Buying a website is the first step to become a success online but picking the cheapest option, or even a free website, will probably never be seen by anyone. There are so many web design companies that offer their services and say its great for SEO marketing and performing well on Google, but there really not! Here are the factors you must consider before buying a website as you could be wasting your money and time.
Access
To make the necessary changes to your website to rank well on Google for your industries keywords you need to have full access to all elements of your website. If you cannot access these elements there is no way you can make these required changes and your at a stand still before you even started your SEO marketing.
- Full FTP access all files and folders on your domains hosting account.
- Full access to all web pages HTML code.
- Ability to install plugins.
- Ability add/edit pages.
- Ability to add blog posts.
All these above elements allow you to promote and expand your website as your business grows. If any of the above is restricted you will not be able to progress your website as well as you should.
Branding and Theme Changes
You need the ability to customise every single aspect of your site including adding your logo, images, layout of your web pages and even the colour scheme. Most designers give you a template that doesn’t allow you to make this changes and you are very restricted what can go where and how its displayed. Branding is important for your SEO marketing as it allows you to push your brand around the web, printing and social media accounts.
How is It Coded
How your website is coded is vital to a successful SEO marketing campaign. You can use W3C to check if the design is up to the latest HTML5 and CSS3 standard. Your HTML coding also reflects on how quickly your website loads and is displayed on mobile and tablet devices. People will not wait for websites to load, they will just go else where and more and more people use their mobiles or tablets to search Google for what they want.
Selling Products or Services
You should be able to edit your products or services if you have an eCommerce website whenever you like. Having full access to this is vital if you’re adding a new product or special offer. Having to go through a web web design to make these changes can be costly and waste a lot of time, even though it only takes a few minutes to do.
Ability To Add Blog Posts
Blogging is vital for your SEO marketing as it will contribute to large amounts of inbound links, website visitors and social shares. Being able to add high quality blog posts regularly is an absolute must, if you are unable to do this then you may as well give up now.
Whats The Best Platform To Use?
I suggest going with a web designer that builds WordPress websites. You are able to achieve all the above functions with ease and guess what… WordPress websites perform great on Google! The biggest factor to remember with having a WordPress website is you need to have Admin user credentials. Anything less than this will not allow you to carry out most SEO marketing features.