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What to Expect from a Web Design Company

Posted on by Phil

Hiring a website design company can be a daunting task. Where do you start? Who is the best company to use? Will you see results from a new website? How much will a website cost? Should you even hire a web designer should you try and build your own website?

These are all completely valid concerns. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have a better idea of what to expect when you engage a web design professional.

Before we go too far, it is important to understand what you are going to be getting. There are a lot of elements that go into web design. One of the most important is the platform your website will be built on. Ask prospective designers what platform they will be using to design your website. This is important to know as some predefined proprietary website platforms–like WIX and Squarespace for example–may be great for certain businesses. However, if you are looking to scale and expand your website down the track, it is not always possible without some extensive technical ability, if at all. Therefore, ask if your website will be customisable.

If you want your website to be truly awesome and be an Inbound sales tool, it needs to work for you. It should help you educate your customers, build trust, attract leads, and grow with you as your business grows. To get more than an online reference point, a custom website may be a great fit for you. However, if you’re looking to start smaller and scale as you go, then a growth-driven website is probably the best option for you.

What’s the difference between a Custom Website and a Template Website?

Before you can determine if a custom website or a template website is a better fit for you, it’s important to know the difference between the two.

Template websites

The simplest explanation of a template website is that basic framework is provided. The design and layout are set a certain way. Then you fill it in with your own content using the tools provided. Most are a drag and drop sort of a system so that essentially “anyone” can build a website. With a template, you need to fit your content (or information) into the boxes that are already there or already provided. These platforms or systems are designed with DIY in mind. So the good news is that you can get a website up and running at a relatively low cost. The pitfalls may be if you aren’t tech-savvy or don’t have at least a basic understanding of SEO and best practices. You may be throwing away your time and what little money you do spend if this is the case.

The point of a website is to help your business get found online and help you build trust and authority. It helps you Attract leads who may want to buy from you and ultimately educate these people about your industry. So if you make a website and no one can find it, it might not be of much use. Template sites are a good way to start. However, they tend to be very hard to grow long-term.

Custom website design

Custom web design on the other hand means the sky is the limit. It means your website will also be 100% custom to you and your business. No one else will have the same one! You are only limited by your imagination – and possibly your budget. Cost is often seen as the main downside of going custom. The other downside is that it tends to take a little longer to get online. This is because your design is unique, made for your needs to accomplish your goals. These two concerns can be mitigated, however, by implementing a growth-driven website philosophy.

Growth driven design is an iterative process. This means your website is built around a strategy with your business goals in mind. It’s a long-term plan that starts by getting a site launched quickly and improving it over time. A growth-driven website will not only get you online faster, but often, you will see returns faster too. Find out more about growth-driven web design here.

A good web design company will be upfront about their abilities

As mentioned earlier, there are so many options out there. Almost anyone with some technical nous can start a web design company using the likes of Shopify or Wix. There are also a bunch of WordPress templates for sale online too, which can be purchased for as little as $50 (sometimes free if you know where to look!)

So ask your potential website company what they use to build their websites. And make sure they will be able to scale with you if you plan to grow.

What can you expect for the overall web design process?

Whist the specifics may change from company to company in terms of how they operate and collaborate, we believe the key steps in the process of designing a website are:

  1. Planning and Strategy
  2. Research and Design
  3. Content creation
  4. Web Development
  5. Optimisation, Testing, and Debugging
  6. SEO
  7. Launch

Planning and Strategy

At the beginning of your project, you should meet with a design and/or web development team to help them understand your company. This will help them know what your desired goals are for your website. At Back9, this is what we refer to as our discovery and strategy workshop.

This planning phase may also involve working through Wireframes. A basic sketch outlining the site architecture. This is to see what will fit where and what you want your website visitors to do once they get to the various pages of your website.

Content Development

Content is king when it comes to establishing trust and educating your buyers. It is imperative to understand the importance of getting content right. Content tells a story, whether it be copy (text), photos, graphics, or video. A good web design company will understand the importance of content and explain it to you.

If you’re lucky enough to find a full-service agency that fits your business, then you should expect they can also produce all of your content in-house.

The Design Phase

The research and design phase is the key part of any website design. This is where the design team takes the ideas and desired goals from the planning phase. Then, they figure out how they will work, what they will look like, and how users will interact with certain elements of the website.

Web Development

Web Development is the construction period. You will have likely signed off on a prototype design before this process begins. If you haven’t seen designs at this point this should be a red flag. You should be asking some questions of the company.

The development phase of the process is very technical so there is often not much opportunity for client input. You should still expect your web development team to check-in periodically and update you on the status of your project.

These meeting times, even after the planning period is over, are important. They allow you to notify your team about any features that you may want to change. It also helps iron out any questions that you might have.

