Dennis Yu

$25,000 to Build a Website for My Home Services Business? A Breakdown of What the Website Cost Really Should Be

As someone who has built websites for over 30 years, here’s a secret about website costs. Just because you pay $25,000 instead of $1,500 doesn’t mean you’re getting something that’s better or higher quality in any way. Ensure you know how to go beyond the aesthetics of how it will look. The paint job is nice, but we care more about the engine and transmission. In other words, consider where the content is coming from—location service pages, blogs, profiles of team members, your reviews, etc. What good is a nice-looking purse that is empty? Let’s take BrandtHavac, for example. Their site design seems to be okay, but they’re using stock images instead of their own. The inputs to the website must come from you, not magic AI tools– though AI tools can help edit this like a smart VA. For example, BrandtHavac does not use its own content in some parts of the website. As explained above, they’re using Stock images, which can negatively affect their SEO. You must be able to measure how many phone calls you’re getting and where they come from, meaning digital plumbing has to be in place. A simple one-pager checklist for that, too. If you’re a local service business, usually $850 is enough website cost to build your site and meet all the criteria I mentioned above. You can also hire a VA on UpWork to clone another site you like, put it on WordPress, and host it on WP Engine with our standard set of plug-ins. If you want someone in the US to do it, multiply the $850 price by 10X. In fact, hiring from the US doesn’t matter; what really matters is hitting the site’s goals following EEAT (Expertise—Experience—Authority—Trust). In other words, does your site demonstrate that you have expertise, experience, authority, and trust in your services? Let’s use Bee Friendly Pest Control’s site as an example to demonstrate EEAT. If you look at their site, you will notice that they use real images to showcase their products and services. Using real images shows that they have expertise, experience, authority, and trust in what they do. If you want coaching, consulting, or agency-like services, multiply the price by 30X to accommodate a standard 3X agency markup on labour. There is nothing wrong with paying $25K for a website, but be sure you’re itemizing what you’re getting because most US-based “designers” hire someone else anyway and pocket the difference. $850 for the actual build-out (likely the agency is subbing out to someone, who then subs it out to someone else)– then the overhead of salespeople (they need to be paid), marketing, overhead, and a profit for the owner. Take, for example, my friend Curtis Fenn who paid more than $10k for a website for his real estate company RedX, only to end up having something that performed poorly. So what matters is not how beautiful your website is or how costly it is but if it has the necessary ingredients that lead to more traffic and conversions. Hope this gives you insight into what websites actually cost. Looking to unlock your website’s potential? Head over to AreYouGoogleable.com now for a comprehensive website audit. Quick, effective, and absolutely essential—let’s go!

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Is Buying Guest Posts a Smart SEO Strategy?

If you want to guest post on a site with a 50+ Domain Authority, it’s $500, as you can see from this network below. The SEO pros will argue whether buying guest post opportunities is a smart SEO strategy. But most will agree that this is the going rate to be able to guest post on a high DA site. BlitzMetrics.com is a DA62, and free-ebooks.net is a DA73, which is beyond what you can even get on such sites. And our sites are not available for purchase even on private networks. For the “SEO pros” out there, I believe Google can spot your private link scheme, even if it’s triangular or delayed. But if you’re a client for any of our packages or a member of Office Hours (our $100 a month membership), I’d like to offer you one guest post on my sites to boost your SEO with the following conditions: Conditions for SEO Scheme Ready to build up your SEO link power so you can rank on more competitive keywords on Google?

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Grab your .club domain name before someone else does.

Go grab your domain name before someone else does. I just bought yourcontentfactory.club and blackdiamond.club so I can reference it in my Clubhouse bio and mention it live. I was invited to a room by Jo Verdu, who is a massively successful domainer, who explained this to me… Clubhouse is taking off, so the .club domains are super valuable digital real estate. He brokered a million dollars in .club domains in the last 24 hours– around cannabis. In some ways, the .club domain will be more powerful and easier to acquire than a premium domain. I’m sad that someone else snapped up dennisyu. club– so get yours now before you have to pay through the nose for someone who squats on your name. Grab your friends’ names and business names. GoDaddy is selling .club domains for 99 cents right now. George Verdugo just mentioned me in this Clubhouse room just now, talking about our 3-day mastermind he attended. So I decided to offer that training to anyone who messages operations@blitzmetrics.com with “I LOVE GEORGE VERDUGO” as the subject line. All I did was share what George told me (I’m not a domain expert). He was kind to me and I paid it forward, which is the heart that drives Clubhouse.

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You might have a domain addiction– having a .club domain doesn’t mean you have a business.

