, start with Google Ads vs. SEO, because the answer decides whether you need a landing page first or a service page first.

Run your site through the free website grader to see whether the page your ads land on today is fast enough to deserve the clicks. Then tell us about the offer and where the traffic is coming from. Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when a landing page comes up.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: A homepage serves everyone who might visit and offers many paths. A landing page serves one audience arriving from one place, an ad or a campaign, and offers one action. Fewer choices, higher conversion.

: Almost always. Sending ad clicks to the homepage makes visitors hunt for what the ad promised, and Google scores the ad lower when the page does not match it, which raises your cost per click. A page built for the ad fixes both.

: From $500 with us, which covers the design, the writing, the form and the tracking. Our full breakdown of what drives website prices is in How Much Does a Website Cost.

: Usually no, or a minimal one. The point of the page is one action, and every link away from it is a leak. Keep the phone number and the form, and drop the rest.

: It can, but that is not its job. A landing page is tuned for paid or campaign traffic. For search, you want a service page on the main site with more depth. Often the two share the same offer and the same form.

: A week or two from the brief to a live page with tracking, faster when the offer and the photos are ready.

How Much Does a Logo Cost? What $750 to $2,000 Buys

2026-02-19T16:25:16Z

A logo is the first thing a business buys and the first place it is tempted to save money. You can get one for $5 from a contest site, $50 from an online generator, $500 from a freelancer or $5,000 from an agency, and from the outside they all look like a logo. The difference shows up a year later, on the side of the truck, the sign, the business card and the website, when the cheap one does not match, does not scale and does not look like anyone meant it.

Here is what a logo costs at each level in 2026, what the money buys, and how to tell whether you need a logo or the whole brand. Our own prices are on the pricing page: custom logo design from $750, and branding and identity from $2,000.

The short answer

Generators and templates, $0 to $100. You pick a symbol and a font. So does everyone else using the tool.
Contest and gig sites, $50 to $500. Many designers submit, you pick one. Fast and cheap, often recycled work, and the files are frequently incomplete.
A freelance designer, $300 to $1,500. One person, a few concepts, a real conversation. Quality varies with the person.
A small studio, $750 to $3,000. Several concepts, refinement, complete files and a designer who will still be there when the website needs to match. This is us.
An agency, $5,000 to $50,000. Research, workshops, a strategy deck and a team. Right for a company with many locations or products, overkill for most small businesses.

What you are paying for

At every price level the deliverable is a picture. What changes is the thinking behind it and what you can do with it afterward.

Concepts, not one guess

A professional logo process starts with a conversation about the business: who the customers are, what the competitors look like, where the logo will live. Then the designer brings several directions, not one, and you choose. Our logo process gives you several concepts to pick from and then refines the one you choose with you, which is the step a generator cannot do and a contest site does badly.

A mark that works everywhere

A logo has to work at the size of a favicon and the size of a truck door, in one color on an invoice and in full color on a sign, on a white background and on a dark one. A designer plans for all of those from the first sketch. A generator gives you one version and lets you find out about the others when the sign company calls.

The files

This is where cheap logos most often fail. You should walk away with vector files (SVG, EPS or PDF) that scale to any size without blurring, plus PNGs with transparent backgrounds for the web, in full color, one color, and a reversed version for dark backgrounds. If all you have is a JPG, you have a picture of a logo, and the first printer you talk to will ask for the real one.

Ownership

Make sure the agreement says you own the logo outright when it is paid for. Some contest and template services license the design rather than sell it, and some fonts and stock symbols inside cheap logos cannot legally be used as a trademark. A studio delivers original work and says so in writing.

Logo or branding: which do you need?

A logo is one mark. Branding is the system around it, and the difference matters more than most owners expect.

If you are a one person business with a van, a card and a simple website, a well made logo at $750 and a note about which two colors and one typeface to use is enough. The site, the card and the van will match because there are only three things.

If you have staff, uniforms, a sign, vehicles, social accounts, print materials and a website, you need rules, because five different people will be making things with your logo and each will guess differently. That is what branding and identity delivers: the logo suite, a color palette, typography, brand voice and a style guide that says how they go together. It starts at $2,000 with us, includes the logo, and is the reason a fence company's truck, website and apparel all look like the same business. Croix Area Fence came to us for their logo, their website and their apparel, and the site is now the part their customers comment on every week.

How the $750 is spent

Owners sometimes ask what takes the time. Roughly:

The brief. A conversation about the business, the customers and where the logo will be used, and a look at what competitors are doing so yours does not look like theirs.
Concepts. Several distinct directions, drawn properly, shown in context on a card, a sign and a phone screen rather than floating on white.
Refinement. You pick a direction and we refine it with you: proportions, color, the type, how it sits in a circle for social media and in a strip for the website header.
Production. Every version and every file format, tested at small and large sizes, named clearly and delivered in a folder you can hand to anyone.

LCM Industries, a hot runner refurbishing shop, got their logo and their website from us in one project, so the mark was designed knowing exactly where it would sit on the site. That is the quiet advantage of getting the logo and the website from the same studio: nothing has to be adapted later.

When the cheap logo is fine

If you are testing a business idea and may rename it in six months, spend $50 and move on. If you sell only online through a marketplace that shows your name in its own typeface, the logo barely matters. And if you already have a logo customers recognize, do not replace it. Refresh it. A refresh that keeps the shape and fixes the reproduction problems costs less than a new mark and keeps the recognition you have paid for over the years.

What to ask any designer before you pay

How many concepts will I see, and how many rounds of changes are included?
Will I receive vector files, and in which formats?
Will I own the logo outright?
Are the fonts and any symbols licensed for commercial use and trademarking?
Can you show me the logo on a sign, a card and a phone before I approve it?
Will you be available when the website, the sign and the uniforms need to match?

Getting a logo with the website

Most of our logo work happens alongside a new website, because a new business needs both and it is cheaper and faster to design them together. The Small Business plan at $200 a month includes branding, copywriting, design and development, so the logo and the site arrive on one bill with nothing large up front. If you only need the logo, it is $750 and the quote is in writing before any drawing starts. Tell us about your business and Jason replies in under 24 hours.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask before they commission a logo.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Between $500 and $2,500 for a logo designed for the business by a professional. Our custom logo design starts at $750 and includes several concepts, refinement with you and final files in every format you will need. Below $300 you are usually buying a template or a contest entry.

: A logo is one mark. Branding is the whole system around it: the logo in its variations, the colors, the typefaces, the voice and a style guide that says how they go together. Logo design is $750 with us; branding and identity starts at $2,000 and includes the logo.

: Vector files (SVG, EPS or PDF) that scale to any size, plus PNG files with transparent backgrounds for the web, in full color, one color and reversed for dark backgrounds. If a designer only gives you a JPG, you do not have a usable logo yet.

: Usually two to four weeks: a conversation about the business, several concepts, a round or two of refinement and then the final files. It can run faster when you respond quickly and slower when the whole family is voting.

: Yes. A refresh keeps what customers recognize and fixes what is dated or does not reproduce well. It usually costs less than a new logo and is quoted in writing after we see the current one.

: Yes. The $200 a month Small Business plan includes branding, copywriting, design and development, so a new business can get its logo and its website on one monthly bill with nothing large up front.

Google Ads vs. SEO for a Local Business: Where to Spend First

2026-02-11T20:43:20Z

You have a marketing budget for the first time, or the first time in a while, and one question: Google Ads or SEO? Everyone you ask has a strong opinion, usually matching what they sell. We sell both, from $600 a month each, so our opinion is at least balanced. Here is how each works for a local business, what it costs, how fast it pays back, and a simple rule for choosing.

How each one works

Google Ads buys a position at the top of the search results. Someone searches for "fence company near me," your ad appears, they click, and you pay Google for the click. The ad can be live tomorrow and the leads start the day it runs. The moment you pause it, the leads stop.

SEO earns a position in the unpaid results below the ads and on the map. It is earned by having a site Google can read, a page for each thing you do, useful content, a complete Google Business Profile and links from other sites. It takes months to build. Once built, it keeps producing without a per click fee, and it keeps producing after the work stops, for a while.

