WEBSITE DESIGN PORTFOLIO
WEB DESIGN TORONTO PRICES. HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU REALLY SPEND FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
How Your Website Makes You Money
Most business owners that are just getting started in their entrepreneurial journey don’t know that your website can help generate a majority of your business revenue, regardless if you are a brick and mortar business or you sell things online, having a well-built website can help set you up for success. In our web design Toronto agency, this is exactly what we specialize in. For over 8 years, we’ve been helping businesses of all sizes get more results by leveraging conversion-optimized web design and strategic digital marketing campaigns.
Having an amazing looking website to represent your brand and your image is so important. If you are just opening up your first business, it’s no longer enough to just have a website and assume that everything is going to go nice and smooth because all of your competitors have websites, the secret is to have a website that looks 10x better than your competitor’s website.
The average customer is going to Google search a product or service and clicks on the first 5 websites that show up on the first page of Google. Simply showing up on Google is half the battle, getting people to buy from your website vs your competitors’ website is the other half of the battle.
How Your Website Will Help You Get Customers
Let’s look at things from your customer's perspective on how they are going to evaluate which company they are going to buy from. Your customer is going to open up 5 websites on their web browser and one of the first things they are going to notice is which website looks better. Having an amazing-looking website shows your customer that you care about your business and will capture their interest for more evaluation. The websites that they came across that have a terrible design, are automatically going to get removed from the selection process. Think of it this way, if you are looking to hire a web design Toronto agency if they had a bad looking website, could you trust them to build yours?
The Importance of Standing Out from The Competition
The next thing a customer is going to do is find specific products or services that they are looking for on your website, it’s important that you work your web design Toronto agency to develop the right pages on your website that will help customers find exactly what they are looking for. Having your website organized with dedicated pages for each of your products or services can help you improve your conversion rate. If you provide services, it can be helpful to have price ranges on your website so that customers can get a sense of what things cost. We’ve done this for some of our clients and noticed a huge increase in conversions simply by adding price ranges of services we have on the website. Consider adding long-form content on your website that can help educate customers on which of your products or services might be best suited for their needs.
How to Find Amazing Free Photography for Your Website?
The next web design element you want to take into consideration is photography. It’s going to be very difficult to make your website look good if you don’t have a lot of photos to add to your pages. Simply taking a few photos with your iPhone is not going to be enough, since those images are not professionally edited, the lighting will be off and the general aesthetic won’t flow with the rest of the images on your website.
If you fall into this category, it's best to use professional stock photography on your website. You have both free options to choose from and paid options to choose from. We will attach links to the bottom of this page so you can go through these sites and start choosing some amazing photography for your website. The paid stock photography options will have the best variety of photos and the free stock photography providers will have lesser variety, but still plentiful for any new business owner that’s just getting started. (See links below this page)
Which Review Websites Should You Care About the Most?
After a customer narrows down a few websites that they like, the next thing they will look at is reviews. The best place to collect reviews for your brand is through your Google Maps listing. Reviews on your Google maps listing will directly influence the position of your website ranking in Google search. So, with that in mind, try and get as many positive reviews as you possibly can, if your top competitor has 20 5-star reviews, try and get at least 30, if your top competitor has 200+ 5-star reviews, well then you have a lot of catching up to do. In the eyes of a customer, choosing a business with more reviews is going to be a safer bet.
Work toward getting as many reviews as possible. Don’t try and leave yourself fake reviews from new Gmail accounts, Google can figure these things out and their algorithms will penalize you for it. As a business owner, you want to be on top and always making sure that your customers are happy with your products or services. If you get a complaint, make sure you handle it asap.
Too many negative reviews can cause permanent damage to your business and it will make it very difficult for your sales staff to close new customers. If you do have bad reviews make sure you respond back and explain your side of the story, if the customer has a legit complaint, be proactive and make it up to them in hopes of them removing the negative review. It's always better to spend some money and keep customers happy than lose out on future sales because of bad reviews.
What Type of Website You Should Get?