You should have enough access to your project that, if there are ever any issues, you’ll be able to spot them. It may be the case that you would rather check-in on your project when your approval is needed. You might not want to have to follow the project day-by-day. While that’s entirely up to you, you should still be able to see how your project is progressing. This is opposed to a “big reveal” at the end.

Optimisation, Testing and Debugging

A lot of the optimization required is part of the coding and construction process. However, testing is something you should expect to be involved in. The idea of testing the website is to find any issues or bugs before it goes live. The last thing you want is for a potential customer to find them. Given you know your business best, it is important you take time to be a part of this process. You should understand what you are looking for and the errors you are trying to detect. A good web design company will explain this at the start and give you plenty of direction to carry out testing.

Debugging is fixing anything that crops up and issues or errors. Many of these can be found during testing. But some you may not notice until the website has been live for a while. If you or a customer notices one of these bugs, you should have your developer sort them quickly.

SEO

A good web design company will offer basic SEO optimisation as a standard. SEO is basically all the technical stuff that helps your site tell Google that it has the answers people are looking for. There are a lot of factors when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation. A good web design company will explain this from the start. Great SEO is not a one-off silver bullet. It should be seen as an ongoing standard practice. Whilst it will come at an ongoing cost, it is an investment. You should expect this is something your web design company should offer.

Post-Launch

After your website has launched, your team should be available for crucial issues or bug fixes. There is always a chance we have missed something.. What happens post-launch often depends on the specific nature of the project. For many, the launch is the first step in a series of ongoing updates and improvements made to a site.

Assessing what kind of post-launch support you’ll need is something that should happen during the planning process. For example, your website may require ongoing support one week out of each month to continue down your roadmap. This is for performing ad-hoc updates and so on. A website is never finished and is a business tool, so this should be an option you can expect to discuss with any good web design company.

So what to expect and how to choose a website design company

Business – whether online or bricks and mortar is about one key currency. TRUST. So in saying that, the main thing you should expect from any web design company (or arguably any company you deal with) is transparency.

Choosing-a-web-design-company

As mentioned above, a website is a business tool, a sales and marketing tool, an asset, and an investment. If you expect that is the case, then a custom website is probably the way to go for you. If you don’t agree with that, then that’s fine too. In which case, a template option could be just fine for you too.

To clearly know what to expect from a web design company, you need to know what you want to achieve. Ultimately, you should expect the company you choose to know and understand that. They should also have the abilities to deliver that too. If you are in the market for a new website, I wish you the best of luck with your journey. And I hope you get just the results you are looking for.

How Growth-Driven Website Design Works [VIDEO]

Posted on by Phil

What is growth-Driven design?

Updated 20th December 2024

In today’s fast-paced digital world, traditional website design often falls short – it’s slow, risky, and leaves little room for flexibility. So is traditional web design broken?  We believe so. And that’s where Growth-Driven Design (GDD) comes in, offering a smarter, data-driven approach to building and maintaining websites that grow with your business.

So, what exactly is Growth-Driven Design? It’s a methodology that focuses on launching quickly, learning from real user behavior, and continuously improving your site to drive better results. Unlike the old “set it and forget it” approach, GDD is all about adapting to what works best for your audience.

In this article, we’ll break down how Growth-Driven Design works, guide you through its key stages, and show you why this dynamic method is reshaping the way businesses approach web design.

Ready to discover how a GDD-driven website can help you achieve your goals? Let’s dive in.

How does Growth-Driven Design work?

The Growth-Driven Design methodology has three major stages: the strategy, the launch pad, and continuous improvement.

Strategy Phase: Building the Foundation for Success

The Strategy Phase focuses on deeply understanding your audience and their needs. By stepping into their shoes, we uncover how your website can solve their problems and guide them toward their goals.

To do this, we ask key questions:

  • Who are they?
  • What challenges do they face?
  • What are their goals?
  • How does your website fit into their journey?

This phase includes several essential steps designed to ensure your website is built with a clear purpose and user-focused strategy.

Steps of the strategy phase

1. Define Website Goals

We begin by reverse-engineering your business goals to determine how the website can help achieve them. The goals we define follow the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. This ensures we can accurately track the website’s impact on your business.

2. Understand Your Audience

Through in-depth UX (User Experience) research, we uncover insights about your users. This research may include:

  • Qualitative insights from interviews or surveys
  • Quantitative data from analytics
  • Observational studies of user behavior

The result? A clear understanding of what drives your audience and how your website can meet their needs.

3. Apply the Jobs to Be Done Framework

This framework identifies the deeper needs and motivations that drive your audience’s decisions. It helps us understand why they might choose your product or service over competitors.

Refine your audience

4. Reassess Fundamental Assumptions

We examine and refine what you already know about your market, users, and website. This includes creating or revising:

  • User problem statements
  • Unique value propositions
  • Situational triggers
  • Current user habits
  • Barriers to switching

These insights form the foundation for a user-centered strategy.

