Like everything good in life, a happy, functional website requires upkeep! That’s why I’m breaking down these website maintenance tips for entrepreneurs!
A little basic care and attention are an important part of keeping your website humming along happily, both with the Google algorithm (healthy SEO!) and with your potential customers. As your most important- and potentially most expensive- business tool, a little TLC on your website goes a long way to provide the best user experience for visitors and gives you the best chance of converting visitors into sales and clients.
But what exactly does that mean, and how do you do it without the technical know-how of a savvy website designer or developer? If you’re not sure, you’re in the right place!
BEST practical website maintenance tips for entrepreneurs to keep your website healthy
1. Update out of date content
Out of date content is the best way to push customers AWAY in droves. Are the details of your services out of date? Is your About page stale from last year? Did that contact email change? Inaccurate content makes potential customers question your credibility.
2. Act on your analytics
After you get a website, you should (1) Add your Google Analytics tracking ID and (2) Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Then, monitoring analytics should be a biweekly or monthly activity (I’m guilty of checking mine DAILY!). This feedback is critical for understanding the customer journey on your website so you can make improvements.
3. Changing images? Change alt text
If your website was professionally done, your designer put a lot of time and energy into optimizing it for SEO. That means every single image is (1) appropriately sized to not slow down the site and (2) labeled with optimized alt text and descriptions. If you swap an image, make sure to compress and label it for SEO!
4. Blog consistently
Google decides which websites to serve to searchers based on a variety of factors, but new content to crawl is a BIG one. What’s crawling? Web crawler bots, also called web spider bots, index website content for search results. Blogging consistently gives Google new reasons to crawl and serve your website to relevant searchers!
If you’re not an expert at SEO for blogging, download my FREE guide, the Ultimate Website & Blogging SEO Checklist for Beginners to get the breakdown of all the tips and tricks on copywriting for SEO! These are my tried and tested SEO hacks for getting ranked on Google while providing valuable content to my audience!
5. Run speed tests
After you make changes to your website (especially with video or image-heavy content) run speed tests to make sure you didn’t accidentally break anything! My favorite FREE way to do this is gtmetrix.com, which gives feedback on what (if anything) is broken or needs improvement.
What questions do you have? We want to hear from you! Let us know in the comments or contact us at SO Digital to learn how we can help you optimize your website or build you a brand new website in less than 1 week!