Cloud Base Website Builders: If you run a local service-based business or brick and mortar, you can save yourself a lot of money by hiring a web design Toronto agency to build you a website using a cloud-based website builder. Your website will get built a lot faster and once it is complete, you and your staff can get training on how to edit the website and make updates regularly. For most small businesses, using our own website builder will have more than enough features to help you grow and scale your business. Our web design platform has multilingual features, backend coding access for developers to add features in the future, e-commerce integration with one of the largest providers in the industry, and of-course the design of our website are SEO friendly as well.
WordPress Websites: We typically recommend WordPress websites for enterprise-level businesses, that operate in multiple countries around the world and need advanced system integrations for their business. WordPress allows us to add an unlimited number of customizations once the website is complete, however, it does take a lot more time to build WordPress websites and can cost business owners a lot more money.
E-Commerce Websites: For businesses that primarily focus on selling products online, we recommend using Shopify since it’s one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world. All the advanced features and integrations that we need, to help you grow and scale your business. In our web design Toronto agency, we have a lot of experience with generating sales for e-commerce stores so you can rest assured knowing that your business is in good hands.
How SEO Can Help You Grow Your Business From 0 – 7 Figures
Once we finish building a website for our client, we always start marketing the business by doing something called Google Ads. This allows us to pay to be on the first page of Google. For example, we can have a $20/day budget or we can have a $1000/day budget, which really depends on the revenue goals of our client. Apart from doing Google Ads, we can also do something called SEO.
SEO is the process of getting your website to show up number 1 on Google without having to pay for it. However, you do end up having to pay an SEO consultant to write content for your business, build backlinks for your business until your website ranks number 1 on Google. SEO can take anywhere between 6-months to 1 year before your website ranks number 1 on Google. Although it is a long-term investment, Ranking number 1 on Google can help your business generate anywhere from 6 figures to 7 figures plus in additional revenue, really depending on the size and scale of the industry you are in and the types of keywords your rank for.
You can easily pay and run Google ads to get customers to your business, we simply recommend businesses to do Google ads first and SEO second. If you want to grow and scale your business, focusing on Google ads and SEO should be one of the top things you need to focus on as a business owner, since these actions directly influence the level of revenue your business will make long-term. Luckily in our web design Toronto agency, we offer full digital marketing services so business owners don’t have to worry about web design or online marketing.
Should You Hire a Web Designer or Marketer?
The simple answer is, you need both, however you can save a lot of money by hiring a company that can fulfill both roles for your company. In our web design Toronto agency, we help businesses all over Toronto with all of their web design and online marketing needs. Both of these services work hand in hand. Simply having a website won’t make any impact on your business, you also need a proper digital marketing strategy to help you bring the right type of customer to your website.
Best Practises for Your Website – Google Related
The Importance of Fast Load Speed: If you have a slow website that takes forever to load, customers are going to click the back button and your chances of converting that website visitor into a customer is pretty much non-existent. Google announced a few years ago that websites that load slowly will have lower rankings than faster loading websites.
To mitigate this problem for our customers in our web design Toronto agency, we use Amazon Web Servers as our primary hosting provider, we also compress all of the images on your website before we upload them which helps to improve your website load speed significantly. If you decided to use our cloud-based web design platform, all of your images get optimized automatically. For a full list of our cloud-based web design features, send us an email and we will forward a PDF file with more info.
Mobile Optimization
The majority of customers will shop for products and services with their mobile devices, it’s incredibly important to have your website look amazing on mobile devices, according to Google, within the next few years, mobile searches will surpass desktop searches so it’s incredibly important to have a mobile-optimized website. As a trusted web design Toronto agency, we always want to make sure that our clients are ahead of the game, which is why we were one of the first agencies to roll out mobile-optimized websites as standard for our clients.
HTTPS Website Security
Google cares about its customers that go on Google and search for products and services or use any of their online services, you as a business owner need to be compliant and make sure that your website is secure and safe for all the people that will be browsing your website. To secure your website, you need to enable HTTPS usually by purchasing an SSL certificate. All of the websites that we build inside our web design Toronto agency, come with full HTTPS as standard. We cover the cost of purchasing and the setup so that our clients don’t have to waste time trying to figure out how to get this done right.
