| Have you heard the old saying “the more things stay the same, use for email collection has a limit and could no longer accept the more they change?” It’s one of those things that make you more names. These are items that need to be checked. |
As a web guy for over two decades, I’ve seen this happen more than you could imagine and am actually guilty of it myself. That is, I’ve let things stay the same for so long that they’ve become ineffective.
I’m mostly talking about your website, but this could also be your online presence as a whole. Technology is constantly changing so while your website might stay the same, everything else around it is changing, which in turn causes your website to change (and not always for the good).
Components on your website could have been added but the technology behind it may have changed and is no longer functional. Take something as simple as an opt-in form on your website. When you added it to your site and tested it, it worked. But over time things happen; maybe the form code is no longer functional or the plugin quit working. Maybe there was a server upgrade that caused a bug with the form. Visually, it looks the same but the underlying components you can’t see aren’t working.
One of the things I’ve been guilty of is having an opt-in offer that became stagnant. I had the same thing up there for several years, and it was just no longer needed or desired by my market. So, it was time to change it up. Also, if the same visitors come back to your site and everything looks the same, they mentally block out certain items. So, making subtle changes from time to time is helpful.
An issue that has become more prevalent is that your opt-in may look as you want on a desktop computer but isn’t functional on a mobile device. I can’t tell you the number of sites I’ve visited on my phone that an overlay or pop-up form covers the whole site, and you can’t even access the website or close the overlay without some work. People will most likely leave if that happens to them.
Ironically, as I was writing this post, I went to check my website to reference something and my whole site was down. I didn’t change anything, but the site was down. It just so happened that something else changed and an out-of-date plug in caused a compatibility problem. How long was it down? What traffic did I lose? How many leads did I miss out on?
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been researching external things that could affect my site for better or worse such as site speed. I know I’ve talked about this before, but it turns out that in the past we would just run a speed test and fix the issue. But as more and more people move from desktop to mobile viewing, a mobile speed test needs to be run, as well.
We all look for additional ways to drive traffic to our website; one area we miss out on is effective usage of our social media ac- counts. Sure, we post to them, but do we mention our website? Do we give incentives to visit it? Actually, go look right now. Visit your social media pages and check out when the last time was that you linked to your website.
Another area that affects our website that we don’t think about but can have some control over is backlinks. Backlinks are where another site links to yours. This can give you higher rankings, but it must be a quality link—a site with a good reputation. And it should be relevant to the anchor text they’re linking to your site with.
For example, if they have a link to your site and the link says beach balls and your site isn’t about beach equipment, then it does you no good and can actually be harmful. You should con- tact that site owner and ask for them to either change or remove the link. Also, you will get a better back link score if the site linking to you has a high Domain Authority score themselves. For example, I have a couple links from Microsoft. As you can
imagine, they carry a pretty high DA score (99). My brother and I were actually mentioned on one of their blog sites. Plus, I spoke to a group of their Microsoft certified Trainers group on social media.
It is good to use a service such as https://ahrefs.com/back- link-checker to check your back links from time to time to see if there are some you want/need to remove.
In closing, there are so many things that can change around your site or online profile that happen whether you do some- thing or not. It is good to be ahead of the game and think about things your competition may not be doing. It’s these little strategies that give you higher ranking and more credibility.
Keep thinking outside the box and don’t get complacent in thinking because it worked yesterday it will be working today.
