Building Websites

If you want the opinion of a true web nerd, Search Engine Optimization should be a part of the marketing strategy of every small business.

Getting free traffic from search engines is highly valuable, and not all that difficult if you understand the fundamentals and the process to keep the traffic coming in.

Plus, for most of the population these days, if your business doesn’t show up in search results, you might as well not even exist.

Here are 7 SEO musts for your Louisville small business.

Fix Your Website Errors

Search Engines hate website errors. These are things like broken links, outdated software, security vulnerabilities, poorly configured web servers, duplicate pages, thin pages, old technology, slow pages, overly large images, and more.

All of these things make it harder for them to do their job, which is to crawl your website and catalog its contents.

If your website contains errors of any kind, or even things that just aren’t ideal, get those fixed right away. The more up to date and stable your website is, the more likely it is to rise in search results.

If you need help fixing your website, we can help you with either our WordPress Rescue service, or a monthly support plan.

Build a Great Contact Page

To stand out to search engines, it’s not enough to just have your phone number or email address somewhere on your website.

In order to be seen as a trusted business, you need a dedicated contact page that lists your address or service area, your phone number, and your email address. You can even build a form to make it easier to get in touch with you. Check out our contact page for a good example.

The reason is that businesses that make it easy to get hold of them tend to provide a higher level of service. Listing your address on this page also helps to search engines understand where your business is located. This helps boost your ranking where localized results matter, as it does for most small businesses.

Create Solid Foundational Content

The content of your website is what search engines use to understand what types of products and services that you provide. Potential customers want to read this content on your website so they can understand your business.

By providing high-quality content about what it is that you do in several formats (text, images, video, pdfs), you’ll give search engines more to chew on in order to understand your business. This translates into more ranking opportunities and higher rankings.

For example, if you provide 7 separate services, build a separate page for each one, not just one that lists all of them. Then optimize each one of those pages for specific keywords. That is 7x the ranking opportunity.

One word of caution here is not to create content just for the sake of content. Make sure it is relevant to your business and your customers.

Write Ongoing Fresh Content

While we’re on the subject of content, let’s keep going. This is where a lot of businesses fail. They’ll build their website, and then everything stops right there.

We’ve all seen outdated websites with the last piece of content posted 7 years ago. Don’t let that be you. If you’re not going to keep up with content, don’t even do it in the first place.

Search engines love fresh content. People love to read it. But it’s easy to get too focused on running a business and forget about marketing the business.

Because of this, outdated websites tend to fall lower in search results while other businesses keep their content fresh.

In order to stay relevant, it’s a good idea to create a new piece of content for potential customers about once a month. Many businesses do it even more often.

This can be a “how-to” piece, a “top tips” list (like this one), an announcement of a new product or service, or any number of things.

Just write something that keeps your website fresh, and is relevant to your potential customers. The LWN blog is a good example. We don’t post all that often (a few times a year at most), but when we do, we like to provide something meaty and relevant to our customers.

If you’re not sure how to set up a blog to write content, let us know and we can help you out. We also have an SEO service which we provide optimization work on your website, and ongoing coaching to help you do your part.

Establish Trust On Your Website (especially your homepage)

Before people will get in touch with you, they need to trust you first. Building in trust factors throughout your website goes a long way. These are things like:

• Team Pictures and Bios
• A Genuine “About” Page
• Visible Contact Methods
• Real Reviews and Testimonials
• Certifications and Recommendations
• Social Proof such as # of businesses served, etc
• Examples of Past Work / Portfolios
• Up-to-Date Authoritative Content

All of these things together help establish that you are running a legitimate and trustworthy business that people are going to have a good experience working with.

While it may seem crazy, search engines pick up on these things on a website, and they’ll rank your website higher if you are able to display these types of trust signals, especially on your homepage.

Build Your Google My Business Property

Google has been doing a lot of work in the last few years with it’s Google My Business profile. This is one of the first things a business owner should have set up after building a website.

It allows you to post photos of your business, collect reviews, list services, tell users about your business, provide directions, business hours, and more.

One of the main benefits of a Google My Business listing is that Google will display results that match your business when people are searching for similar products and services. This is a great way to stand out, and by using it in conjunction with a well-optimized website, you’ll get a lot of free traffic.

Keep Up With Your Website

No one wants to go to a website and not be able to use it, but that’s what will happen if you don’t keep up with your website, or have someone do it for you.

I’ve seen this hundreds of times. A company spends thousands of dollars on a website build, and then never touches it again.

It might not happen overnight, but eventually, it will break, the technology will get outdated, the content will get outdated, it will get hacked, or a number of other things if someone isn’t looking after it.

Search engines will even delist websites or mark them as hacked when things like this happen. I’ve seen this happen as well, and can take months to recover from, if you notice it.

The point of all of this is, your website isn’t a one-time project. It’s a living business asset that should be utilized to market your business.

If you need help keeping up with your website, our monthly support options are perfect for you.

Get Control of Your Website

If you find yourself in need of help with SEO, or even just keeping up with the day-to-day of your WordPress website, we’re here to help.