The stopwatch and the sapling. One is instant and runs out. The other is slow and grows.

If you want the numbers behind all of this, our small business website statistics page collects the current figures on local search, ad costs and AI search, each linked to its source.

What each costs

With us, Google Ads management starts at $600 a month. That covers keyword research, ad copy, landing pages, bid management, conversion tracking and monthly reporting. On top of that you pay Google for the clicks, and for a local service business that is commonly $500 to $2,000 a month, set by you and changeable any day. So the real monthly cost of ads is management plus spend, often $1,100 to $2,600.

SEO also starts at $600 a month, and there is no spend on top. The money buys hours of work on the site, the profile, content and links. We broke down exactly what those hours buy in how much SEO costs.

How fast each pays back

Ads pay back immediately or not at all. Within two weeks you know what a lead costs and whether the math works. If it does not, you change the ads or stop.

SEO pays back slowly and then steadily. The first weeks are audit and fixes with little visible change. Local improvements, the map listing especially, often show within a couple of months. Competitive rankings take four to twelve months. Merriment ABA, a therapy practice serving Hamilton County, saw its site climb the rankings within a few months of starting with us, and that is a typical local timeline. The owners who get the most from SEO are the ones who judged it at six months rather than six weeks.

Where each one wins

Ads win when you need the phone to ring now, you are new and have no rankings, you have a seasonal push, you are testing a new service, or your market is so competitive that organic rankings are years away. Ads also give you something SEO cannot: control. You pick the search terms, the towns, the hours and the budget, and you can change them tonight.

SEO wins when you plan to be in business for years, your customers search for what you do, your margins cannot absorb a per click fee on every lead, or you already have some rankings and a profile that just need work. SEO also compounds: every page and every review you add keeps working.

The simple rule

If you are new, or the business needs leads this quarter to be fine, start with ads and add SEO when the ads are paying for themselves. If you are established and the business will be fine for six months without new leads from search, start with SEO, because every month you delay it is a month later it starts paying. If you can afford both, do both, because they share a landing page, a tracking setup and a list of search terms, and each makes the other cheaper.

What they share

Whichever you start with, three things have to exist first, and they are the same three.

A site that converts. Sending paid clicks to a slow site with a buried phone number is the fastest way to waste an ad budget, and sending organic visitors there is only slightly slower. Our free website grader tells you in a minute whether the site is ready.
A page for what you are promoting. An ad for fence installation should land on a fence installation page, not the homepage. That page also happens to be what SEO needs. When a dedicated page is called for, a landing page from $500 does the job.
Tracking. Calls and form fills have to be counted and attributed, or you will never know which channel is working. Google Analytics, Search Console and conversion tracking in the ads account, set up in accounts you own.

What we would do with $1,000 a month

Owners ask this exact question often enough to answer it. For a new local service business: $600 of ads management and the rest in spend, for three months, with the site fixed first. Then, once the cost per lead is known, shift to $600 of SEO plus a smaller ads budget on the two or three search terms that proved they convert. For an established business with a decent site: $600 of SEO from month one, and ads only for a seasonal push. Either way, the first month's money goes to making the site worth sending people to, because nothing else works until that does.

Our lead generation page explains how SEO, ads and social media fit together, and Web Marketing 101 is the gentler introduction. When you are ready to put a number on it, tell us about your business and what you need the phone to ring about. Jason replies in under 24 hours with what we would do first.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when they have a budget and one choice to make.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Neither is better. Ads bring leads this week and stop when you stop paying. SEO takes months to build and keeps producing afterward. A new business that needs calls now usually starts with ads; an established business with some rankings usually gets more from SEO; most end up with both.

: Management starts at $600 a month with us, plus the ad spend you pay Google, which for a local service business is commonly $500 to $2,000 a month. The spend is yours to set and can change any day.

: Local improvements can show within weeks; competitive rankings take months. Merriment ABA saw its site climb the rankings within a few months of starting. Judge an SEO plan at six months, not six weeks.

: You can, and Google will happily help you spend. The difficulty is not setting up ads but avoiding waste: wrong search terms, broad matching, no conversion tracking, a landing page that does not convert. Most owners who try it spend more per lead than a managed account would.

: The leads stop the same day. That is the fundamental difference from SEO, where the work you have paid for keeps ranking after you stop.

: Not directly. Google does not rank organic results better because you advertise. Indirectly, the search term data from an ads account tells you which words actually produce calls, which is useful for deciding what SEO should target.

How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost? (2026 Prices)

2026-01-27T14:28:00Z

Ask three web designers what a website costs and you will get three numbers that are nowhere near each other. One quotes $800. One quotes $8,000. One says it depends. All three are telling the truth, which is exactly why the question is so hard to answer from a search result.

This article gives you the real numbers. Lackey Designs has built websites for small businesses from Fishers, Indiana since 2006, and our prices are published on our pricing page rather than hidden behind a sales call. So the figures below are what we actually charge, with an honest look at what cheaper and more expensive options buy you.

The short answer

For a small business website built and maintained by a professional studio in 2026, expect one of three shapes:

A custom website for a one time fee: from $5,000, and typically $5,000 to $20,000 depending on size and features.
A monthly plan: $200 a month, with design, development, hosting and support rolled into one bill and no large invoice at the start.
A performance plan: nothing up front, and a percentage of the sales the site brings in. Ours is called Grow Together and the share is 10%.

Below that range you will find template builders at $15 to $50 a month where you do all the work yourself, and freelancers at $500 to $2,000 who build once and move on. Above it you will find agencies quoting $25,000 and up for the same number of pages, usually because of the overhead that comes with a large team.

What actually drives the price

Every quote you receive is a sum of the same handful of parts. Once you can see the parts, you can compare quotes that look nothing alike.

1. The number of pages

A five page site (home, about, services, portfolio or gallery, contact) is the most common small business website and the cheapest to build. Every additional service page, location page or product category adds design and writing time. A contractor who wants a page for each of twelve services and each of eight towns is asking for a site four times the size of the five page version, and the price follows.

2. Who writes the words

This is the part most owners underestimate. A website with no writing is a wireframe. Someone has to write the headline, the service descriptions, the about page and the calls to action, and they have to write them for the customers you want, not for you. If you write it yourself, the site is cheaper and usually takes longer to launch, because the words are the step that stalls. Professional copywriting is $200 a page with us, and it is included in the Small Business plan.

3. Design: template or custom

A template is a finished layout you pour your content into. A custom design starts with your business, your customers and your competitors and builds a layout around what the site has to do. Custom costs more and it is worth it when the site has to compete, which for most local businesses it does. We wrote a longer comparison in Template vs. Custom Built Websites.

4. Features beyond pages

Anything the visitor does on the site, beyond reading and clicking to call, is a feature with a cost. Online booking, a quote calculator, a product catalog, a members area, a job application form, integration with your scheduling software. Our Croix Area Fence site has a fence designer that gives the visitor an instant quote, which is a feature that earns its cost many times over for a fence company and would be pointless for a law firm. Be specific about the features you need and skip the rest.

5. Hosting, security and upkeep

A website is never finished. It needs hosting, an SSL certificate, backups, software updates and someone to change the hours when they change. Some quotes include all of that. Some include none of it and the surprise arrives twelve months later as a renewal invoice. Ask. Our one time builds include hosting, security and backups, and full hosting and maintenance with content changes is $200 a month.

6. Branding and photography

If you have a logo you like and photos of your actual work, team and premises, your site will cost less and look better than one that needs both created. If you do not, budget for a logo (from $750 with us) or a full brand identity (from $2,000), and plan a morning with a photographer. Stock photos are the single fastest way to make a professional site look like a template.

Our prices, line by line

These are the a la carte prices on our pricing page as of this writing. They are starting points, and the quote you receive is in writing before any work begins.