5. Develop Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are detailed, fictional representations of your ideal customers. They include key attributes like:

  • Challenges
  • Goals
  • Pain points
  • Decision-making behaviors

Personas ensure your website speaks directly to your audience’s needs.

6. Map the Buyer’s Journey

We outline each persona’s journey before, during, and after interacting with your business. This map provides a clear direction for how your website can seamlessly fit into their lives, solve their problems, and guide them to take action.

Establish Website Goals and Strategy

7. Create a Website-Specific Plan

This plan includes essential elements like:

  • Site architecture
  • On-site SEO
  • Key sections and pages
  • Technical integrations and requirements

8. Build a Website Wish List

We brainstorm a list of creative, impactful ideas to solve user challenges and meet business goals. Your wish list could include 20 to 200 items, such as:

  • Features and modules
  • Pages and sections
  • Integrations
  • Interactive elements

We’ll recommend options that have been successful for businesses with similar goals.

9. Prepare for Launch

With the strategy complete, it’s time to build your Launchpad Website – a simple, high-performing site designed to go live quickly. The real magic happens in the next phase: continuous improvement.

The Launchpad Website: A Strong Start

With a carefully crafted wish list of high-impact ideas, we move into the second phase of the Growth-Driven Design methodology: building the Launchpad Website.

The goal of this phase is simple – create a site that’s not only better than what you have today but also serves as a foundation for future growth.

It’s important to note that your Launchpad Website isn’t the final version. Think of it as a starting point – a functional, high-performing site designed to go live quickly. This approach enables you to collect valuable insights by observing how real users interact with your site.

By launching quickly without sacrificing quality, you:

  • Gather real-world data to make smarter, data-driven improvements.
  • Achieve faster results compared to the traditional web design process, which often takes six months or more to complete.

Your Launchpad Website accelerates time-to-value, setting the stage for continuous optimisation and growth in the next phase.

How to Quickly Build a Launchpad Website

Creating a high-performing Launchpad Website quickly requires strategic focus and efficient processes. Here are the key areas to prioritize to accelerate the build while maintaining quality:

1. Customise Your Approach

Every website is unique, and the approach to building a Launchpad Website should reflect that. The goal is to strike a balance between speed and quality. This often requires a mix of strategies tailored to your specific needs.

Partnering with an experienced agency (like us) can make all the difference. We guide you in selecting the best approach for your new site, ensuring a well-performing and efficient launch.

2. Leverage Design Sprints for High-Impact Pages

Design sprints are short, focused sessions that use brainstorming, prototyping, and testing to tackle specific design challenges. By concentrating on high-impact sections of your website:

  • You draw on the team’s collective expertise to generate the best ideas.
  • You create high-quality prototypes faster than traditional methods.

This approach ensures key pages are optimized and ready to perform from day one.

3. Streamline Content Development

Content creation – including text, images, and video – is often the most time-consuming part of any website build. To avoid delays:

  • Implement an efficient content development process.
  • Use collaboration tools to improve communication and productivity.

The result? Faster production timelines and higher-quality content to fuel your website’s success.

4. Invest in Internal Efficiencies

Internal efficiencies can dramatically speed up the Launchpad process. Consider these strategies:

  • Transition from a waterfall process to an agile or scrum framework for faster iteration.
  • Build a library of pre-designed templates to save time.
  • Minimise developer dependencies, enabling marketers or in-house teams to make updates using user-friendly tools.

These optimisations empower your team to work smarter and make updates seamlessly.

Once the strategy has been created and your launchpad website is live, the next step is the Continuous Improvement stage of the Growth-Driven Design methodology.

Continuous Improvement

The Continuous Improvement stage focuses on identifying and implementing high-impact actions to grow your business using real user data. After your website is launched, it’s easy to lose focus on what will drive the most significant results. That’s why we follow a simple, agile process: Plan, Build, Learn, and Transfer.

Planning: Setting the Focus

In the planning step of the cycle, we’ll define the most impactful items to build or optimize at that moment in time to drive toward your goals. This starts by determining an area of focus that your team can rally their improvement efforts around. Focus is key.

The challenge is, there are many areas you could work on: from messaging to layouts to building new pages to optimizing existing ones. The wide range of options can make it overwhelming and difficult to determine where to best focus your time.

It’s helpful to have a website performance roadmap, so we can figure out where best to focus your time, i. The performance roadmap is a framework for us ensure you’re spending time and energy on improving the most impactful areas.

The roadmap helps you set clear expectations on exactly what you should and should not be working on and why. And because there are specific metrics to measure for each focus area, you can easily measure and report on your progress building a peak-performing website.

Building

The first step in the cycle is to define the most impactful items to build or optimize to move closer to your goals. The key here is focus.

Why Focus Matters

There are countless areas you could work on—messaging, layouts, creating new pages, or optimizing existing ones. Without a clear direction, it can quickly become overwhelming to decide where to invest your time.

