Here’s a clip from my recent presentation at the Core Summit in Austin, TX. In this video I give you some very important tips when it comes to your website including your domain, hosting, WordPress and more.
All right, so you all know your website’s a hub of information when it comes to online. Your website is the window into your business in this digital marketplace, right? You got to make sure that you’re set up for success with the right messaging more so the right structure and the right content on your website.
But just some basic stuff because few problems that i’ve seen over the years, if you don’t own your own domain and you don’t own and have access to your own hosting account, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.
It’d be like starting a new business and then sending some random person to the city to open up your business for you and start an LSE in their name. When you say, “Hey person, I don’t want you working here anymore.” Like, “Yeah, good. I got your, I own the business.”
So you want to do the same thing with your domain. I can’t tell you how many clients we’ve come across that have a great website. They’ve got really solid SEO. They just have some issues with an agency. And when they want to move on, the agency holds all the keys to everything that they own.
They own the domain, they have nobody has access to the hosting so you can’t pull your website down or anything like that, you’re basically at a point where you’re starting over from scratch. And the only times that you can recover this domain is if this company isn’t savvy enough and they let it expire, and then you go into Godaddy and try to hit it on the day that expires to recover your domain because a lot of this is building authority to a domain when it comes to your SEO results.
Alright, so if you don’t know who owns your domain, do a quick whois search. If it’s private domain, it won’t show you anything, but you just make sure you have those keys, no matter what level of the company you’re at. And as far as hosting goes, same thing applies.
If somebody else is hosting your website, and you don’t have access to it or, you know, there’s a lot of agencies out there that just have this bulk shared hosting and they’ll make your website live, build you a new site, you spend three or four years building SEO authority and all this stuff. And you see, you know what, we want to sever ties with you. They’re like, okay and they turn a switch off and your website’s gone.
Or they try to come back at you and hold your website website hostage for 10 or 20 thousand dollars to get all your information back. And it does happen very, very frequently. So hopefully, you know, the market’s been educated a little bit more with this kind of stuff. So this stuff that we’re seeing in this a little bit less.
As far as your structure of your website goes, we always recommend WordPress. Anybody here is using WordPress with their website? The majority, anybody not using WordPress? You’re not using Word, but what platform are you using?
So you don’t own your website. So Scorpion owns the website and the content. So if you ever moved, yeah. It depends on, I mean, really it depends on your unique situation. I think this will be a bigger conversation for the Q & A, so we can move through here, but remember to ask us that towards the end, and we’ll give you some advice on it. And you want to make sure you’re optimizing your website for user experience.
Anybody that’s been, keeping their fingers on a pulse of Google a couple years ago? That an algorithm update that came out, they’re weighing your SEO results and your visibility on the user experience, how ambiguous is that, and your page speed. There’s a really cool tool. I’ll share a URL with you guys, you can check it on your own, but that is a ranking factor now.
How fast your website loads and how it flows. Google does check that stuff with a crawler so that you do get a page score with this. There’s a URL I can share with you guys and you’ll get a page score of your website. So you want to make sure you’re optimized for the user experience and not just for Google sakes, but for your own conversion sake.
People don’t want to wait for anything, especially when they have property damage. They want to be able to get the results that they want and get the information they need to get in touch with you right away. So if you make it difficult or they have to scroll around, you’re probably going to get lose the job and they’re going to go to your competition.
You want to make sure you’re scanning your, and this is a technical hosting thing, depending on your hosting company. Some offer this is relatively new. We partner with HXC hosting. We’ll talk about that later, but you know, scan for malware. The last thing in the world you want is to own a website. You own everything. And one day you walk up and you have the white screen of death on your WordPress website. You have zero idea how to recover it, right?
The redundant malware scanning is very important to get rid of these things. People can access your website through non updated plugins, themes are out of date and just different ways. Every single day, if you do manage your own website, you’ll notice if you have any modalities in place to block people out of it. Like we have thousands of people every day trying to break into our website.
So as long as you have those security systems in place, you can kind of keep yourself, protected a little bit. And the other thing I would say is make sure you’re updating your plugins and backing up your website. Like I, you know, I ridiculous, I do a lot of updates on my website, backing it up and making sure that it’s updated at least monthly.
You can get away with a few months without updating your plugins or your theming. But it’s important to check that because that’s one of the back doors that people use to get into your website. So up, backing it up is crazy, is really good. We’ve had clients where somebody broke into the site. We get a phone call or we notice it on our own and within two or three hours they’ve got their website right back up.
All the information’s there and we figured out how they penetrated the site and we’re able to remedy that for them. Alright, and the biggest one is build the site to convert. We already talked about that a little bit. Conversion is way more important than the amount of traffic that you’re sending to your website.
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Benjamin Ricciardi is the founder of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, A digital marketing agency that specializes in the Restoration and Cleaning industry based in South Florida. Benjamin is the author of The No Bulls**t Guide to Internet Marketing for Restoration Contractors and hosts The Restoration Rundown Podcast, a podcast that is focused on everything related to marketing and owning a Restoration and Cleaning Business. Connect with Benjamin and Ironclad Restoration Marketing on social media for the latest tips and tricks on how to grow your Restoration Business.