Here’s the biggest problem with domainers – they go crazy and buy all the domains.  You can buy all kinds of .com domains or .club domains, to reserve or build-out.   The big issue is this: just because you have a domain doesn’t mean that you have a business.  We have to put a national business behind it or tie it to an existing business. What you’re doing when you hold a Clubhouse room – as Dr. Chris Colgin from San Mateo, CA did a week ago, talking about how chiropractors can integrate ChiroThin – is creating content. From there, it’s fantastic to cross-post and repurpose into your .club domain, because the .club domain should be the interactive community companion to the live Clubhouse conversations that are in the rooms, which eventually leads to a club that you built when you apply for a club. What most people are missing is that you can buy the name. You heard about the domain .club yesterday – how some of these folks were early, and they bought thousands of domains and turned around and sold them for a few hundred dollars each. They have different tools to put up landing pages and just sell them, and that’s great.  Mostly, domainers make money by squatting on the value of a high-level name. Someone mentioned that they had maths.com, but they also had maths.club.  Because of COVID, maths.com became very valuable as an e-comm play.  Of course, the .club domain is valuable, but it’s going to cost much less than the premium domain – maybe 1/10th or even 1% of the cost. If it’s a premium domain worth a hundred thousand dollars, you might be able to get the .club for a thousand and build it up in referrals, community, conversational, mid-funnel plays that can refer to the .com or do anything to the .com, or to your practice, for example. That’s to build a network.  Anyone who’s doing a Clubhouse should be constantly referring people to the .club because, otherwise, there are only two other ways to get people anywhere. One is a link in their bio, which works on either Twitter or Instagram. They don’t allow that.  They don’t allow linking. And the second thing is the live mention. You saw that I did a live mention, which got us a hundred or 200 people. We just got flooded with all these people.  Notice it wasn’t a landing page, though – it tells people to put it in an email.  Or we could mention the .club.  The meaning of the .club is it’s also basically a vanity URL.  You could say Dr. Chris holds it – go visit me at drchriscolgin.com. So why would I do a .club?  Because the .club is meant to be the Clubhouse version of it.  Instead of drchriscolgin.com/clubhouse, it’s just easier to use a vanity domain.   It’s the same thing you use with TV and radio, where you have a domain that is a tracking domain or a landing page for a particular offer or particular community.  Chiropractors build communities, and that’s how they bridge value out of Clubhouse. It’s one thing to be on Clubhouse, and make connections and say, “Oh, look, there’s Shawn Dill, and we’re talking live.” But if you want to drive measurable value, a .club companion is the thing to really monetize and collect community.  Live networking is great, but you can make a clear case because you have the community already. You are driving sales, you can ask them to show ROI in a .club, which no one’s ever done yet on Clubhouse. It’s the equivalent of the .com land grab 25 years ago or 30 years ago. Remember, these guys are saying the .club is bigger than the .com trap. I don’t think so, but I could be wrong – I still think it’s valuable because they don’t want to have to dump.  Let’s have something – even if we just have a nothing page right now, and all of a sudden it’s worth something, and it’s nice. It can be indexed by the search engine. It doesn’t mean there’s a lot of content. At least we have something there that at least starts the clock on Google.   Google basically penalizes brand-new websites. A lot of people will say that there’s the sandbox penalty, meaning they’re put in a sandbox for a certain amount of time because we don’t know if it’d be spammy or whatnot. The point is, if you’re a new site, you do have some sort of penalty attached to you. So by having this idea that, “Oh, there’s actually something here. We used to start the clock, this domain in a completely brand new suite. If you sit on it for six months, at least you can say, okay, this site at least started six months ago.” I think of it more as real estate. Imagine that you were in San Diego before it became San Diego, and it was just farmland. You wanted to buy all of this farm, then you get the department for cheap, but then 40 or 50 years later, all of a sudden they’re going to put a shopping mall and buildings.  That real estate becomes more valuable later – which is the whole point behind this.  That’s what domainers do. They buy all the real estate believing that it might be valuable. One day, it’s turning around, and other people would say we can monetize it because we can put a big sell on the .club, but then both of those guys are wrong – because the short-term people are going to treat the .club like a .com.  Why would you have two competing, conflicting properties?  There needs to be something different about the .club – it’s not just about doing all the .club stuff, because it’s the hot new thing, and you need to grab your name, or otherwise someone’s going to grab your name, so it’s an insurance-protected

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Why Great WordPress designers fail

There are so many themes out there– each of the providers has thousands of templates. But how many will fit the personal branding requirements for verticalized public figures like your client? Only a handful. You could spend months, as we have been, perusing the millions of templates out there. Many of them are beautiful and have visual features you might want to mimic. But this could come at the expense of building a site that has actual business value– to drive impact against your client’s stated goals specifically.And there is so much cool technology out there, which would confuse non-technical and even technical people, that we get distracted. This is why 99% of website projects fail– the technical folks have no idea of the business goal, while the business people are trying to understand tech. So my recommendation is that you start with your client’s #GCT. Make sure you understand them, even if you think that this is something you don’t need to know. Then consider the framework that we’ve been teaching the last couple of years, especially requirements that Josh and I have filmed in person. And then look at what themes will work, especially with Dan’s help.It seems like a lot more work, but you’ll find that you not only build a site that has value but looks great, too.

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Check this out

If you’re migrating websites, see this super helpful checklist from Tim Ash of SiteTuners. Most people make bone-headed mistakes when it comes to 301 redirects at the URL and domain level, damaging their SEO. We see a lot of overconfident engineers make these mistakes– even when we show them why.

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Store owners and local businesses– not everyone NEEDS to make it to your website.

In retail, we can and should expect that people who are exposed to our messaging, will just come into the store. The lower the price of the time, the less likely a consumer needs to have a website visit as an intermediate step. Consider the last time you had fast food or bought something at a chain store after seeing an ad for a special sale. Did you go to their website or were you more likely to look at maps and directions? I predict that in-store visits and offline conversions will become THE most important metrics we optimize towards. Further, with robust chat, canvas ads (look at “collection” ads), and other integrations, expect next year to be where people question the ROI of maintaining a website instead of questioning the ROI of social media. Businesses will find that Facebook and Google already do everything their website was doing and many things a website can’t do. Local is our future, but tuning websites is a necessary phase to get to local store-driven optimization. You’re hearing this from a guy who has done PPC and SEO for over 15 years and worked at a major search engine. Facebook and Google (via Google My Business) won’t be ready for at least a year to properly serve mainstream locals.

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