The Website Performance Roadmap

To stay on track, we use a performance roadmap—a framework designed to prioritize your efforts and ensure time is spent improving the areas that matter most.

  • Clarity: The roadmap sets clear expectations about what to focus on and why.
  • Metrics: Each focus area is tied to measurable metrics, making it easy to track progress and report results.

With the roadmap in place, your team can rally around a specific area of focus, driving meaningful improvements without distractions.

Building: Bringing the Plan to Life

The next step is implementation. Using the performance roadmap, we track progress and guide the build process across three major themes: Establish, Optimise, and Expand.

1. Establish: Laying the Foundation

The “Establish” phase focuses on foundational activities immediately after launch.

  • Quick Wins: Address low-hanging fruit—high-impact actions that are fast and easy to execute.
  • Audience Building: Collect data and run experiments to understand user behavior.
  • Value Confirmation: Ensure the website delivers measurable value to users.

2. Optimise: Enhancing Performance

The “Optimize” phase improves both user experience and business outcomes.

  • Usability Improvements: Ensure visitors can unlock value quickly and effortlessly.
  • Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Streamline funnels to reduce friction and increase conversions.
  • Personalization: Tailor experiences to individual users or segments, providing relevance and value.

3. Expand: Maximising Impact

The “Expand” phase focuses on growing the website’s role within your business.

  • New Digital Products: Add features like tools, directories, or interactive resources.
  • Customer Journey Enhancements: Develop elements that support the full journey, such as customer support portals or advocacy programs.
  • Cross-Team Enablement: Build tools to help other teams, such as sales enablement features to assist with prospecting and closing deals.

The Expand phase helps the website contribute to the growth of the entire organisation.

The Lifecycle of Continuous Improvement

The roadmap aligns with the lifecycle of your website:

  • After Launch: Focus on “Establish” and “Optimise” to stabilise and improve foundational elements.
  • Over Time: Progress into the “Expand” phase to grow the website’s impact across the business.

By consistently planning, building, and optimising based on user data, your website evolves into a dynamic tool that supports long-term growth.

Is every website different?

Every website is different, which is why it’s essential to let performance metrics and user experience guide your continuous improvement efforts. By reassessing your priorities each quarter, you can focus on the areas that will deliver the greatest impact. This quarterly reassessment ensures your team directs time and resources to what matters most. Once a focus area is chosen, it’s crucial to stay consistent. Shifting focus mid-cycle can lead to wasted effort with little measurable progress.

With a clear focus, the next step is to conduct user experience research. This process uncovers the challenges or friction points users face on your website and identifies barriers that may be preventing them from reaching their goals. Armed with these insights, your team can brainstorm new action items designed to solve user challenges, deliver value, and improve key performance metrics—all while staying aligned with your chosen focus area.

After generating ideas, it’s time to prioritise. Not all ideas will have equal impact, so focus on identifying the highest-value actions first. Based on your team’s workload capacity, select the top items to implement within the quarter. Any remaining ideas can be revisited in the next planning cycle. This method ensures resources are used efficiently, delivering meaningful improvements without being stretched too thin.

By tailoring your approach to your website’s unique needs and following this structured process, you’ll create a dynamic and evolving digital experience that consistently drives results and meets user expectations.

Turning Ideas into Action

With those high-impact action items ready for the current sprint, we’ll collaboratively create detailed action item cards, each containing four essential elements:

  1. A clear description of the specific customer scenario, framed as a “job statement.”
  2. A hypothesis statement outlining your proposed change and the impact you expect it to have.
  3. Supporting research or data to validate your hypothesis.
  4. An experimental design detailing how the hypothesis will be tested.

Armed with a focus and prioritised action items, it’s time to move to the next step in the continuous improvement cycle: Build. This phase involves hosting a focused working sprint with a cross-functional team to tackle all high-impact action items.

Much like a sports team in the heat of the game, your team will “swarm” these tasks, collaborating aggressively to get them done. This means syncing schedules, aligning on meetings, and dedicating collective work time to ensure every action item is completed efficiently and effectively.

But it doesn’t stop there. Alongside building the action items, the team will set up the experiments as outlined in the experimental design. This ensures we can measure the impact of each action item accurately, validating or invalidating the original hypothesis with real data.

Once everything is ready, we’ll launch the updates and let your audience interact with the experiments. After sufficient time—specific to each experiment—we’ll move forward to the next phase in the cycle: Learn.

Learn: Turning Insights Into Growth

The Learn step is where we pause to review the experiments you’ve run and extract valuable insights about your audience. Did your original hypothesis hold true, or was it proven wrong? If it turned out wrong, that’s perfectly okay – especially when you’re starting out and testing bold new ideas.

What matters most is what you learn from the outcomes. Dive into the data and ask:

  • What did your audience’s actions and behaviors reveal?
  • How can these insights shape future action items?