Duplicate Content
Your business will need content, the more content you can add to your website, the better. Most business owners by default will go and search for competitor websites and copy and paste random pieces of text. This is one of the worst things you can do for your website, Google will automatically recognize this and penalize your website so it’s best to avoid doing this sort of thing. Be careful if you decide to hire freelance content writers, they may sell you plagiarized content in hopes of cutting down on their work time. You could potentially face legal action from another website owner for stealing their content, so make sure you use a tool like Grammarly to scan every single piece of content to see if it is stolen. (See Grammarly link below this content)
Directory Listings
Submitting your website to several directories is a great SEO tactic to let Google know that you are a legitimate business. Make sure that your business name, address and phone number always stays consistent across all directory listings. Below this article you will find a list of the top recommended places to submit your business, however, you should always make an effort to find relevant business directories that are suitable for your niche and to create profiles in those directories. Feel free to use the free profile options since the paid versions rarely bring any real value to your business, however, certain directories might be an exception.
Social Media Profiles
Regardless if you decide to use social media or not, you will need to register your business on all social media profiles, because if you don’t. Most likely your competitor will take your name and register a profile, or a digital squatter might target you and create a profile on behalf of your business. Make sure you do this early on and keep the login information safe. As your trusted web design Toronto agency, we want you to get started on the right foot, so any business or marketing related questions you have, you should always have a digital strategist that you can refer to. As a client of our agency, we set you up with all the resources you need to help you succeed in the digital world. Below this page, you will find tons of tools and resources that can help you better understand the world of web design and marketing.
Choosing the Right Domain for Your New Website
When it comes to choosing a domain for your business, first, do a Google search and see if the business name that you want to use is already being used by another business, if it is, considers using a separate name. If there is another business already using the name, both of your websites will compete on the first page of Google and you might end up sending a lot of free visitors to another website simply because they outrank you for your own desired business name.
Chances are, you won’t outrank them any time soon so make sure you choose a unique business name. When you decide to buy the domain, make sure you choose a domain that is easy to spell and easy to remember. Don’t use random spelling, make it as easy as possible for your customers to remember how to Google it in the future. When you end up on a domain registrar website, make sure you purchase both the .com version of the domain and the .ca version of the domain especially if you live in Canada. If the .com version is not available, we wouldn’t recommend using that domain since you could be losing a lot of website visitors in the future simply because another website is using the same domain as you.
If you ever decide to do business in Europe or anywhere else, consider buying a relevant domain extension that matches the area. You can have all of these domains redirect to one primary domain, reach out to our web design Toronto agency for more info on how to handle this.
How to Choose the Right Location for Your Business?
Location does play a role but it is not as important as it uses to be with a few exceptions of course. If you run a coffee shop, gym, grocery store or restaurant, then you want to consider finding a location with lots of foot traffic. However, if you run a specialty service or sell expensive products, you can choose a location anywhere in the GTA.
However, it will make things a lot easier from an SEO perspective if your business is located somewhere along the borders of Toronto. Most people will Google products or services using a Toronto keyword, so it would make it a lot easier for us to rank your website number 1 on Google if your company is actually located somewhere in Toronto. Google prefers to show local businesses that are located in the actual city that the customer is searching for, In the Greater Toronto Area, Toronto keyword traffic always seems to have a higher search volume than any other city.
How to Choose the Right Web Design Company
You will have a very long-term relationship with your web design Toronto agency for many years to come, your business will evolve over the years and the marketing world will constantly change and evolve. You want to make sure that you work with a website design company that can stay up to date on all the changes and help your business stay on the path to success in the coming years. Take the time to interview a few web design Toronto agencies until you feel that you are 100% confident that you have found a company that you can trust. We hope the info we provided in this piece of content was useful to you, if you are interested in having us help your business grow, send us an email and you will hear from us within 1 business day.
