I’ve made a pretty drastic change this morning in a manner that I normally do not do. I usually only raise my rates and never lower them. However, I’ve significantly lowered the rates of my website review this morning, going from €750 to €495.
Why I made this change? Simple: I wanted the site analysis, which is a report on how to improve your site in key areas such as SEO to Usability to Site Speed & more, to be more easily accessible to more people. I know that I’m a reasonably expensive consultant, yet I love helping people improve their websites. This service is aimed at exactly that and with this new price point I think it’s something that most SMBs should be able to afford.
To be able to get to that lower price, I’ve been working on the system by which I create site analyses over the past weeks. I used to do them all by myself, but since I sell several of these a week now, sometimes even several a day, I can’t keep doing that. I also noticed that I was telling the same things an awful lot, people tend to make the same “mistakes” all the time.
Getting some help
The conclusion was simple, I needed to outsource the “simpler bits” to someone who has a bit more time on his hands and only do the hard bits myself. Now, the simpler bits aren’t all that simple, to be honest, which is why it took me a while to find someone who wanted to do those and had the capabilities needed to do it. I found that person in Michiel Heijmans, who, incidentally, lives in the same town as I do here in the Netherlands.
He was one of the very first bloggers in the Netherlands, starting his first blog in 2001, and has been in the online industry ever since. He co-founded about:blank, a famous Dutch e-zine about blogs & social media. Michiel knows an awful lot about all aspects of websites, from conversion to usability and more. On the last few reviews we’ve been working together and I noticed that because the two of us look at each site now, we actually give more feedback instead of less. And now we do that for a lower price.
Actionable Results
While the feedback I got for my site analyses has always been good, one of the remarks I got from people is “you’ve suggested so much, where do I start?”. I fully understand that, the report needed to be more actionable, this is why all site analyses from now on will contain a to do list, ordered by a priority from 1 (high) to low (5).
At €495, which is currently less than $680, the cost of the analysis is far far lower than the value it represents in turn-over and profit. If you want my feedback on your site, because you’re stuck in improving it, or haven’t even started yet and want to know where to begin, you should order a website review right now!
Update: due to some additions we made to the review and a better analysis of time spent after the review answering questions, we’ve been forced to up the price to €749, which is still less than $1000!
When customers get the same as before lowering the price would be great for them. On the other side the report is not only written by you anymore. So i think lowering the price a bit is normal for this change, but a price-change of 30 procent is a lot of money!
Well they actually get more than before, and while I’m not writing every sentence, all of it is vetted by me :)
That’s actually not expensive – at all!
If you write a lot of the things again and again, what program do you use? Like an autotyper?
No I created a tool that helps in creating these, also forces us to make sure we check most aspects of a site.
What is your opinion on tools like Woorank and Lipperhey? They can be used as a starting point to.
They can be useful but they’re nothing close to this. My main issue with these tools is that they don’t explain the “how” or the “why” well, just point out an issue. Next to that they don’t have a clue about design, conversion and other things that you need human eyes for :)
Hi Joost,
As part of the site analysis will you request or require access to web analytics data? Outside of WP, do you specialize in other platforms? I work mainly with e-commerce sites.
Kind regards,
Michael
Hi Michael,
no that’s not part of the site analysis (mostly because it’d become like twice as big because of it).
Hey Joost,
That’s wonderful news, and the new rates will surely bring in more customers. I’ve always wondered wither you will expand to do more than just English websites, but thought you’d pass b/c of the language barrier. Now that you started taking more guys in, is it going to change?
Hi Kiril, we do Dutch, of course, and I have done some reviews for other language sites too, just means I understand a bit less about the keywords and the target groups, but the general usability, SEO, design ideas etc. can still be done of course, so yes, we do those.
Is there a ‘dummy’ sample report so we can see what to expect please?
thanks
Hi Vincent,
no, we don’t provide that. Each report is unique, while some sections might be re-used because people make the same mistakes, we tend to focus on the things that matter to that specific site the most at that moment. This also means that even the chapters of an analysis differ depending on the site analyzed and that if we’d give you a sample report, your actual report might be so different that you’d feel you were expecting something else. We don’t want to argue about that, we just want to give you the feedback on what I think are the most important things to take care of in your site.
Focus is on (among other topics) design, content, templates, usability and SEO, several different aspects of those subjects. In the analysis, we point out quick wins and thorough improvements for your website.
We’ll be collecting customer reviews over the next couple of weeks to illustrate the value of an analysis.
Seeing something like this I think would push a lot more people into signing up to your service.
I’ve seen some people pay $$ for seo sites to simply hand over a generic, you should get links from example.com to improve your rankings.
I’m in no way saying that’s what you are offering. But, it would really be good to see a sample, review or something of that nature to show people how much genuine work you put into an analysis.
i wanted to learn a few things by asking you a few questions that i wanted to get answered “straight from the exoerts” mouth so to speak… Can i still do that, if i bought your service?
I believe everyone is start to outsource some of there task these days, and this is great news for all webmasters that don’t mind someone looking over there shoulder… I believe more eye’s you have on your projects better the outcome to the site owners looking forward to your work.
Darryl H.
Do you work on specific types of sites (ie Magento and WordPress)? Do your reports recommend specific changes or do you suggest testing ideas/designs etc?
The focus is on making the site better than it already is. In different area’s (content, layout, template code, etc).
And yes, for WordPress sites, we do supply extra’s by including f.i. recommended plugins. The same goes for Magento.
Nevertheless, we have done Joomla! and straight up HTML sites as well and judging by the responses we get, those are equally valuable.
By the way, since Google Translate is no stranger to us, we have done French, Danish, German sites as well. Language is no issue. I’m looking forward to the first Chinese site :)
If my WP powered site would support a business I’ll hire you to optimise my site because I think you are one of the best out there. Some advice you’ve provided helped me a lot to optimise my blog and improve speed and usability. Just reading your site and articles it’s a huge step forward for anyone who wants to do things right online.
PS> I’m still owning you a truck of good chilled beer :).
like to read Lowering the Price for Site AnalysesSite Analyses.
When we get a little further along, we will definitely look for an analysis of the site. Am sure we will get a ton of valuable information from your analysis since we keep hearing your name a lot in different SEO circles and events.
Although I’m skeptical about SEO – specially after Google’s PANDA releases this year, website reviews are a good way to move forward. If i come to that stage – i would favor at least 2 independent reviews and maybe a 3rd on conflicting review results.
I paid the higher price for a site analysis, and it was the best thing I’ve ever done. My dev is now busy implementing all suggestions. At the lower price, it’s an incredible bargain. Absolutely worth it.
Look’s good. SEO is still such an expensive commodity, but I guess you get what you pay for, right? Thanks again for the yoast plugin, its amazing.
Wow, Great pricing for a great SEO!
Will def use this to both learn and help with the overflow of work :)
Do you also offer specific recommendations for Drupal sites?
Hey, what do you mean with specific recommendations? As in, what modules to use? No.
But of course that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot of recommendations we could give :)
Thanks for the quick response! Yes, I meant as in which modules might be used to address specific problems.