Last episode, I talked about your vision. And if you haven’t changed your vision in this last year and a half with everything that’s going on, you really need to think about that, because we’re hitting December of 2021.

Things have changed so much in those last year and a half. And if your business hasn’t changed to accommodate them, if you haven’t redesigned your vision to take into account COVID and everything that’s been going on, I urge you do that.

Start 2022 Right: Click here to start with a brand new vision for your company.

Today, I want to talk about how you should be owning it, And I mean that literally.

You should own your website.

If your website is on Wix, Squarespace, or something like one of the free ones, or even one of the inexpensive template-based sites like GoDaddy, I urge you get your own website:  It’s going to help you so much in the search engines.

And here’s why. I’m going to give you two examples.

I have one client that contacted me about six months ago now. They had a 10 page website on Wix. And all 10 pages were in the search engines, but the site was no higher than page five.

When’s the last time you went as far as page five when looking for something? Right.

Page five is not going to get you new clients.

I did some research on their website and I found out that there was a fatal error in the template (an area that can’t be changed by users).

Here’s a big thing about errors: Websites can have errors on them, lots of errors, but you’ll never see it; The website will look great. It’s kind of like a car with a new paint job, but the engine is 500 years old, which of course can’t happen but you get the idea. You can have a terrible engine in a car that looks great.

And you can have terrible coding on a website that looks fantastic.

You never know when you see it, but the search engines will catch it. Fatal errors  are the worst. The search engines may even just stop looking at it your site when they come across a fatal error. They may index the entire site (if you’re lucky), but it won’t get high in the search engines.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why websites don’t get higher in the search engines is these errors. Because the search engine just can’t read past these errors. Or sometimes it just can’t read what’s in the area that has an error.

So having your own website, and I’m talking about WordPress, of course. Having a WordPress website, even if there are errors, they can be corrected. Most of the major themes these days do not have errors, though. And yes, most WordPress websites are theme based.

So you have to ask yourself: is that free website really doing you any good, especially if you have a Wix or a Squarespace site?

These people had a 10 page website on Wix, I have nothing against Wix, it’s great if you’re just starting out and you’re just opening your doors today or something like that, that’s fine.

But you need to plan for and budget for a better website as soon as you possibly can.

Everything is being done on the internet now. When COVID shut everything down, there were so many businesses that scrambled and went out of business simply because they didn’t have that online presence, you need that.

And if your online presence is social media, get off that now. And I don’t mean get off social media, don’t make that your cornerstone.

Your website has to be your cornerstone, and it has to be a stable website.

The second example, I just recently had a client contact me that wanted to have SEO done because they’re not getting higher in the search engines. I did some of my techie research stuff, and I found out that Google sees page one of this website, and that’s it. It doesn’t even see the rest of the website. This is one of these templates, but this person is paying for this template.

And the template is so messed up that search engines can’t see any part of the site but the home page.

Maybe that’s a temporary thing, but it certainly doesn’t help this business, does it?

Let’s say you have a 10 page website and only one page is being found in the search engines. Google loves websites that have continuity across multiple pages, and they reward you for that. So if they only see one page, it’s probably not going to get to the top of the search engine, so it’s really not worth it.

Let’s get down to brass tacks though. Let’s talk about actual money. What’s it going to cost to have a WordPress website?

There are companies that charge $5000-10,000 for a 10 page WordPress website. And that’s ridiculous unless you have something very special going on.

You should never be paying that kind of money for a 10 page website, there’s just no reason for it anymore. I would say the maximum that you pay to have a website design should be $2,500.

Here at PortBell.com, We charge under $1,500 for a basic 10 Page marketing website. Contact us if you’d like to get more information about that.

However, the website’s only part of it, you want good hosting and you want your domain name, of course, as well. You may already have your domain name. But if you don’t, check out KoolWebHosting.com. You get .com domain names for under $12 a year.

Oh, and watch out for these companies that give you a free domain name because chances are, if they’re giving it to you for free, they own it, not you.

When you move away from them, you can’t get that domain name so you’ve just lost out on everything you’ve done. So don’t do a free domain name, go to KoolWebHosting.com, get your own domain name  and pay the $12 bucks a year.

Now the domain is only part 2 of it, though. You need hosting as well. And KoolWebHosting.com, of course, has hosting too. It’s like $90 a year. So you’re paying what $102 A year. And don’t quote me on these prices. It’s actually a little bit less than that. But let’s say let’s say you’re paying $110 a year, that’s less than $10 a month that you’re paying for hosting and the domain name.

And with our services, you get an email address also. So you have your email address with your domain name and your hosting, you don’t have a Gmail account.

You want to look professional and part of looking professional is having that email address as part of your domain name. You know, sally@{mydomain}.com or something like that. That’s so important; It looks great and it looks much more professional.

But here’s the big thing. I can compare two websites and one of them would be on Wix and one of them would be on WordPress, the WordPress website 99.9% of the time is much higher in the search engines than the Wix website would be. And it was gets higher in the search engines easier.

I’ve gotten Wix websites onto page one, but it cost a lot of money. It would have cost less money for them to have the site redesigned than it did for me to do all the SEO work on it, but that’s what they wanted.

So we’re in December 2021 right now. for 2022, to make it your goal, get your own website and get it on your own hosting.

Don’t have social media be your cornerstone because Facebook could shut down tomorrow. And you may sit there say, well, Facebook’s not going to shut down tomorrow. Why would Zuckerberg ever do that?  Zuckerberg is rich, you really think he needs more money? He can say no, I don’t want to do this anymore. And if you think that won’t happen, for those of you old people like me remember MySpace, or Prodigy? Or America Online? Or let’s go a little bit more recent: Google Plus?

Google is a huge company, they could have run Google Plus forever at a loss and it wouldn’t have hurt their company hardly at all. But they still shut it down, and that affected a lot of businesses.

In fact, I know a couple businesses that went out of business when Google Plus stopped simply because they had all of their stuff on Google Plus.

Get your own website. If Facebook goes down tomorrow, you will still have your website. I had my first website in 1995 and that website still runs today. And it costs me about $11 a month now, that’s it. It’s not that expensive.

So once you have that one time price of having your site designed then you just got the hosting and domain costs. So get your website done.

Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO