How much to run a website?

[KrissKross]

Suggestions, please

Woocommerce eCommerce platform, built on a template, content and pictures supplied, very professional looking.

Very niche business selling premium products, maximum 2-5 online orders per day, plus a couple of enquiries and questions.

How much to look after such a website, handle SEO and other bits to make it run smoothly.

Possibly involved in social media posts, coming up with new ideas, a bit of marketing etc.

Is £1000 a month a fair rate to pay for this?

Thanks

[DSLiverpool]

You need to define what SEO targets your working to and give more detail on “other bits”

Is it a new site? Does it convert? At what %

Also is running the site adding content, pictures, blogs etc?

Tell us more and people here can help.

[thebraketester]

Sounds unnecessarily expensive to me.

[KrissKross]

DSLiverpool said:

You need to define what SEO targets your working to and give more detail on “other bits”

Is it a new site? Does it convert? At what %

Also is running the site adding content, pictures, blogs etc?

Tell us more and people here can help.

Thanks for the reply, I couldn't tell you some of these questions without probing the current people looking after the site.

It's selling around £10k per month if that helps?

Creating new content is one issue, there is not enough being provided and that's not their fault. They are outside the UK which probably doesn't help as they cannot just pop in to resolve these matters.

[wheelerc]

£1000 per month should get you around 20 hours, which should be plenty to do what you need by reasonably experienced people, but you could spend a lot less to just keep things ticking over, or more to really push things.

Make sure you are getting detailed reports on the SEO work being carried out as it's easy for agencies to do some setup work and then charge a large retainer each month for keeping things ticking over and running automated reports. Consider splitting some of that SEO budget into SEM (paid ads) - at least to test the waters and see what works and doesn't for you.

[DSLiverpool]

What WheelerC says, you can’t just throw a K at a site with SEO without some road map.

You should be running google analytics, do you have your own log in? You’ll see where your traffic us coming from and can ask how your target audience is being defined.

Are your products seasonal ? Is this reflected in the campaign ?

Happy to have a open chat

[Canute]

I think £1k per month on SEO for ecommerce sounds a little light unless it's a very niche set of products and not too many of them.

[anonymous-user]

How long is a piece of string?

Is £10k per month sales a good result in your mind? Would you pay £2k a month if sales were £20k per month (and so on)

Is it growing?

There is a big difference between 2 orders / day and 5 orders / day

Is the £1k number what you are prepared to offer, or what someone is asking for?

The terms you use are too vague to make a proper judgment: is packing / dispatching of orders included? What does 'look after a website' mean? Does it include providing hosting / tech support etc.? What does 'Handle SEO ' mean (does the £1k include any paid marketing spend for instance)? What are the 'other bits' that you mention? same for New ideas?

[KrissKross]

Canute said:

I think £1k per month on SEO for ecommerce sounds a little light unless it's a very niche set of products and not too many of them.

This is not for SEO, just his fee

[Junior Bianno]

KrissKross said:

This is not for SEO, just his fee

So you're talking about paying £1k a month for someone to look after a WooCommerce site doing <5 orders a day? ...and that doesn't include doing the SEO work.

Wow

We'll do it for £900 - PM me

[RegMolehusband]

My business website was done by a local company using Magento 2. It cost about £5-6K and we pay them £240 a month for hosting, support and a couple of hours a month development. We turn over £1M a year between online and telephone sales. I would never entrust a third party again with our SEO and do it ourselves. There really is nothing to it if you know your market and customers though it helps to be in bit of a niche market. You also need to be sure that Google likes your chosen e-commerce platform. Strong social media activity helps too.

You really don’t need to be spending £1000 a month on your website.

Edited by RegMolehusband on Wednesday 19th February 20:50

[jammy-git]

I'll try to break it down to give you an idea of costs.

Assuming it's a basic Woocommerce site. Probably running a few plugins (Wordfence, Yoast, CF7, probably a few Woocommerce plugins). If you're getting 2-5 sales a day I'm assuming a 2% conversion rate, so a few hundred visitors per day (nothing spectacular).

Hosting should be less than £100 (flat fee).

Support/maintenance can be billed either as a flat fee or estimated number of hours per month. Flat fee I'd expect £50-150 a month. Estimated hours could be 1-3 hours a month @ £50-100/hr. On top of that you'd probably want another 1-10 hours of development per month for adding new plugins, features, tweaking existing bits, etc - depends how actively and aggressively you want to build the site up.

Blog articles usually come in at less than £500 per article.

Not going to get into SEO prices because there is such a wide variety of activities, ways of billing and costs, it really is a separate topic all by itself and not my area.

[jonamv8]

You could pay £1k alone for SEO before any website handling is considered

[RegMolehusband]

jonamv8 said:

You could pay £1k alone for SEO before any website handling is considered

What would you get for your £1K exactly?

[DSLiverpool]

RegMolehusband said:

jonamv8 said:

You could pay £1k alone for SEO before any website handling is considered

What would you get for your £1K exactly?

Time from a proven SEO expert who has case studies.
I love it when people cite long tail search terms as proof they are good at seo.
Also £1k is the base starting point for a company that wants to increase your visibility. It’s only 10 hours max in most agencies.

[Canute]

DSLiverpool said:

It’s only 10 hours max in most agencies.

Maybe not even that for an agency that knows it's stuff.

[billythekid001]

Based on what you describe, £1k should be ample to ensure your website constantly moves forwards in terms of quality. Whether it's value for money or not depends on what you get for the money and how that translates into impact on measured performance. Perhaps try and tie all activities back to their impact on tangible metrics such as:

• Search engine ranking for given search phrases (https://www.semrush.com/ can do this)
• Site uptime and page load times (https://www.pingdom.com/ is a simple way to measure this)
• Google PageSpeed Insights score (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)
• Revenues and conversion rates from Google Analytics (or equivalent analytics platform).

If you’re paying this to a single company to do ‘everything under one roof’ then the benefits will be convenience to you and coherence of the various strands of work. You’ll probably get a unified hourly rate though, and you may get better bang for your buck by sourcing the work themes you can judge for yourself directly. For example, you may not understand what makes for good/bad code, but you can appreciate a well written article. You could ask your agency for a content strategy and then opt to source a copywriter directly to implement it.

[RegMolehusband]

The OP's business sounds very much like mine when at the startup phase. I have experimented with SEO companies who promised the world. The last one succeeded in losing our Google positions for 9 months through using "black hat" techniques and these took a long time to recover. This cost about £90K in lost sales in year four.

Now I see in-house SEO as part and parcel of running our e-commerce website and we do it very successfully. It really isn't difficult and there's mountains of free information available. We manage the content of the website and every time we write new copy or add a product SEO is the main consideration. H1, H2, alt tags, copy, meta tile and meta description, minimal image sizes - that's 90% of it done. Nobody knows our customers and market better than we do, what they're searching for and the key words and phrases they're using.

We use Semrush and Moz daily to keep an eye on things and of course Analytics.

Put this out to a third party and you've lost control yet increased costs. This is all IMHO but we have position 1 rankings for 2-3 word competitive phrases for several landing pages - and a profitable business.

[jammy-git]

What I will say, is that if you're paying £1k a month, which includes little to no SEO work, I'd be expecting a report every month detailing exactly what work was done and how it has impacted the site's performance.

[KrissKross]

Thanks for all the great comments guys, anyone north of London or around the Bedfordshire area would like to discuss, I am open to suggestions if we could keep fairly local. Maybe take a look at what we do and make a proposal?