If I replay the conversations I’ve had with potential clients over the last month – six months – year for that matter, there’s a common thread that ran through every single conversation – price or cost. I’m pretty sure it’s not just me.
Try this quick exercise and let me know what your results are: in your conversations with prospective customers how often did price come up? It doesn’t matter if it surfaced in the first conversation or the tenth one – did it come up? Now, shift your focus for a minute and put your consumer hat on – think of any significant purchases you made in the last few months and answer this question: how many times did price or cost come up as you navigated your way through the decision making process?
If you’re being honest with yourself, price or cost comes up all the time. It’s one of the most fundamental and ubiquitous topics of modern day commerce. So, why is it that so many business websites don’t have a shred of information about the costs or pricing of their services? Why don’t you address price or cost on your site? (If you do, please weigh in on your experiences from addressing this topic on your site in the comment section below. If you did and then removed it – definitely post your experiences in the comments!)
We’ve all heard/thought of the reasons for NOT addressing cost or pricing on our websites, some legitimate and many not so. We’re not going to venture into that territory but instead we’ll focus on the reasons why you should address pricing on your site.
1. You will be talking about this subject anyway so be proactive in initiating the discussion. As we learned in the exercise above, pricing and cost is top of mind for the consumer of goods and services. I’m not advocating that you publish an exhaustive price menu of every service you sell but rather help set expectations for prospective customers as they seek to learn how you potentially qualify as a solution for their needs. There’s nothing stopping you from listing some of the factors that impact cost and providing a low side/high side bracket for their edification.
Think like a consumer or buyer, factor in the line of price questioning you’ve had in your experiences and develop something that addresses initial needs. Your goal with addressing this topic is to foster further discussion with a prospective customer.
2. Search engines favor the sites that are addressing this issue – especially if the competition isn’t. If this conversation is not happening on your site, there’s no way you can be found for it and that’s a lost opportunity. Here’s another exercise for you: take your top keyword phrases and work the price/cost component into your query and see what results you get. Regardless of the specific results you get it will be telling – either you’re missing out on viable site traffic generated by cost or price queries or you can own the results for the price discussion for your services.
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