Custom website design and development: from $5,000
Website copywriting: from $200 per page
Landing page: from $500
Logo design: from $750
Branding and identity: from $2,000
Hosting, support and maintenance: $200 per month
SEO: from $600 per month
Google Ads management: from $600 per month
Social media management: from $200 per month per channel

Add those up for a typical five page custom site with professional writing, a new logo and ongoing hosting, and the first year lands around $8,000 to $10,000. That is the honest number for a site that is designed for your business, written for your customers and looked after by someone who answers the phone.

Three ways to pay for the same site

The price above assumes you pay for the build once. Most of our clients do not, and the alternatives change the math.

Pay once: the custom website

You own a finished site for a one time fee from $5,000. Hosting, security and backups are included, and support is added separately when you want it. This suits an established business that has the cash and wants the lowest total cost over several years.

Pay monthly: the Small Business plan

$200 a month covers branding, copywriting, design, development, hosting, daily backups, security and your content changes, with no large invoice at the start and no hidden fees. Over three years that is $7,200, in the same range as the one time build plus hosting, but spread out, and with the writing and upkeep included. This is the plan most new and small businesses choose, and we compare the two in detail in Pay Monthly Website vs. Paying Upfront.

Pay from results: Grow Together

Nothing up front. We build the site and run the marketing, SEO included, and we are paid 10% of the sales it brings in. If the site does not produce, we do not get paid, which keeps us honest. It is built for new businesses that have a good product and no budget yet.

What the cheap options really cost

We are not going to tell you a $20 a month builder is a bad product. For a hobby, a one person side business or a site that only exists so the Google Business Profile has somewhere to point, it can be enough. But owners who come to us from a builder usually describe the same three costs that never appeared on the invoice.

Your time. The builder is cheap because you are the designer, the writer and the support desk. Forty hours of an owner's time at any reasonable value is more than the difference in price.

The results. A site that looks like every other site in its template does not win the comparison a customer makes with your competitors in three open tabs. That is the comparison that decides who gets the call.

The lock-in. Many builders will not let you take the site with you when you leave. The pages, the design and sometimes the domain stay with them. When a business outgrows a builder it usually starts over from zero, which is the most expensive website of all.

How to compare quotes

When quotes arrive, put them side by side and ask the same six questions of each:

How many pages, and is the writing included?
Is the design custom or a template?
Which features are included, and which are extra?
Is hosting included, for how long, and what does it cost after that?
Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the design when we are done?
What happens when I need a change in month seven, and what does it cost?

A quote that answers all six in writing is a quote you can trust. One that answers "it depends" to half of them is where the surprises live.

Where to go from here

If you have a site already and are weighing a replacement, run it through our free website grader first. It scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, SEO, accessibility and security, with no email address required, and it will tell you whether the site needs a redesign or just some upkeep.

If you are ready for a number for your own project, tell us about your business. Jason reads every request and replies in under 24 hours with next steps, and the price arrives in writing before anything is built.

Frequently asked questions

The questions owners ask once they have a quote in hand.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: From a studio like ours, a custom five page site starts at $5,000 and includes design, development, hosting, security and backups. On the Small Business plan the same site is $200 a month with no large invoice at the start. Template builders are cheaper, but you do the design, writing and upkeep yourself.

: Because the word website covers everything from a template you fill in yourself to a custom build with original writing, photography and an online store. The biggest price drivers are the number of pages, who writes the content, custom features such as booking or quoting tools, and whether hosting and support are included or billed separately.

: It depends on what is included. Ours covers branding, copywriting, design, development, hosting, daily backups, security and content changes made in under 48 hours, with no contract and no hidden fees. A monthly plan that only covers hosting, or that locks you in for years, is a different product.

: Hosting and maintenance is $200 a month with us, and that covers hosting, backups, security updates, SSL and your content changes. Sites built for a one time fee include hosting, security and backups, with support added separately. Compare every plan on our pricing page.

: With us, yes. The domain, hosting and admin accounts stay in your name, and you can cancel anytime. Ask that question of any monthly provider before you sign, because some keep ownership of the design or the domain.

: Most of our sites launch within 4 to 8 weeks of the first conversation. The timeline depends on how many pages the site has and how quickly content and approvals come back from you.

How to Choose a Web Designer in Fishers, Carmel or Indy

2026-01-08T14:18:52Z

Searching for a web designer in Fishers or Carmel turns up freelancers, studios, agencies, franchises and a handful of national companies with a local phone number. They all have a portfolio and a quote, and from the outside it is very hard to tell which one will still answer the phone in two years.

We are one of the options, so take this with that in mind. Lackey Designs has built websites from Fishers since 2006, and most of our clients came to us after a bad experience with someone else. Here are the questions that would have saved them, and the answers that matter.

1 "Who will own my domain, my hosting and my site?"

This is the question that matters most and gets asked least. The domain should be registered to your business in an account you control. The hosting account should be yours or clearly transferable. The admin login should be yours. Many designers register everything in their own name because it is convenient, and it is the reason that leaving them later becomes a rescue operation instead of a handoff. We wrote a whole guide to that rescue. Avoid needing it: insist on ownership in writing before any work starts.

2 "What exactly is included, and what does it cost?"

A good quote lists the pages, says who writes the content, names the features, states whether hosting and support are included and for how long, gives a launch date, and puts a number on it. A quote that says "website, $3,500" is a quote for an argument later. Our prices are published on the pricing page and the quote arrives in writing before anything is built. Ask for the same from anyone.

3 "Can I see three sites you built that are still live?"

Not screenshots. Live sites, for businesses something like yours, that you can open on your phone right now. Check whether they load fast, whether the phone number dials, whether they look like they were designed for that business or poured into the same template. Then ask what happened after launch: did calls go up, did the owner stay with them, is the designer still maintaining it. BMZ Law told us their new site brought 40% more inquiries, and we can point to Croix Area Fence, Merriment ABA and Epic Guide Service with the client's own words on our testimonials page.

4 "Who does the work, and who will I talk to?"

At an agency, the person who sells you the site is rarely the person who builds it, and the person who builds it is rarely the person who answers the phone a year later. At a studio like ours there is one answer: the person you meet on the first call plans the site, builds it and makes the changes after launch. Ask who will actually do each part, and ask what happens if that person leaves.

5 "What happens after launch?"

A website is never finished. Hosting renews, software updates, certificates expire, hours change. Ask what the designer does after launch and what it costs. Some build and vanish. Some charge by the hour for every change. Some include it: our hosting and maintenance is $200 a month with content changes made in under 48 hours and no contract. Whatever the answer, get it before you sign, because it is the part of the relationship you will live with longest.

6 "How will the site get found?"

A beautiful site nobody finds is a brochure. Ask what the designer does about search: whether the site is built so Google can read it, whether each service gets its own page, whether your Google Business Profile is set up and matched to the site, and what ongoing SEO costs if you want it. A designer who says "SEO is included" without explaining what that means is including the checkbox, not the work.

7 "What will it look like on a phone?"

Most visitors to a local business site arrive on a phone. Ask to see the designer's work on yours. If a site in the portfolio is hard to tap, slow to load or cut off at the edges on your phone, yours will be too.

8 "What do you need from me, and when?"

Most website projects run late because of the client, not the designer: the photos, the text and the approvals arrive slowly. A good designer tells you up front what they need and when, offers to write the content if you would rather not, and gives you a launch date that assumes you hold up your end. Most of our sites launch in 4 to 8 weeks for exactly that reason.

Red flags

A multi year contract. A designer who needs to lock you in for 36 months is telling you something about what happens in month four.
"Free website" with a monthly fee. Usually a template you do not own, on hosting you cannot leave, at a price that rises after the introductory period.
A guarantee of page one on Google. Nobody can promise that, and the ones who do usually mean page one for your own business name.
No prices anywhere. A designer who will not publish a starting price is planning to price by what you look like you can afford.
The portfolio is all screenshots. Sites that are no longer live, or that were never theirs.
They want your passwords before they want to understand your business.

Local or remote?

A local designer in Fishers, Carmel, Noblesville or Indianapolis can meet you, knows the competitors you are up against, and is accountable in the way a business down the road is accountable. A remote designer widens your choices. Both can do good work. The questions above matter more than the address, and any designer, local or not, who answers all eight clearly in writing is a designer you can hire with confidence.

