Well hey, you’re still with me after I bashed on Wix and SquareSpace last week…thank you!
I get it. You want to build websites that are affordable for your clients because you want to capture those leads. Especially brand new businesses, I totally understand that they don’t have the budget for a big $6K+ website and it can be too much for what they need right now anyway.
So what do you do for that brand new business owner when they come to you?
Single Page Websites Are Flexible
If you didn’t guess from the title of this post, the answer to that problem is typically a single-page website.
Look, I’ve been building websites now for longer than I’d care to admit. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to get the budget down and build websites for clients who were brand spanking new and limited in what they were willing to invest in. I also don’t ever want a client to go into debt just to work with me. Sure, a website I build should make them money, but it can sometimes take awhile for you to see the return on that investment.
Take advantage of my years of experiments and tweaks and headaches and help yourself. A single-page website can absolutely be the budget-friendly, flexible option your client needs.
Business Changes a Lot in the First Two Years
Having built a couple of businesses of my own and helped clients build theirs, I’ve learned that the first two years or so in business can bring a lot of changes. What you think people want isn’t what they’re actually looking for. Services you never expected to deliver become your most popular. And how you think your audience talks and searches for things is probably not once you actually start talking to them.
When your clients invest a lot of money into a big website, they want to be relatively sure it’ll last for a few years. That’s a lot less likely in the first iteration of a website and business. However, a single-page website can provide just enough information to get browsers to call or request more information, copy is a lot easier to tweak and change, and the overall investment is a lot less than multiple pages, which makes it far more attractive.
How Much Can I Charge?
This will depend a lot on what you’re charging for a full website now, but there’s no reason a single page website should be less than $500. In fact, you’re probably still including multiple panels of information with copy to write, pictures to share, and I always recommend having the blog built out so it can be utilized. In my case, I typically charge about $2000 for a single-page website. I’m still writing the copy and ensuring the website follows on-page SEO best practices, digital accessibility standards, and is fully responsive across devices. It’s still an investment, but it’s a lot less intimidating than my typical price point. You can even break up the payment into a year-long maintenance plan that’s a lot more digestible for new business owners and provides them some on-going support as they go through inevitable growing pains.
How’s the SEO?
One of the first questions and concerns I get is how the SEO is on a single-page website. Obviously, having multiple pages is best for on-page SEO because it’s hard to target a lot of keywords/key phrases when you have only page to do so. In this case, you’ll want to focus on one or two main keywords and keyphrases and if it’s a local business, take the chance to geotag as much as you can.
You can, however, mitigate some of those issues by encouraging your clients to blog. Since I build all of my websites in WordPress already and have a starter package that I build from, their blog is pretty much ready to go. I take a little extra time to customize it for their design and highly recommend they start blogging at least once a month. Of course, that’s something they can hire me to do, but I think writing your own blogs can be super beneficial to learn about your audience and what they need.
Even if I know they’re not going to use it right away, I include a blog into every single-page website I build. I just teach them how to turn it “on” at a later date if need be.
And believe me, no client likes it when you tell them to blog, but it’s even more important with a single-page website to really optimize for Google and multiple targets.
Adding onto Single Page Websites
If you get clients worried that they’ll “outgrow” their single page website in 18 months or so, that’s honestly probably true.
How do you deal with those concerns though when you’re asking for $1,000-2,000 now to get it done?
You offer a special deal on upgrading that single-page into a multi-page website. Instead of charging a client my full price, if they upgrade to a multi-page website within a certain time frame, I’ll let them more or less pay the difference. After all, I built the first one, am already familiar with their business, and have a copy base to work from. It’s really just an expansion pack to level them up then a whole new project.
I’ve found this often removes those last objections and provides them with a solution that is honestly the best solution for them.
Components of a Single Page Website
If you’re thinking about selling single-page websites as a budget-friendly option to your clients, you need to remember that they need many of the same things a full website would have. Your home page is different in that it’s much longer and houses all of the main information, but you still need to have that main Heading 1 at the top of the page and introduce those separate panels or sections with Heading 2s.
You’ll want the menu to include links to those different sections, just with anchor/jump links instead of going to a separate page.
Things I Include in Single Page Websites
- Different ideas/focuses separated out in panels
- Jump links in navigation to the different panels
- Still only one H1
- H2s for each panel
- Sticky nav that follows them down the page
- Contact form at the bottom of the page
- Links to social media in the footer
- Click to call phone number
- Address linked to Google My Business profile
- Optional blog to build up SEO
Last Thoughts
There are so few downsides to a single-page website for a small business that there’s no reason they shouldn’t be a part of your sales strategy. It helps you cultivate long-term relationships with those new clients, offering them something that’s a great entry-level product, and can be super quick to turn around (I can knock one out in two to three work days total, copywriting included).
Tell me, are you currently building single-page websites for your clients? What are you waiting for?