Joseph225
Member
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2012
- Messages
- 159
I'm currently in the middle of a ginormous Charlie Foxtrot, and thought it would be good to share some insight.
I've been in business for 10 years. When this all began, I had no money, so I spent a lot of time learning Wordpress, created my own site, and over the years have worked pretty hard to wrap my brain around SEO. About a year and a half after I took my site live, I paid someone a few hundred bucks to do some cosmetic work, and make it "prettier". Then, about a year and a half ago, I spent a few thousand for some onsite SEO to be performed. I've been pretty happy, overall, with work done on my site...until now.
I've been in business for 10 years. When this all began, I had no money, so I spent a lot of time learning Wordpress, created my own site, and over the years have worked pretty hard to wrap my brain around SEO. About a year and a half after I took my site live, I paid someone a few hundred bucks to do some cosmetic work, and make it "prettier". Then, about a year and a half ago, I spent a few thousand for some onsite SEO to be performed. I've been pretty happy, overall, with work done on my site...until now.
- A couple years ago I had a glitch happen, where the site went down for a bit. I called the hosting company, and with their help, managed to get it up and running. There were a couple aspects of the site that looked "odd", visually, and so checked back in with hosting company. They explained this was normal, and that a website is like a car. When you first get it, the coding and all aspects will work together and run pretty smoothly. As time goes by, though, things will get "worn", and need to be updated. That I should consider having a company do some work to completely overhaul the site every 7-10 years.
There's a guy I encountered in a local networking group, and he'd been working for a local company doing their marketing, as he worked to establish his own marketing company over the past couple years. I listened to him talk one day about analytics, and what you can do with the data from various social media ads you run, and was duly impressed. Then one day, I had him look over a blog article to help me get rid of passive voice in the content, and it came back to me with h1, h2, and h3 headings separating various parts of the blog, too. I was all KINDS of impressed. Turns out he'd gotten a degree in technical writing. One or two more blogs like this, and I was convinced. This cat was THE. REAL. DEAL., right?
So then it came time to update the site, and I tasked them with the project. They created the site, convinced me to move the hosting to a local company instead of Hostgator, and it was implemented on September 8th.
IMMEDIATELY, and over the next month, rankings started tanking, and continued to do so. They were like "Oh, that happens when you switch to a new site, it'll be fine." and made noise about 3-6 months. I let it go another couple of weeks with no improvement, and at this point have become convinced that they are/were completely out of their league with website design and SEO. I learned from talking to them, that they'd used a browser to surf the website, and create a list of pages to be made. Even though they'd had access to the backend of the website, they completely discounted the internal structure of the site, and created it off of what the normal consumer could see/find. The onsite SEO created by the other company was lost, and when I realized that was no longer there, there were no longer any backups available from before the implementation of the new site. Their attempts to make this right have fallen flat, and I can say this with confidence because I've used a keyword tracker for years (not the Google Analytics research tool, although that HAD been installed on the old site). I have a list of keywords, and a list of municipalities around me that I do work in. I track the various combinations of keywords (service type + municipalities), and how my website ranks for any given keyword. This is something I strongly recommend for the rest of you, if you don't.
I equate what's happened to taking a Subaru WRX STI with 35 psi in for a paint job, and this company scrapped it and brought me a shiny Honda Civic. It's infuriating.
All that being said, I've determined that the following things should be performed for website work to be implemented in the future:
- Backups of current site will be established, and saved in a manner that can be easily restored by me, if necessary
- Implementation of all work will actually be done by me, rather than anyone else, even if they're the ones who create the content
- Keyword tracker will be maintained until the end of time to be used as a metric for website performance, and it would be a good idea to also learn about and understand what keyword research is
- Google Analytics is also a very important aspect to have installed on your site, for the purposes of tracking how much traffic is coming to your site. As changes are implemented to the site, you can watch to see if traffic or keyword rankings change from that point forward, and by how much.