Our answers

You own everything. Prices are published and the quote is in writing. The person you meet does the work. Hosting and changes are $200 a month with no contract. Most sites launch in 4 to 8 weeks. The studio has been in Fishers since 2006, and our work has won awards for mobile and responsive design. If you would like to compare us against the designers you are talking to, tell us about your business and Jason replies in under 24 hours. Before any of that, run your current site through the free website grader so you know what you are starting from.

Frequently asked questions

What owners ask when they are comparing designers.

Have a different one? Call 317-572-7457 and ask Jason.

: Either can do good work. Local means you can meet, the designer knows the market and the competitors, and they will still be here in three years. Remote widens the field. What matters more than location is whether you own your site, whether the price is in writing, and who answers when something breaks.

: Freelancers run $500 to $3,000 for a small site, studios $5,000 to $15,000, agencies more. Our custom sites start at $5,000 and the Small Business plan is $200 a month with writing, hosting and changes included. Our full breakdown is in How Much Does a Website Cost.

: Sites for businesses like yours, that are still live, that work on a phone, and that the designer can tell you a result about. Click through to the live site, not just the screenshot, and check that it loads fast.

: Letting the designer own the domain, the hosting or the admin login. It feels convenient and it is the reason switching later becomes a rescue. Insist that every account is in your business's name from day one.

: Four to eight weeks for a typical small business site when content and approvals move. A designer who promises a custom site in a week is using a template, and one who cannot name a date has not planned the work.

: You need a written quote that says what is built, what it costs, when it launches, who owns what and what happens after launch. That can be one page. What you do not need is a multi year commitment, and you should be wary of a designer who requires one.

Entrepreneur Resources to Start Your Business Right

2025-12-23T03:26:49Z

Essential Resources for New Business Owners

Navigating the early stages of business ownership can be daunting. As an entrepreneur who owns and operates multiple businesses, I fondly remember the journey of starting my ventures from scratch. I also had to navigate the stresses that come with life in industry.

Yes, it was fun. But it was also a lot of work.

As someone who has experienced these challenges, I wanted to take this opportunity to relay advice I have learned along the way. The road to success in business might seem scary. But if you identify the right resources and make connections in your community, the chances of reaching your goals will be much higher.

So aspiring entrepreneurs, listen up!

Mentorship

As a new business owner, I can promise you don’t have all the answers. You might think you do, but there are always lessons to be learned.

According to a 2013 survey, 80 percent of CEOs have said they received some form of mentorship in their careers. This is clearly a trend. The chance to make connections, receive needed advice and glean some moral guidance are just a few of the ways a mentor can help.

One problem: You might be reading this and thinking, ‘I do not know anybody in the industry I am joining.’ But that’s okay; you have to start somewhere. There are plenty of places to meet business professionals. You can seek out mentors at business associations in your area, non-profit organizations, or your college or university. Community groups, like a chamber of commerce, will also offer opportunities to connect with potential mentors. I have been a member of many chambers including the Stillwater Chamber of Commerce, which has been priceless in building a strong network of local professionals.

When you identify a potential mentor, be open and honest when trying to start a relationship. Do your research ahead of time, and let them know you are looking for career advice. As an established professional, they will remember how they started out in the industry themselves and likely will want to help out.

Where to Work

Most aspiring entrepreneurs have a dream of someday working in an office with dedicated staff, comfortable furniture, and professional conference rooms. But when you are first starting out, your office might be your own home or apartment.

Where will you hold important meetings with potential clients or business partners?

Common meeting places like coffee shops can be noisy, and you might not know ahead of time what space will be available.

One good alternative in many communities is a shared working space. In River Falls, the St. Croix Valley Business Innovation Center is an excellent example of a facility designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses. And it offers more than just a space to work.

The St. Croix Valley Business Innovation Center is a collaborative partnership among the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, the City of River Falls, Chippewa Valley Technical College, and the regional economic development community. The idea for the center started in 2010 when these civic leaders and organizations began looking at critical strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for small businesses in the region. Construction on the facility launched in May 2017 and the center officially opened for business in February 2018.

How can it help you? If you have that pesky space issue we touched on earlier, the innovation center’s shared space opportunities offer a solution. The center has a variety of options for rent, including co-working space, offices, and rooms for meetings and events. Yes, they are not free, but many are affordable. A conference room, for example, is available for a reasonable $25 per hour.

You can find other business help there as well. The center is teaming up with UWRF’s Center for Innovation and Business Development, conveniently located in the new facility. Resources available through this partnership include business planning, coaching and mentoring assistance, software help, and financial advisory services. These resources, along with the added chance to network with other local business professionals, would be a great asset for any budding entrepreneur.

Community Small Business Development Opportunities

Many communities offer additional resources to help small business owners, whether you are a newcomer or have years of experience.

As a business owner, I recommend the support provided by the University of Wisconsin-River Falls Small Business Development Center.

The Small Business Development Center is part of a statewide network supporting entrepreneurs and business owners through consulting and targeted education training programs. These consultants are paid professionals and experts in marketing, finance and business planning. Many of them have been business owners themselves.

More information about these classes and consulting opportunities are available on the organization’s website, which is linked above. So if there are areas of business ownership where your knowledge is lacking, then check out a local resource like the UWRF Small Business Development Center.

Online Resources

Almost every business today needs an online presence to succeed today. Shocking, I know.

A majority of your customers use the Internet to find whatever it is they need. It can hurt your chances of success and even damage your credibility if a simple web search of similar keywords does not reveal your business.

Buy a domain name right away. Even if you can’t afford a website you can reserve a domain name for around $10/year. You should try to get a .com if at all possible. Having a website for your business is the first step to growing your internet presence. (If you are opening a local business, see how we build a first site on a small budget on our websites for new businesses page.) But beyond that, SEO practices will help you show up near the top of search engine results. Google My Business is one of the most essential and straightforward steps to SEO. Google My Business builds a profile that shows up when customers search for similar keywords on Google Search and Maps. This profile will let you post updates, respond to reviews, and highlight what makes your business special.

Maintaining a good reputation on your Google My Business reviews is critical. Positive reviews will help you build brand loyalty and gain the trust of potential customers.

A Facebook Business Page will also help grow your reach online. The page can be set up in minutes and includes the name of your business, a quick summary, profile and cover photos, and a call-to-action that directs your page visitors to do something, like visit your website or make a phone call.

When the page is set up, you should invite your Facebook friends to “like” it to grow your presence.

Your Facebook Business Page will have more credibility when you complete the steps for verification. A verified page will have a gray badge next to its name and will let visitors know the page is not a fake. Follow these steps to finish verification.

Growing Your Network

I realized the importance of maintaining a healthy network early in my career as an entrepreneur. These connections have more than paid off for advice and increased business opportunities. Perhaps the most significant factor in small business success is who you know and how much these individuals trust and respect you.

If you are new to the industry, it is crucial to identify the people involved in the community and find out what makes them tick. Start by scheduling meetings with few like-minded people, even if it is only for 15 minutes.

Keep in mind that relationships involve an exchange of value, even in friendships. While you might not have the experience, you have value to bring to the table. Once you identify your best qualities, growing your network will be that much easier.

For all you budding entrepreneurs, congratulations on taking a step toward what could be the most rewarding decision of your life. I hope you learned something here that will help you reach your goals as a business owner.

Remember, if you work to grow your network and identify the resources available in your community, the possibilities are endless. Your hard work will pay off, but make sure to have some fun along the way.

Addition by Subtraction: Why Simpler Websites Convert Better

2025-12-16T03:27:54Z

Why Less Really Is More in Web Design

Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to have “more.”

In sports, we see it repeatedly: a highly-talented player will contribute points to his or her team. But the superstar’s talents are outweighed by their counterproductive habits: not showing up to work on time, not taking team meetings seriously, and adversely affecting the chemistry of the team.

The team takes action. The superstar is traded. Fans are convinced that the team has given up.

