Imagine you had a home that was built on a hillside and an engineer told you that the house was starting to slide downhill. However, he assures you that as long as you keep up with a few yearly Maintenance tasks, your house will stay at the top of the hill and will not slide further.

This is the same way your website works in Google. You may be at the top of the hill on page 1 right now looking down on all below you, but if you do not keep up with some very important maintenance tasks on your site, you will start to slowly slip down the hill.

Unfortunately, the downhill slide happened to our company not too long ago. We were in the first spot of page 1 for the keywords we have worked on and maintained high placement for 12 years and we started sliding down the hill and fell as far as page 2 which is a ghost town.

Well at that time, we were working on 3 very large projects in addition to our usual steady small projects. All of these projects kept us all so busy; we completely neglected our own company website.

Two months had gone by since we had last posted in our blog or on any outside blogs. We hardly updated any content in our site and even found some broken links in our site. We did very little Social Media posting or any email newsletters. We, as an online business entity, basically had no pulse in Google’s’ eyes and I can hardly blame them for not wanting to keep us at the top of their search engine for any keyword. They would be doing their clients a disservice sending someone to a site that hadn’t been updated in over two months with new fresh content.

Well, we finally got our act together and came back to life online and on our website; we posted new valuable blog articles for clients and potential clients to benefit from. We updated our portfolio adding some of our new projects we were proud to show off and deleted some of older projects who decided to call it quits on their site which gave us a dead link on our site (not good). We did WordPress maintenance on our plugins, the version of WordPress we were running, ran much needed backups and updated our theme.

Wouldn’t you know it, within a month, we had restored all of our number 1 spots and high rankings. You know what else happened? The phone started ringing a lot more, the website lead forms were being filled out constantly again and we were back to 50 hour weeks. Busy is good.

So the goal of this article is to strongly emphasize that no matter how much money you spent on your site, no matter how awesome it looks on a mobile device because it is Responsive, no matter how many times you visit it yourself, if it is not properly maintained at least a few times a year, there is no question as to whether you will slip down the hill, the question is how far will you slip?

So here are our top tips on the things that need to be done in your site to stay on top of the hill in the search results.

1. Google Likes Fresh Content And Your Clients & Potential Clients Do As Well
If you want your website to be a destination page that not only gets people to visit, but more importantly keep people coming back over and over, it is crucial to provide new fresh content. This can be in the form a Blog articles or simply new pages built into your site, or at the very least links to industry articles on other sites that provide value to your visitors.

Your visitors love free tips, valuable information and constant updates, so does Google. If you are not doing this type of website maintenance, you will start to slide down the hill for sure. A great tip is to watch what all of the sites that come up on page 1 in the first, second are third spot are doing in their sites and mirror those techniques.

2. Update Your Social Media Content With The Same New Content In Your Site.
Don’t wait for people to find all of your great new information on your website; it is imperative to push it to all of your social media channels as well to drive even more traffic back to your site. We have some awesome WordPress plugins built into our site, that when we publish a blog post, it automatically updated all of our social media channels with that post, so it helps with our website maintenance to have these plugins, but more importantly all of our new fresh content in not alone in just our website, it has been blasted out to close to 100 sites.

3. Use Google Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) To Ensure Your Site Is Compliant
Now called Google Search Console this is a wonderful free tool that allows you to do many things in order to manage and maintain your SEO campaigns. You can submit sitemaps that make it easier for Google to scan all of the pages of your site. It allows you to see any errors in your site and even fix them to ensure you are 100% compliant. The Search Console also provides a detailed traffic report telling you virtually everything you need to know about your traffic.

4. Speed Up Your Site
There are many caching plugins as well as image compression plugins that can be installed that will speed up your site. This is a very important site maintenance step because page load time is something Google takes into account (as well as many other things) to determine your site rankings. There are a few sites that will run a speed test on your site to give you a better idea if you are having speed problems and how to fix them: PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTmetrix

The above website maintenance services are the primary maintenance tasks on your to do list, but there are many other things you can be doing to ensure you do not slide down the hill in Google results, we will talk more about these things in a future post. Be sure to review our Website Maintenance Checklist post for more tips.

For your one-stop shop for website maintenance services, contact us today. We are so confident in our products, our process and our people that we offer the first hour of work on your website maintenance for free with no obligations or commitments.