This step is critical because every cycle adds to your understanding of your audience. The more we learn, the better we become at creating value for your users and achieving your business goals. Each iteration builds on the last, refining our approach and increasing the likelihood of success.

Learning is a cornerstone of the Growth-Driven Design philosophy. It’s an ongoing process that ensures your website continues to improve, delivering even greater results over time. With each cycle, we uncover new opportunities to optimise and grow, turning insights into actionable improvements.

Transfer: Amplifying Insights Across Your Business

The final step of the continuous improvement cycle is Transfer – where the insights gained from experiments are shared across your organisation to drive growth beyond just your website. This step ensures the knowledge and ideas generated in the cycle benefit your entire business.

Through internal communications and collaborative meetings, we’ll share findings from the experiments, showcasing what worked, what didn’t, and the reasons behind each outcome. These insights fuel strategic recommendations for future improvements while opening up discussions with other teams to uncover additional opportunities and fill gaps in user research. This collaborative approach turns website learnings into company-wide advancements.

The transfer phase also reinforces the cyclical nature of Growth-Driven Design. Every two weeks, the steps – plan, build, learn, and transfer – are repeated, creating momentum with each iteration. New action items are implemented to achieve the current quarterly focus, and once metric goals are met, attention shifts to a new theme from your website performance roadmap. This ensures your website and business continue to grow and adapt, delivering greater value to users and sustained success over time.

Growth-Driven Design: A Smarter Path to Website Success

The Growth-Driven Design methodology begins with careful planning and research during the Strategy Phase, where we develop a deep understanding of your audience and create a solid roadmap for success. Next comes building a comprehensive wish list of ideas that guide the creation of your Launchpad Website—a high-performing foundation that’s better than what you have today but designed to grow and evolve over time.

From there, the focus shifts to the Continuous Improvement Phase, where we implement a cycle of plan, build, learn, and transfer to drive month-over-month improvements. This ongoing process ensures your website continues to meet user needs, improve performance metrics, and adapt to emerging trends.

Unlike traditional “set-it-and-forget-it” web design, Growth-Driven Design offers a dynamic, iterative approach that keeps your website ahead of the curve in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

The future of web design is Growth-Driven

A Growth-Driven Website Design doesn’t just adapt; it evolves. By continuously improving, it drives results month after month, helping every aspect of your business grow.

Think of Growth-Driven Design as the foundation of a high-performance sports car. While the design itself is sleek and powerful, you still need fuel—your marketing and sales efforts—to keep it moving. Together, these elements create the ultimate engine for business growth.

The challenges of traditional, “set-it-and-forget-it” web design are solved with Growth-Driven Design. This is the future of web design—the playbook for building a peak-performing website that grows with your business.

If you’re inspired to leave behind outdated web design and start building a website that drives real growth, let’s talk! Hit the meeting button below to explore how Growth-Driven Website Design can work for your business.

Book your FREE Initial Discovery Meeting

All information about the growth-driven website design methodology is derived from Hubspot and Growth-Driven Design.

How does video help SEO?

Posted on by Phil

You’ve likely heard the term SEO (search engine optimisation), but did you know adding video to your website can drastically improve your SEO efforts and drive more people to your website?

Ranking a website in the long term is not just about building a large number of links. It’s also about creating high-quality content that will encourage link clicks over time. However, one type of SEO that still is under-utilised is VSEO (video search engine optimisation).

Google and VSEO

Google’s algorithms are increasingly prioritising websites with video content. It’s not something you want to ignore. The vast majority of online experiences start with a search engine, so you need to everything you can to get your website on that first page. And you especially want to appear in the first three results — the top three spots get over 75% of all clicks.

Video SEO content can be a fantastic tool for increasing conversions on just about any website. More businesses than ever are using videos on their landing pages and on various other pages of their websites to keep visitors engaged and, eventually, convince them to make a purchase. It is easier for your customer to consume whatever information you are presenting through a video, rather than reading an article. 

Should I only do video then?

Video is great for your website. However, video alone won’t be your saving grace. Think of it as a link in the chain. Video gives you a boost in rankings, which allows more people to see your site, which means more people will click on your link. But they won’t actually stay on your site very long if your on-page content isn’t high-quality. As a matter of fact, this could be detrimental. Hosting a low-quality video with little or no context will make your rank plummet. At the start, more people may see your site, but if your page doesn’t satisfy their intent, they’ll quickly exit your page — telling the search engines your site doesn’t give the people what they want.

If used correctly though, video can be an extremely powerful form of content and make a significant contribution to your overall SEO strategy.

Some quick tips on video

Video encompasses a huge range of material, and there’s a lot to learn. But here are a few quick tips to help you get started.