But suddenly the opposite happens: the team starts performing better than they did before. The team rallies and suddenly they find themselves in the playoffs.

This is the concept of “addition by subtraction,” and you don’t have to be a general manager for a professional sports team to know how powerful it can be.

What does this have to do with web design?

Simple: it’s easy to get caught up in having an expensive web team full of lots of people who handle myriad elements of your web presence. But that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily doing the right thing.

It’s far more important to look for great web people than it is to look for a lot if web people.

So what determines whether or not you’re working with great web people or simply a large team of web people? Let’s look at some ways you can diagnose how your web presence is doing, and whether you might need better web people as opposed to more:

Understanding How Addition by Subtraction Works on Your Web Presence

Your web presence doesn’t have to be 250 pages wide.

You don’t need a thousand sub-sections. You don’t need a million ways for someone to find you.

What you do need is a web presence that is simple and has an immediate emotional impact on your intended audience.

In the book “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz, the author explains that many consumers often feel overwhelmed by choice. The same problem is present in low-value restaurants: when someone feels like they can order one out of 1,000 things on the same menu, they also feel that they’re probably not going to get a great experience if they choose just one.

The same logic applies to your website.

Your website should be simple, impactful, and direct the audience’s attention in the right direction. For example, if you have one “Contact Us” page, you don’t want to split up your audience’s attention across different landing pages. You want to keep pointing them to the same page, over and over again. That way, when you optimize your landing page, you know what kind of impact it can have on your potential leads.

If you’re spending too much time with attaching frills and other features on your website (many of which you don’t need), you’re only going to get caught in the weeds. Try to find a web team that can not only help you understand the difference between “busy work” and productivity, but who can build you a simple web presence that converts, attracts, and sends you leads while you’re busy working on other aspects of your company.

Addition by Subtraction in Your Productivity

A restaurant that keeps changing its menu every single day is going to end up with a lot of wasted (and paid) hours. It’s going to spend too much money on printer ink. It’s going to spend too much money. Period.

The same is true in other areas of business.

No matter what kind of business you run, you shouldn’t continue to pursue the small returns that come with changing little things.

The wrong kind of web team will be happy to charge you for it.

That’s not what you want. You don’t want to pay expensive invoices each month as your web team tells you that they’re making all sorts of changes and upgrades that you don’t need. Instead, remember the 80/20 principle: 20% of your efforts will tend to yield about 80% of the rewards. It’s important to optimize the 20% of your company that’s most productive.

As for the rest…you don’t always need to pay such close attention.

By creating a strong website that’s simple, you also free up your time for other types of marketing. That can include a wide variety of marketing efforts, including advertising (both online and offline). That, in turn, drives traffic back to your website. If your website has already been optimized with an effective web design service, then you know that you can trust that website to continue converting potential leads into potential customers. That will only help you grow your business in the long run.

Working with High-Quality Web Design

With all this in mind, how can you tell when you have a high-quality web design team on your side? This is what we recommend you look for:

Motivation. Are the people you work with motivated toward getting you a high-quality website? Or are they simply going through the motions? Do they care about your concerns and who your audience is, or are they simply going to rework an existing template and give you something you could have designed yourself for $15? It’s your money you’re spending, after all; take advantage of it.
Marketing outreach. A quality web design team will be able to help with your marketing by giving you a simple, intuitive website that funnels your leads in a specific direction. You’ll want to work with a web team that doesn’t pursue those small little design elements, but rather focuses on what it can do to simplify.

If it’s time to update your web presence, then maybe it’s time for you to reconsider how you approach your site. Are you going to continue to focus on the wrong things, or are you going to work with a web design firm that understands what addition by subtraction means?

Now’s the time to simplify your design and enhance your ability to gain new customers. Now’s the time to work with a group like Lackey Designs.

Website Jargon Glossary: Web Design Terms Explained

2025-12-02T02:20:22Z

A Glossary of Common Web Design Terms

When you start your web project there may be a lot of terms you may not understand. Here we have compiled a list of typical website lingo as a guide:

Analytics: Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a website. Used as part of client relationship management (CRM) to allow the client a monthly or annual view of trends and behaviors on their website.
Back End: The back end of a website is the part hidden from view of regular website visitors. The back end generally includes the information structure, applications, and the CMS controlling content on the site.
Backlink: Backlinks are links from other sites back to your own. They’re sometimes also referred to as “trackbacks” (especially on blogs). Backlinks have a huge impact on your site’s search rankings. Lots of backlinks from high-ranking sites can greatly improve your search engine results, especially if those links use keywords in their anchor text.
Blog: A blog (short for “web log”) is a type of web page that offers a series of posted items (short articles, photos, etc.). Blogs have become a common medium for communication in professional, political, news, and other web communities.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Breadcrumb: Breadcrumbs are navigation elements that generally appear near the top of a web page that show you the pages and subpages that appear before the page you’re on. For example, on a blog, the breadcrumbs might look something like: Home > Category > Post.
Browser: Software programs that enable you to view web pages and other documents on the Internet. They “translate” HTML-encoded files into the text, images, sounds, and other features you see. The most commonly used browsers are Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
CAPTCHA: A challenge-response test used to determine whether the user is human, used to filter out spam. It is fully automated, requiring little human maintenance or intervention to administer. CAPTCHA is usually at the end of a web form.
CMS (Content Management System): A CMS allows its users to edit, delete, and manage the content of a website from a visual interface. A successful CMS requires no knowledge of programming languages, CSS, or HTML to easily update a website. Examples include WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Crawler: Crawlers, also referred to as “spiders,” are programs used by search engines to roam the web, visit sites and databases, and keep search engine databases up to date. They obtain new pages, update known pages, and delete obsolete ones.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A language for the web used to define the style (look and feel) of a webpage, including fonts, colors, layouts, and more.
Domain: A domain is a person or organization’s unique space on the Internet. In layman’s terms, it commonly refers to the name of your website.
Domain Name: A domain is identified by a number (IP address) assigned to its unique space. To make it easier to use, that number is given a name of your choice. This way, people don’t need to remember the IP address to visit a website. They can use the easier-to-remember domain name instead.
Favicon: A favicon is a tiny (generally 16×16 or 32×32 pixels) customizable icon displayed in the browser’s address bar or tab next to the page title.
Font Family: Font family is a group designation for defining the typefaces used in CSS documents. The font family tag generally lists multiple fonts to be used and usually ends with a generic font category (e.g., “serif” or “sans-serif”).
Front End: The front end is all the components of a website that a visitor can see: pages, images, content, etc. It’s the interface visitors use to access the site’s content, also known as the User Interface (UI).
Google Algorithm: Google’s algorithms depend on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” to determine what you might be looking for. These signals include things like terms on websites, freshness of content, your region, and PageRank.
Hamburger Button: The hamburger button is a symbol consisting of three parallel horizontal lines (≡) used as a menu icon in user interfaces. It typically appears in the top left or right corner and is named for its resemblance to a hamburger.
Hosting: The service of providing hardware, software, and storage for websites, including maintenance of site files on a server.
Hyperlink: A hyperlink is a link from one web page to another, either on the same site or a different one. Generally text or images, hyperlinks are highlighted in some way (underlined, different color, etc.).
Landing Page: A web page that a user is directed to after clicking on an external link, often designed specifically for marketing purposes.
Metadata: Metadata is data contained in the header that offers information about the current web page. This information isn’t visible on the page itself (except in the source code) and is contained within meta tags.
Meta Tag: Included in the head section of an HTML page, meta tags are visible to search engines but not human visitors. They provide information like the page title, keywords, description, and instructions for search engine robots and browsers.
Navigation: Navigation refers to the system that allows visitors to move around a website. This includes menus, in-page links, breadcrumbs, related links, pagination, and any other links that help visitors move between pages.
Organic Listings: Unpaid search results, as opposed to paid advertisements that appear in search engine results.
Plug-ins: A plug-in is third-party code that extends the capabilities of a website. Most often used with a CMS or blogging platform, plug-ins add functionality without modifying the site’s core code. Note: too many plug-ins can slow down a website.
Redirect: When you type in a certain URL and it automatically changes to a different URL.
Responsive: A website that adjusts its layout based on the screen size it’s viewed on (computer, tablet, or phone) so it always looks its best regardless of device.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): A form of Internet marketing that promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising, also known as Pay-per-Click (PPC) or Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertising.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Planning and writing website content to improve the likelihood of showing up for relevant search terms in search engines like Google and Bing. SEO includes keyword research, content writing, web design, web development, and blogging.
Sitemap: An index of all the content on a website. It helps visitors find what they’re looking for and helps search engines discover all your pages.
Slider: A rotating display of images on a webpage, usually pausing briefly on each image. Often used on homepages to feature important topics or promotions.
Thumbnail Gallery: Smaller preview photos used to display a large collection of images. When clicked, the photos enlarge for the user to see in full size.
URL: The abbreviation for “Uniform Resource Locator.” Also known as a web address: the characters you see in your browser’s address bar.
White Hat: Ethical SEO practices that follow search engine guidelines to ensure optimal results. The opposite is Black Hat SEO.
Wireframe: Simplistic drawings or layouts of a webpage with no design applied. Wireframes are used in preliminary stages of website design to focus on UI and content layout before applying visual design.