Here Are the Best Resources of Tools, Links & Free Business Training Links for Business Owners
Free Stock Photography Resources
https://www.gratisography.com/
Paid Stock Photography Resources
https://www.bigstockphoto.com/
Best SEO Blogs For Free Training
Neil Patel: https://neilpatel.com/blog/
The Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog
Search Engine Journal: https://searchengineland.com/
Search Engine Roundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/
SEMRush Blog: https://www.semrush.com/blog/
Yoast Blog: https://yoast.com/seo-blog/
Google WebMaster Central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
Content Marketing Institute: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/topic/seo/
Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/
Quick Sprout: https://www.quicksprout.com/blog/
Backlinko: https://backlinko.com/blog
GotchSEO: https://www.gotchseo.com/blog/
Best Web Design Blogs for Free Business Education
Smashing Magazine: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Web Design Depot: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
Site Point: https://www.sitepoint.com/
Tutorial Zine: https://tutorialzine.com/
Scotch.io: https://scotch.io/
Designs Shack: https://designshack.net/
Best YouTube Channels For Entrepreneurs
Sunny Lenarduzzi: https://www.youtube.com/user/SunnyLenarduzzi/about
Dan Lok: https://www.youtube.com/user/vanentrepreneurgroup
Grant Cardone: https://www.youtube.com/user/GrantCardone
Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/user/neilvkpatel
Gary Vee: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEMEjL1GBJ41uCWur5VXWQ
Patrick Bet David: https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickbetdavid
Sam Ovens: https://www.youtube.com/user/samovenstv
Silicon Valley Girl: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiq1FIgtEK7LRAOB1JXTPig
Graham Stephan: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV6KDgJskWaEckne5aPA0aQ
Entrepreneur Magazine: https://www.youtube.com/user/EntrepreneurOnline
Content Editing Tools & Plagiarism Protection
Grammarly: https://app.grammarly.com/
Duplicate Checker: https://www.duplichecker.com/
How to Get Your Website HTTPS Enabled
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
GoDaddy SSL Certificate Purchase: https://ca.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate
Social Media Profile Creation
Facebook Business Page Setup: https://www.facebook.com/business/pages/set-up
Instagram Business Page Setup: https://business.instagram.com/getting-started
LinkedIn Business Page Setup: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/linkedin-pages
Pinterest Business Page Setup: https://business.pinterest.com/en/creating-your-account
Twitter Business Page Setup: https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/create-a-twitter-business-profile.html
Business Directory Listings
Google My Business: https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
Yelp Business Listing: https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
Yellow Pages Listing: https://business.yellowpages.ca/onboarding/#/search
Apple Maps Listing: https://mapsconnect.apple.com/
Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/en/us
Angie's List: http://angieslist.com/
Yahoo Local: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local
Manta: http://manta.com/
N49: http://n49.com/
Best SEO Tools For Your Website
SEM RUSH: https://www.semrush.com/
Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Ahrefs Backlink Checker: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
Yoast SEO Tools: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Keyword Everywhere: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
Image Compression Tool: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
Google Analytics: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Best Video Editing Software
Camtasia: https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
Final Cut Pro: https://www.apple.com/ca/final-cut-pro/
Adobe Premiere Pro: https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/premiere.html
Best Networking Event Apps For Your Business
Meetup: http://meetup.com
Event Bright: https://www.eventbrite.ca
BNI: https://www.bni.com
Legal Policy Generator for Your Website – Always consult your lawyer before uploading any legal documents to your website
Privacy Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator
GDPR Policy Generator: https://www.gdprprivacynotice.com
Refund Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator/refund
Cookie Policy Generator: https://www.cookiepolicygenerator.com
Terms of Service Policy Generator: https://www.shopify.ca/tools/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions
Best Websites to Buy Your Domain & Tools
GoDaddy: https://ca.godaddy.com
NameCheap: https://www.namecheap.com
Dynadot: https://www.dynadot.com
Google Domains: https://domains.google/intl/en_ca/
Best Payment Processors
Stripe: https://stripe.com/en-ca
Square: https://squareup.com/ca/en
Shopify Payments: https://www.shopify.ca/payments