When you look at your medical billing, cable bill or any other utility or invoice, sometimes they are hard to understand what they are charging. In this day and age, with reoccurring bills and subscription models, it is hard to keep track of everything. Furthermore, if you hire an advertising agency or web promotion agency, the monthly and overall billing may be confusing as well. So we would like to lay out what kind of billing you may see from a reputable web promotion agency.
Design, Rebuild or Maintain Your Current Site
First of all, the initial expense is building your site. If you have no site at all, this step can be huge. Also besides designing and building the site, you need to find the content of the site as well as images and text. This portion of your budget may vary and usually is a one-time cost when you first build. Of course, this does not include the price of rebuilding the site five to six years down the road. A way you can save on the initial build of the site is if you already have a working site. But you may need to consider if the site needs improvements coding wise which could be part of initial costs.
When hiring a web agency, your initial cost will be the design, rebuild or maintenance of you current site which should be a one time fee. During this first meeting, you should also lock down your domain name as well if you have not already.
Web Hosting Charges When Hiring A Web Agency
Every website is hosted on a server. Essentially, a server is a computer where all the files for your website are stored. When someone visits your site on the web, that computer displays the files that are requested. Hosting costs are unavoidable. Also, servers need to be maintained, updated and kept running and there is a cost to this. Some agency charge more, some less, just keep in mind what kind of service you are getting and how secure they actually are. Hosting costs are usually billed quarterly some monthly depending on the provider.
Web hosting costs usually include maintenance costs for the server and updates to whatever software your site uses.
Web Promotion
Once your site is built and your hosting package is settled, you can leave it at that, and just pay hosting fees and domain renewals all year. But this is not very beneficial to your business. Initially, once you add all your content and you submit to search engines you might see good Google placement. You may think that is enough. But be warned, it will decline unless you keep it up, and there are some options here.
- Your first option is to maintain your site yourself. What this means is you or someone at your company adds new content and links to the site and keep it up with relevant content. In our experience, this almost never happens. Usually, the business owner is too busy or the employees come and go and the site gets neglected. Which leads to the next option.
- Hiring a web agency to handle your promotion. This is where VR Metro comes in. By hiring a web agency, they maintain your site and help to add current content and back links to make your site relevant to search engines.
Promotion and Hosting Separate Billing
Now keep in mind your web promotion budget will separate from your hosting fee. When hiring a web agency to handle your web promotion they will lay out the budget and what will be done for your site. Also, look at this way, you can skip the promotion part, but your site will start to decline over time and move to lower pages in searches. It is like when you place an add in paper four years ago, yeah it was great at the time but no one sees it today.
When hiring a web agency just make sure to understand what is billed and for how long and why. Finally, if you are looking for a reputable web agency, contact VR Metro today. We can handle all your web hosting, development, and promotion!
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