Common File Types

.psd: Adobe Photoshop file.
.eps: A common vector file format allowing graphics to be resized without altering quality or resolution. Designers often request this file type for logos used across multiple mediums or large formats.
.ai: A vector file format used in Adobe Illustrator. Vector files can be resized to any size without losing quality, which makes them ideal for large graphics.
.jpg: This file extension is used for JPEG files. JPEGs use lossy compression, which removes portions of data to create smaller file sizes suitable for web use.

Rather leave the technical side to someone else? Our website development services cover everything from domain and hosting setup to moving your site to a new platform.

How to Write an Effective Blog That Boosts Your SEO

2025-12-01T03:14:58Z

Why Should Your Business Have a Blog?

Blogs are more than just fun and games for business owners who hope to build a quality website.

Yes, blogs are undoubtedly a good source of information for customers, but that is not the only benefit. Quality blogs will also help your website’s appeal to the most popular search engines on the internet.

The strategy of improving your website’s ranking on popular search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO can be complicated, and many of its details can be saved for another day. But there is one easy way you can help out your website’s SEO: Blogging.

As a business owner, you are already considered an expert in your field. Blogs will offer a platform to both convey your knowledge and help out in the SEO department.

How will this happen? Here are a few ways that blogs will help your website climb the rankings on popular search engines:

Creating a content rich website:

Content is king and with new updates to the Google algorithm consistently creating new unique content will show in your analytics.

When you continually update your website by adding pages, Google and other major search engines will take notice. Search engines do this by checking on the number of quality indexed pages contained inside a website. This is known as web crawling.

When you continually update your website by adding new pages with good information, Google’s ranking algorithms will take notice. Search engines are interested in websites that are active, and blogs will help you meet that requirement. After all, search engines are always working to give users the best results possible. Having good content will prove that your site belongs at the top.

Drawing in customers:

Customers who are interested in a product may also have plenty of questions. And that’s great, because blogs will give you an opportunity to showcase your solutions.

This blog is a great example of that: ‘Why are blogs essential for your website?’ Hopefully by now you have learned something.

Once a customer sees that you are an expert in your field, they may also be interested in what you have to offer. This could help drum up some business. Plus, like we said before, search engines are in a never-ending quest for quality results.

Backlinking:

This is another way a good blog will help build SEO. If another website owner finds a blog interesting, they may post a link back to your site.

Great!

Why is that? Search engines take notice when two quality, alike websites link to each other. These external links are almost considered a third-party vote that a website is helpful. The idea is that external links are hard to manipulate, and thus they can be used to determine the popularity of a site.

But beware, linking schemes with non-trustworthy websites will also hurt your SEO. This should not be a problem as long as credible sites are providing those links.

Keywords:

A keyword is the subject word that customers use when looking for specific things on a search engine. For example, the customers of Lackey Designs may search for something like “Wisconsin website services.” When you include these words in your content, you will alert search engines to the kind of information the site provides.

But beware, your site’s SEO may be hurt if the keywords are crammed into the content aimlessly. The words on every page have to mean something.

This is why quality content will help. If you are using relevant terms in a constructive manner, you will be rewarded by popular search engines. The optimal keyword density is 2-5% of a page. Blogs are a great way to use these keywords to your advantage.
We hope you have learned something about why blogs are important for your website. A good blog will not only get you kudos from customers, but also from popular search engines as well. Happy writing!

HTTP vs HTTPS: Why Your Website Needs the 'S'

2025-11-26T03:25:07Z

Understanding the Security Behind Your Website

HTTP is almost as old as the Internet’s popularity itself, but you’d be surprised how few people know what it stands for. Hypertext Transfer Protocol is essentially the “language” of the Internet. It’s how two computers communicate with each other so you can download information from a website and view everything it has to offer.

Nowadays, you’re just as likely to see “HTTPS” on your browser as “HTTP.” What gives? As it turns out, the differences are massive, and they’re differences you need to know about as you build your web presence.

What the “S” Stands For, and Why It Matters

The most obvious difference between the two: HTTP vs. HTTPS. That “S” stands for secure. That means the “hypertext transfer protocol secure” communication is more suited for ecommerce and the open exchange of information than regular old HTTP.

The basic difference here is encryption. Through the use of an SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer), this exchange creates what Entrepreneur.com calls a “secure encrypted connection” between a server and your browser.

But as hackers and viruses around the world grow more sophisticated, this level of security is fast moving beyond a “luxury” for today’s data-driven websites. It’s now a necessity. Critical data like email addresses and passwords need to be exchanged through HTTPS rather than HTTP to ensure full trust between user and server.

Why Your Website Needs HTTPS

It’s simple: you need to protect you and your customers’ data. Any data that passes through HTTP (that can include passwords, confidential information, and even credit card information) is exposed. Switching to HTTPS will give both you and your users the protection of encryption.

If it sounds intimidating, don’t fret. Building a secured system is a highly technical process, but you’ll only have to perform a few basic steps to ensure a quality transition. Here’s what you’ll want to concentrate on:

Purchasing your SSL certificate directly from your web hosting company. You can also ask them how to implement this on your site.
Edit your links. Stop linking to HTTP pages and incorporate the “S.” Make sure you do the same for any outbound marketing materials and contact information.
Integrate your SSL settings with any content management system you might be using.
Set up your HTTPS site with the relevant analytics. You don’t want a small error to cause you to lose mountains of relevant data that can help you build your web presence.

Though there may be more steps, depending on the size and sophistication of your website, these are the basics. Don’t be afraid to make the switch if the process sounds intimidating. Instead, tackle it one at a time.

Why Can’t You Stick with HTTP?

HTTP has been around for a long time. That’s why so many people wonder why they can’t keep their site like it was.

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?

The truth is a little more complicated than that.

The benefits of switching to HTTPS are more than just a vague notion of “security.” Here’s what you need to know:

Minimal impact on performance. PCWorld pointed this out back in 2017 when they noted that Google only noticed a small change in performance when shifting to HTTPS for Gmail.
Boosting trust. Trust is more important than ever. The Internet is full of all sorts of competing websites, which means that anything you put online is already competing with trust built up by large companies such as Google or Amazon. Can your trust compete with companies on that level? HTTPS is one step forward to attaining that trust.
Search engines care about your security, too. It’s not just the trust that people place in you that matters. Search engines like Google need to trust that your website is on the up-and-up. You don’t want to be tagged with a “warning: your information may not be secure” or similar firewall simply because your site is outdated.

What HTTPS Will Not Do

When you move over to a “secure” structure for your website, it’s tempting to view your web presence as invulnerable. But you’ve only made a needed upgrade in security. And like many security upgrades, that should make you more protected, but it won’t necessarily protect you from every threat that comes with publishing online.

You may also find that in certain demographics, HTTPS won’t have the impact you might have imagined. For example, PCWorld notes, B2B websites don’t gain as much from a switch over to HTTPS when it comes to tangible business gained.