  • You don’t have to make every video professional. Spontaneous videos are great for catching something in the moment.
  • It is important to know your audience in order to know what kind of video to make. If you already have a large following with loyal customers then you will use a different tone of voice compared to if you were looking to build a new audience.
  • Google owns YouTube. This means that they are far more likely to rank videos hosted on YouTube. If you want your videos to rank in Google search, hosting them on YouTube is a great idea.

You can learn more about video by reading about our videography service–or get in touch and let us help you out!

Do Google Ads work?

Posted on by Phil

The internet is rife with advertising. Ads appear before YouTube videos, in the middle of Facebook feeds, and on top of Google results. Google Ads–formerly Google AdWords–are the ads that appear before the normal results. They’re a quick way to get to spot one on Google quickly. But does advertising on Google Ads really work?

For many businesses, yes, it does. However, success depends on many factors, such as how much time you invest into creating the ads, the quality of the website itself, and of course, advertising budget. Even on a smaller budget, Google Ads can work–as long as they’re done right.

The different goals of advertising on Google Ads

Ask most businesses what their goal for Google Ads is, and they’ll answer with “Get more customers”. And Google Ads can help with that. But the final sale or new customer is only one stage of the Buyer’s Journey. There are several different types of goals in Google Ads with the main ones being getting website visits, getting leads, and making sales.

Google Ads Audit Offer CTA image

Getting website visits through Google Ads

Not all sites need or even want sales or customers. For some, the goal is to raise awareness. Think of non-profits like charities, who want people to be aware of a specific issue. They may not have anything to sell. They may not accept donations. For these types of sites, the goal is to educate customers, and you’ll pay Google Ads for each click on your ad that leads to your website, with the average across all industries being about $3.80 NZD per click.

One study showed that educated customers are over 130% more likely to do business with a company. And the more expensive the product or service, the more likely someone is to do thorough research before making a decision. Using the website traffic goal can help get people to your website–then it’s up to you to have the right information on the site to keep them interested. If your site is small and simple and you don’t add articles or updates regularly, the website traffic goal may not be right for you.

Since costs per click (CPC) are relatively low, they’re a fantastic option for a smaller budget. Sometimes, people simply don’t know that you’re an option. By showing up in Google for the right keywords, they can find you, learn about you, and maybe decide to do business with you.

Getting leads through Google Ads

When you can’t make sales directly through the website or are looking to get leads, advertising on Google Ads can help you get them. Google Ads can help by having you pay for each conversion. Standard options for conversions include calls made by clicking the call button on an ad or filling out a contact form. You can also set them for custom actions–like if someone visits a thank you page–but these require adding some code to your site manually or by using Google Tag Manager. Naturally, the cost for a conversion action is much higher than the cost per click, currently at around $70 NZD per conversion.

The benefit of using this kind of goal and bidding strategy is that you can see how many leads come directly from ads. If you sell a service that profits you $500 and ends up costing $50 to get a customer, then you’ve gotten yourself a pretty good deal… Especially if they become a regular!

Getting Sales through Google Ads

If you have the ability for people to buy products directly on your website, you can create Google Ads to target getting purchases. Using this goal is great because it’s easy to track if your ads are making you money. However, to work properly it requires extra setup and adding code to your website to track purchases. Technically, a sale is considered a conversion action by Google Ads. This means across all industries, the average is $70 NZD.

For smaller, less expensive products however, this amount can be much lower. The cost per action on apparel, for example, is around $15 NZD. On the opposite end, for high-tech industries, it’s over $180 NZD.

How do you get your cost per click or cost per action lower?

If those costs seem like they’re a bit on the high side, that’s because they are. Properly made and optimised ads can be much cheaper and deliver better results. But these require a bigger time investment both for the ads and for the website itself.

Google decides how much an ad costs to run based on Quality Score. This quality score is a scale of 1-10 and includes the relevance of the keywords, the design and writing on the ad itself, and the relevance of the page the ad leads to. Using the keyword “best” and with an ad that just says “We’re the best” and a page with only “Call us now” will be closer to a 1. Well-written ads leading to an optimised page clearly related to the search term can get you a 10. And the difference in cost for quality ads isn’t just a little bit either. A 10 ad can cost half as much of a 4 ad and several times less than a 1.

Real-world examples of successful Google Ads

At Back9 Creative, we have several clients who are consistently outperforming others in their industry with better results at a lower cost. Some of these include:

  • A retail store with a cost per click of 20 cents NZD–less than 1/10 of the average across all industries and less than 1/5 of the average for other e-commerce sites.
  • A property maintenance company with $34 NZD cost per action — less than half of the Consumer Services average of $84 NZD.
  • A speciality service B2B business with under $2 NZD cost per click and $60 NZD cost per action — with average B2B at $160 NZD per action and $4.67 NZD per click.