That doesn’t mean that you should avoid HTTPS, however.

HTTPS is a step forward for your website. It’s a new way to think about interacting with your potential customers. It’s a way of demonstrating that you care about your information, whether that’s outgoing or incoming information. If you don’t already have a content management system like WordPress in place that can make HTTPS easy for you, consider tackling a manual upgrade. Call your web hosting provider and let them know what you want to do. Your users will thank you for it.

Would rather not handle it yourself? Every site on our website hosting and maintenance plans comes with an SSL certificate, security updates and daily backups.

Responsive Website Design: Boost Your Online Presence

2025-11-12T03:19:59Z

Business owners are constantly searching for ways to get a leg up on the competition.

One way to gain an advantage with your customers online is by having a website that works well on all devices. Consumers use many different types of electronics to view websites, including mobile technology which is more popular than ever. According to comScore, Inc., mobile is now the leading digital platform with 62 percent of media time being spent on smartphones and tablets.

This means businesses today need to market themselves to users on every device possible. And the best way for most businesses to do that is with a site that utilizes a responsive design.

What is a responsive design?

A website with a responsive design is built to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices. Whether you are using a high definition television or an iPhone, a responsive web design will mold itself to fit any screen. That is a big deal for most web surfers.

Next are a few reasons why a mobile-friendly website is important:

How we got here

First let’s go over a brief history of how we got to this point in website design.

Websites were not always created with multiple devices in mind. Most people will remember using desktop computers on dial-up internet in the 1990s. But sure enough, technology started to evolve.

Once mobile technology became popular, the trend in the early 2000s was for websites to utilize two different versions: one for desktop computers and one for mobile devices. The mobile site was often marked with an ‘m’ in the address (example: m.lackeydesigns.com).

Responsive websites started to become more popular by the start of this decade as mobile device usage continued to grow. A Mashable article even called 2013 the “Year of the Responsive Web Design.” Even though web design technology continues to evolve, responsive is considered the easiest and most cost effective method for websites to connect with all users.

Simulating all platform sizes; Desktop, Tablet and Mobile.

Being friendly to mobile

Customers on the web today expect every site to be compatible with the device they are using.

If your site does not meet their expectations, they may leave. According to research by Google’s Think Insights, 61 percent of consumers said they are likely to leave a website immediately if it is not mobile-friendly. Customers are also much more likely to spend money with your business if they have a positive mobile experience.

When they visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future
67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a site’s product or service

A responsive design will guarantee a website’s compatibility with all devices. Your mobile customers will appreciate the effort.

Search Engine Acceptance

If you have a functional responsive website, your users are not the only party who will be happy.

Popular search engines like Google officially recommends responsive sites. Many search engines, most notably Google, place an emphasis on websites that are mobile friendly.

Starting in April of 2015, Google made an update to its algorithms to give a priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. This update changed things for mobile users, but the desktop search algorithms stayed the same. The event was nicknamed ‘Mobilegeddon’ by designers and webmasters.

These new algorithms have placed an even bigger emphasis on the need to have a website that works on all devices. With as much as half your customers using cell phones or tablets to access the internet, a mobile-friendly site is needed to keep your online presence at the highest level. And you will be rewarded with fair rankings on all search engines.

Speed is important

Customers are always looking for answers to their problems as fast as possible on the web. People are busy, which means they want to find information as quickly as possible.

A fast website will keep your customers happy. And yes, speed will impact your ranking with search engines as well.

A 2009 Google experiment on the speed of search engines determined that slowing down a results page by 300 milliseconds resulted in a 0.2 to 0.6 percent decrease in the amount of searches per user.

These findings can be true for any website. After conducting this research, Google concluded:

“We encourage site designers to think twice about adding a feature that hurts performance if the benefit of the feature is unproven.”

Having a fast and user friendly website is crucial in keeping consumers interested. A quality responsive design will help you achieve that goal. Beware of templated responsive websites with possible plugin’s and unnecessary ad-ons slowing down your website. Lackey Designs builds websites from the ground up specific to your business needs.

Time to think mobile

As you can see, it is time to take mobile website customers seriously. That is why every site created by Lackey Designs utilizes a responsive design. We understand the importance of having a product that runs quickly and is easy to navigate. Responsive design is here to stay as experts predict up to 10 years before you may have to rebuild your website.

If your business is using a website that is not mobile friendly, it will cost you in the long run. This is the time to modernize your online presence. Contact us for a quote.

Template vs Custom Websites: Which Is Right for You?

2025-10-05T02:18:17Z

Is a Templated Website Really Worth the Savings?

Most business owners are looking for ways to save on their bottom lines whenever possible.

When looking for a new website, less expensive options often exist. Many sources online offer the opportunity to purchase pre-designed websites or themes that will allow you to plug in information and content as needed. But do these templated sites work as well as ones that are custom designed?

If you are considering a templated website for your business, we suggest you first learn a little bit about the process of designing a website. Here is a breakdown of what most website designers consider when doing their jobs.

Building a house

We always say designing a quality website is similar to building a house. Consider the task an architect must take on when drawing up those plans. The designer will first look at all needs for the new structure and plan accordingly.

A good website designer will follow these same principles.

The first step in our website design process is putting together a solid strategy. We start this process by meeting with the business owner and establishing goals for the new website. This step also includes looking over competitors’ websites to see where yours can excel. We will establish any desired fonts, themes, a color palette, and photos that will be used with the new site.

We will then follow up with a sitemap, similar to a blueprint, to show where pages will fit into the new website.

Once everything is approved, the final step of the process is creating a wireframe of the site to show the business owner what everything will look like in the finished product.

With a templated website, what you see is what you get. You are given a finished website with limited options to make it your own. All photos and content must fit inside predetermined spaces. You also run the risk of having the same website as other businesses online.

Leave it to the experts

Like we said before, constructing a website is similar in many ways to building a house. Would you try to design a new house if you do not have any experience doing so?

Probably not.

Similarly, if you are inexperienced in web design, you might miss some important details when constructing a website. We like to think of ourselves not only as web designers, but also web planners. We often make suggestions to business owners to help make their sites as user friendly as possible. We also will help establish the best design aspects for the site to make sure it is desirable.

This will not be the case if you decide to go with a templated website. All planning rests on the shoulders of a business owner. And, if anything goes wrong, you may have limited resources available to fix the problem.

High performance websites

A templated website may not offer the same level of performance as one that is custom built.

Why is that?

A cheaply constructed website may use poor coding practices or otherwise inefficient operating procedures. Slow performance may bother customers and could potentially hurt your website’s results on search engines. On the other hand, a custom designed website will typically keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring it appears high on the list of results by popular search engines. SEO is a complex science, often requiring optimal coding to ensure a site is favorable to search engines.

A custom website will also be constructed with usability in mind. The main goal of a website is to make sure customers can find the information they want. Correctly built websites are done so with navigation in mind. These options will be limited with a template site.

Potential for data corruption

Would you build a house with rotten wood? In some instances, template websites may already be corrupted. They are often at a higher risk of being affected by malicious code and data corruption because they run on large servers.

If a single file on a template website’s server becomes corrupt, it could harm each website running through that server. Hackers often want to affect as many sites as possible to expose their viruses and spam. What easier way for them to hack large numbers of websites than hacking an entire server of template websites?

With custom-built websites, the coding is different every time. Instead of having a template that features the same code for each website, custom website code makes your website unique. In turn, a website with unique code is less likely to be hacked. Hackers are more likely to go for the low-hanging fruit: template websites.

Our recommendation

These are some of the aspects a business owner should consider before using a templated website. Templates may seem like a convenient way to get your business online, but the reality is a properly built site is usually more effective in the long-run.

We have helped multiple clients with website redesigns after they were previously using a templated website. The need for a quality product was a factor in their decision to seek a redesign.

If you are looking for a functional site that is best for your business, we recommend going with a custom built product.

10 Reasons to Use Google Drive for Your Business

2025-08-03T02:23:40Z

Why Google Drive Should Be Part of Your Workflow

It’s happened to the best of us. You’re working on a vital project, giving it your full focus and attention, until suddenly, disaster strikes. Maybe your file goes missing or you can’t find the USB drive anymore. Whatever the reason, you’ve lost all your hard work overnight.

If you could prevent this risk automatically, wouldn’t you?

Enter a service like Google Drive. Working on Google Drive gives your business access to cloud-based storage and organization that keeps your files handy, shareable, and recoverable.

But you already knew that. Why else should you use Google Drive? We can think of ten good reasons:

Reason #1: Backing Up Should Be Easy

Yes, it’s possible for you to back up your documents without using Google Drive or even cloud-based computing at all.

But the name of the game here is convenience.

If you miss just one session of backing up your files, you’ve exposed yourself to risk. But saving to Google Drive ensures that every time your file is so much as autosaved, it’s ready for you in a pinch.

Reason #2: Cost

Cost is one way of saying it. The complete and utter lack of cost is another. Google Drive’s free edition gives you some 15 GB of storage space, which means you can safely store large files, particularly office work, to your heart’s content. It’s true that this means that Google Drive isn’t ideal for storing larger files, such as videos, but generally speaking, those are better to keep on your own secure hard drives or even external hard drives.

Reason #3: Search

Imagine taking Google’s powerful search engine and pointing it at your own files. That’s what happens when you use Google Drive. The search engine is so sophisticated, in fact, that it can even identify objects in your pictures, which means it will be easier to dig up that visit to the Eiffel Tower, even if your files are all named “fds8a9f0000.jpg.”

Reason #4: Collaboration

Collaboration is the name of the game in today’s economy, but it doesn’t mean you have to stand over a co-worker’s desk to get everything done. Online document sharing makes it possible to work, edit, and comment on each individual file, accomplishing what used to take days and even weeks in a matter of hours. This easy collaboration is a hallmark of 21^st century work and easily accessible across multiple file formats, such as Word documents.

Reason #5: Variety

Google Drive isn’t a one-trick pony when it comes to file storage. You can save multiple file types, so long as you meet the limits of your individual Google Drive account’s storage capacity.

Why is this so important? It’s crucial to have a single bookmark in your browser (or a single folder on your computer) that can take you to all of the relevant files you use for work. This will keep things organized and help keep you sane.

Reason #6: Easy Sharing

Want to share those family photos from your latest vacation? Want to share a document and aren’t sure how to properly send it to someone? Google Drive makes sharing as easy as it does collaboration.

This is especially relevant for those with hectic travel schedules. If you’re on the road, it’s easier to log into an account to share files rather than worry about where your physical storage might be, or whether it might be lost.

Reason #7: Customizable Collaboration

Notice a theme here? Google Drive is big on easy collaboration and sharing, which is good for you because it means that you’ll have every option in the book for managing your files. You can choose who can view it, who can comment on it, who can edit it, or give a broad range of people different permissions on the same file. Google Drive also does a great job of making your files easy to access and share via project management software or email.

Reason #8: Mobile-Friendliness

These days, it seems like just about everything is “mobile-friendly.” But some apps are a little friendlier than others. Google Drive is particularly adept at giving you the access you need to your files you need on a mobile phone, while the experience of viewing and editing is surprisingly easy. This is another great benefit for frequent fliers and business travelers who spend much of their business time on their phone, not their desktop.

Reason #9: Security

With your files this open, the process of sharing has to be unsecure, right? You’d be surprised. Drive is encrypted with SSL, which gives you the same security you’d expect from other online activity like email. While this is not a 100% guarantee that your data will always remain protected, it’s an extra layer of security that will keep your data handy.

Reason #10: Working Offline

We know what you’re thinking. “This all sounds great. But what if I’m not connected to the Internet”?

You’d be surprised. You can make files available offline, which allows you to work on them even when you have no Wi-Fi on the road. You don’t even have to be connected to the Internet during a power outage if you prepare properly, which means you’ll have the same convenience of file use as if you were storing your files locally.

Why You Should Consider Google Drive

With low risk, no cost, and lots of potential rewards, there’s no reason you can’t employ Google Drive to its full potential in your business. We recommend you give it a shot and see how much easier your life can be when you don’t have to worry about the safety of your files.

Backups matter for your website too. Our website hosting and maintenance plans include daily backups and restoration, so you can roll back after a bad update or a hacked plugin.

Web Marketing 101: Understanding SEO and SEM

2025-07-05T02:21:26Z

SEO vs. SEM: Which Strategy Is Right for Your Business?

Web marketing is crucial to helping your company receive as much exposure as possible. Businesses choose to market on the web over traditional marketing because it is cheaper and often times more effective.

When putting together an online marketing plan, many different web marketing strategies exist. Money, effectiveness, and business needs should all be taken into consideration when choosing your strategy.

Perhaps two of the most popular web marketing strategies are search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). As complicated as these strategies seem from a distance, they can be easily simplified when compared to one another.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a web designer’s most effective tool for increasing a website’s traffic. Simply put, SEO is the practice used to increase a website’s search engine ranking. For businesses serious about growth, understanding how search visibility is improved is essential to long-term success.

Effective SEO is achieved by having a website show up high in search engine results. Websites that appear at the top of search engines successfully use SEO strategies. A few different components that factor into SEO are listed below.

Titles – Page titles in the code are taken into consideration by search engine algorithms because they often summarize the webpage.
Keywords – Search engines scan the words used on websites. Using the correct keywords is important so that a website is never overlooked or disregarded by a search engine.
Links – When a website is linked to by other sites, it shows search engines that the site has reliable information or provides good services.

SEO often produces what is referred to as “organic” results. The results provided by SEO are natural because money is not spent on advertising or boosting the website’s visibility.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a fast, highly effective way for websites to reach the top of search engine results. Unlike SEO, SEM is not “organic,” but is paid for instead.

SEM strategies are used to maximize the number of clicks a website gets. A company will pay for advertising that places their company at the top of Google searches or in the news feeds of specific demographics on Facebook.

Many SEM paid advertisements are pay-per-click (PPC). Companies pay a certain sum of money every time their PPC link is opened. PPC advertising can vary in price depending on a variety of variables, including the keywords used by the company’s website.

So where does a PPC ad campaign begin? A company’s best bet is to start with the most popular search engines and social media sites.

Facebook advertising – Posts to Facebook can be “boosted” so that potential customers are exposed to your business’ services. With Facebook advertising, it is much easier to target different demographics by age, gender, and location.
Google AdWords – AdWords is Google’s search engine marketing service. Through AdWords, your business can bid on Google’s search engine position and leap over the competition.
AdWords Express – AdWords Express makes the management of Google AdWords much easier. With Express, keywords and ad placements are automatically managed.
Bing Ads – Bing, the second most-used search engine, offers their own form of a search engine marketing service called Bing Ads. Like Google AdWords, Bing Ads places your business’ website ahead of the competition, and works on a PPC basis. If customers don’t click, you don’t pay.

SEM strategies can be very hit-or-miss. The market for search engine advertisements can vary greatly. Because the market varies so much, using the best tools for SEM research is extremely beneficial. At Lackey Designs, we use SEM Rush.

SEM Rush is software that runs reports about a website’s SEM and SEO opportunities. Reports show advertising opportunities as well as how a company’s competitors’ ad campaigns have worked. The software is also useful when finding effective keywords that are being used in the industry.

The Verdict

A good online marketing plan must involve a certain level of SEO. A company’s website should use effective titles, content, and backlinks to truly optimize the company’s online presence.

However, SEO is only a piece of the puzzle. Some companies are able to maintain a successful online presence solely through SEO, but many need a little boost. If a company is willing to put more money towards their online exposure, SEM can be a very quick and effective way to reach a large audience of potential customers.

All in all, a company needs a plan for SEO. Without one, their website may never come up in search engine results. SEM is optional, but if done correctly it can help a business reach a massive new customer base.

If your business is looking to improve its online presence, take a look at our SEO services or our SEM services, and contact us for a quote.