So how are these costs so much lower than average? First, we are certified in Google Ads, which involves taking courses created by Google and passing the certification exam. We also aim to maximise Quality Score through a combination of creating professional ads with excellent website experiences. Finally, we update ads, campaigns and keywords regularly to maximise effectiveness. If you’re looking to advertise on Google Ads successfully, get in touch with us today and see what Google Ads can do for your business.

Google Ads Packages

9 Reasons Why you should use a professional copywriter

Posted on by Phil

Whether you’re building a new website, want to extend your reach on social media or are eager to create emails people will actually need, there’s a lot of writing to be done. But are you or someone in your business the “write” person for the job? Or should you hire a professional copywriter?

It might seem like there’s not much point in working with a copywriter. After all, most of us can write, and spell-checkers take a lot of the worry away. However, spelling and grammar are only one benefit of using a professional copywriter. So why should you consider using one fo your marketing efforts?

1. Top-level researchers

Copywriters write a lot. One of the most essential parts of the writing process is doing research and providing accurate information. Many copywriters write for a variety of clients, in all kinds of industries. Yet, they have to sound like an expert in each one. How do they possibly do that? Through research. Lots and lots of research. Facts are verified, claims are double or triple checked, and obscure information tracked down. Research is an essential skill of any skilled copywriter so that they can find the information they need, verify that it’s legitimate, then reword it in a new way for a specific audience.

2. Large word counts aren’t a problem.

When you were in school, did you have trouble meeting minimum word counts? Did you prefer multiple choice exams over essay questions? For most professional copywriters, the opposite is true. If anything, they were more worried about writing too much! Yoast, a leader in helping people get found on Google, suggests blog posts of at least 1000 words. HubSpot takes that a step further and recommends 2100-2400 words (like this article!) To put that in perspective, that’s about 4-5 pages in Microsoft Word. Single-spaced. 8-10 pages for double spaced.

3. Masterful communicators

Some people have trouble putting their thoughts on paper. The ideas inside might be brilliant, but conveying that brilliance to other people might be a challenge. Copywriters tend to have an ever-growing, expansive vocabulary and choose the right words for the specific audience who will be reading the work. Those words might include slang, idioms, or even technical jargon–words and phrases that the copywriter will learn through the research process. Different audiences react differently to word choice, and it’s the copywriter’s job to identify which words will appeal to the majority.

4. Help you avoid duplicate content

Google isn’t a fan of copying and pasting from other sites. If you copy something from one site and post on your own, Google will likely give the credit to the original site. That site will be the original author, while yours will be considered duplicate content. Copying and pasting means that Google will only show one version in the search results, so both sites can be hurt by it. But what if what you want to put online already exists somewhere online? A copywriter can help you rework that content and make it your own. The new version will be made in your style and also have an increased chance of ranking well in Google.

Duplicate content penalties apply for your own site too. You might think that if you want to talk about the same product or service in two or more different places you can just copy it. Unfortunately, some bad players used to do that to stuff their target keywords all over their site to trick Google years back, so now Google punishes instead of rewarding that behaviour.

Instead of copying the exact same thing, you should alter the wording so that it has the same message but isn’t a straight copy-paste. Professional copywriters can do this easily through writing, and ones who are also tech-savvy can add signals like canonical links to tell Google that the content on two pages is identical and to only count one page. This can be useful in many situations, like when you have something like a search bar and want the search results to pull text previews directly from the target page and don’t want a duplicate content penalty for doing so.

5. Choose the right voice and tone

It’s essential that your website uses an appropriate style, one that reflects you and your values. A common misconception is that the only correct tone is to be overly formal, almost academic. Instead, what matters most is consistency. If formal suits you, that’s fine. But if you’d rather be funny, straightforward, conversational, or sarcastic, those can all work too. And a copywriter can handle any one of those styles.

Take the message “A copywriter is a good investment” and see how that same message can be portrayed in several different styles:

Formal

Professional copywriters tend to have advanced degrees in English Literature and Composition. They are skilled in researching, creating, and revising blogs, essays, and more. Because of their talent, abilities, and aptitude for conveying insightful, accurate messaging, a copywriter can be a considerable asset to any organisation.

Straightforward

One of the best ways to see an increase in conversions for your marketing efforts is by using a qualified copywriter. Using a professional writer can save you time by working quickly, generate revenue by attracting new leads, and help you put your message into words through a strong command of the English language.

Conversational

In order to be found in Google and to make sure you get the meaning across to your potential customers, you’ll need to do a good amount of writing across your website and social media. Working with a copywriter makes that easy. They’re expert wordsmiths and don’t just tolerate long pieces of writing–they actually enjoy it! They’re quick studies and great storytellers and can take a lot of the workload off your shoulders.

Statistical

The average person only reads the headline of an article, with just 2 out of 10 reading the whole text. This chance increases depending on the quality of the headline, with 6-word headlines being the most compelling. Once engaged, the reader will spend an average of 7 minutes reading an article. Keep in mind however that over 50% of people avoid doing business with a company who has obvious grammar errors. With so much on the line, using a professional copywriter is the smart choice to increase the chances that people will read what you have to say and become leads or even customers at your business.

Sarcastic

Did you enjoy five-page essays in school? Yep. It’d be pretty choice to do that for a living, eh? Well that’s exactly what you’re doing when you try to do the writing for your digital marketing all on your own. Sure, it’s nice that you got 3rd place in the classwide essay competition in Grade 5 about why your great grandpappy was your hero. But now, every paragraph can be the difference between landing a whale worth $30k a month and sending yet another customer over to Big Al’s down the street–who’s proven he might actually be deserving of that Most Likely to Succeed trophy after all. Don’t let Al win; hire a professional copywriter and watch those fat stacks of red dollar notes appear in the black column of your revenue tracking sheet.

Regional Slang

Have you sussed out just how much writing it takes to do successful marketing? If all that work makes you think “yeah, nah” a sweet-as copywriter can create some choice work for your brand. If you’re keen to work with someone who practically shouts your company profit, a copywriter is the ideal choice to be your new old mate who can help your business write copy that’s all good.

Punny

What do you call someone who never mixes up copy/pasting? A copy righter! Don’t get left behind trying to come up with the words all on your own; make the write choice and let a professional copywriter handle the job for you!

So which style is right?

Each of those styles is conveying the same basic message, but they emphasise different points and say the message in different ways. The ideal tone and voice depends on your target market and the feelings and vibe you want your brand to give off. Don’t be afraid to try something different either–it’s important that you be you!

6. Accurate spelling and grammar

Your credibility is instantly reduced if someone finds a spelling or grammar mistake. The level of tolerance for mistakes also depends on the platform you’re on. On a personal Facebook page, most people won’t mind the occasional mistake or misspelling. Less leeway is given from a Business profile page. And for your website, you should look to have impeccable grammar, particularly on your main pages like the Home and About pages. Copywriters are also great proofreaders and can catch these mistakes whether the page was written by them or somebody else.

7. Create multiple types of content

Quick, what’s kind of content do copywriters create? Articles and blog posts are common answers, but it’s only a small fraction of the kinds of content that a professional copywriter can create. Some others include:

Navigation pages

These are the pages in your navigation bar like the Home, About, and Contact pages. Since the navigation bar is on most, if not all pages, the wording on those pages should be precise, helpful, relevant, and grammatically correct.

Landing pages

Landing pages are about one specific topic and are often what you’ll be directed from a Google search. These tend to have a single goal like generating awareness, getting leads, or trying to get a sale or a sign-up to a service.

eBooks

Writing an eBook can be a long, time-consuming task. Unlike a typical article that can be one and done, eBooks are expected to carry a related thread from start to finish. Keeping everything connected can be a challenge, but one that’s much easier for a copywriter than your average person who writes.

Technical documents

These are documents like how-to instructions, course descriptions for workshops or seminars your business is holding, documents for policies and procedures, and many more–as long as they aren’t required to be written by a lawyer, a copywriter can probably handle it!

Social media posts

Social media is steadily becoming a staple of our lives and an enormous influence. Whether you need posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or anywhere else, a copywriter can help you get the message across.

Video scripts

Video is the most popular and influential form of content these days. While the film quality is definitely important, videos with a well-written script are more engaging. Great videos often require teamwork; a star in front of the camera, a videographer behind to film and edit, and a copywriter to make sure it sounds good and makes sense!

Emails and Newsletters

Email marketing is still one of the most common forms of digital marketing. But with hundreds of emails going to a typical person’s inbox a day, how do you get read? Copywriters can help make your message enticing and interesting so you can get past the spam pile.

Blogs, News, and Articles

Writing new content helps your site get found in Google, and increases the odds that someone will find what they need from the information on your site. But these posts need to be helpful, relevant, and fresh. A professional copywriter can make sure it checks all the boxes.

And more!

There’s plenty more that a copywriter can do. You can find out about these and some other kinds of content in detail in our eBook What is content? 

8. Save you time

Even if you’re confident in your writing ability, there’s a lot of writing that goes into successful marketing. Copywriters can cut down on that time by creating content for you. Along with figuring out what to write about, copywriters also tend to be lightning-fast on the keyboard. It’s not uncommon for them to type 60, 75, or even 100 words per minute at full speed. When your goal is to write 2000 words, there’s a lot of time saved between  20 words per minute and 100!

9. Make you more money!

The right word choice can be the difference between success and catastrophe. But it can also be the difference between picking up a sale or sending a customer to the competition. HubSpot has a blog article about how small wording changes drastically increased conversions; sometimes over 100%!

If you’re keen to work with a marketing company that uses a professional copywriter who can create memorable content for your business, give us a look at Back9 Creative Studio. Feel free to give us a call, email us, message us on social media, or just stop by for a chat in downtown Invercargill!