As I write this post, our monthly support plans start at just $99, and full website rebuilds can be done for a few thousand (pricing will vary).

We’ve written before about the cost of not keeping your website up to date over time. It’ll cost you in more ways than one. It’s a huge problem that plagues small businesses. The good news is, Louisville Web Nerds was created to help solve that problem.

Our Support and Maintenance options were designed to perform several key technical services that go into running a website smoothly, some on the front end of a website, and some on the back end.

This is all delivered at a low monthly cost, far lower than an in-house employee or a large agency would charge for the same services.

Some web hosting and domain companies even charge for many of the services we’ll outline here, but none offer all of them together in a package deal, and they’ll often charge you extra when you actually need to use them for support.

How Our Packages Support Your Business

First, we’ll solve your technology problems. From there, we’ll keep your website content up to date over time. This is a powerful pair of services that means you’ll never have to worry about your website.

Here are some problems that we see most often with small business websites. I won’t go heavily into these. We’ll just list them for now, but as you can see, it’s a lot, and with our support plans, you won’t have to worry about any of these.

The list goes on… I could probably make a list of 50 of these that we see all too often.

Each and every one of the issues above can and will result in poor user experiences and lost business, and we solve every single one of them and more with our support services.

Keeping up with the rapid pace of changing technology in the web world is hard. It’s something that no business owner should be expected to do.

That’s what we’re here for, and why we designed our support services the way we did.

We provide not only the back-end services to keep your website backed up, fast, secure, optimized, and running on modern technology, but we also keep the content of your website up to date over time.

And we do this all in a single package.

As I write this post (subject to change), our packages range from $99 – $249, depending on the amount of updates you need, and the number of websites we need to manage.

Let’s explain this a little bit by going into what we do with each part of the service, and see what we can do to quantify that value even further.

Routine Support and Content Updates

This service alone is enough to justify the cost of any of our support plans. Most small business owners would much rather run their businesses than worry about updating their website.

In all of our plans, we include at least simple content updates, so if you ever need a new page created, an existing page edited, a phone number updated, new features built, etc, we’ll take care of it for you included in the cost of your plan.

This is one of our main differentiators. Many providers will host your website and charge you for many of the services I’ll list next, but they’ll leave it up to you to update your website, or they’ll charge you an additional hourly fee to do it.

Your time is valuable, so we would rather you leave the web stuff up to us so you can focus on your business.

We’ll keep your website updated for one predictable flat monthly rate.

Secure Off-Site Backups

There are dozens of add-ons to WordPress to back up your website. Some of them even claim to be easy to use, and they are.

But they all have one major problem. Without custom configuration and professionally managed off-site storage, the backups really don’t do a whole lot of good when you need them.

Why? Because all of these add-ons store those backups on your webserver and require the WordPress admin panel to be working correctly to access and revert to them.

This is a problem because when WordPress breaks, you can’t access the admin portal in a lot of situations, making the backups essentially worthless for the average user.

These locally stored backups also tend to build up in size over time unless you manually delete each one, which slows down your site with each one. And if they ever fail to happen, you’ll never know.

Our backup process uses professionally licensed software and a secure cloud storage location to back up your website each week. If there is ever an error, we’ll know about it immediately through custom configured alerts with each installation.

Through this process, if we ever need to restore from a backup, we just grab the file from our cloud storage, run a script from the webserver (not using the WordPress admin panel), and restore the site to its most recent stable version.

Firewall Management and Security Monitoring

We’ve rescued our fair share of websites from hack attempts (and successes) over the years. While this is rare, when it happens, a website will quickly get delisted from search engines and become essentially unusable.

On top of that, without proper security measures in place, any type of website is vulnerable to attacks which slow it down for its end users.

We keep up with the latest security happenings with WordPress and have deployed settings to protect our clients’ sites against break-in attempts accordingly.

And if anything ever happens to your site on our watch, we’ll fix it as part of your support plan, at no additional cost.

Many companies charge a minimum of $200 to clean a hacked WordPress website. It’s likely that’ll never happen with our security settings, but if it does, you won’t be on the hook to pay more for it.

Weekly Software and Plugin Updates

WordPress evolves very quickly. Software providers typically update their software about once a week, if not more. WordPress and theme designers release updates about once a month.

These can range from new features, to security patches, to performance optimizations, and more.

Because of this cadence, we perform software updates on all of the websites we manage once a week, following a full backup.

This ensures that all security features are patched as soon as they are available, and software and servers stay updated with the most recent and modern installations.

I’ve seen companies bill up to $300 a month for this service alone. We include it in your support package along with everything else.

Weekly Proactive Crawl of all URLs

Have you ever tried to test every single URL on a website to make sure it’s working correctly? It takes a lot of time, and there is no one that has the time to do that each week, not even us.

That’s why we use software to do it for us.

We have professional licenses to a few monitoring tools which we use to monitor the health of our clients’ websites. The one we use most often is Screaming Frog.

We use this to check for broken links, missing images, broken javascript or CSS files, 404 and 500 errors, and the other issues that can come up with routine updates.

Through this process, and high-level manual checks, website quality gradually increases over time, and remains at a high level thereafter.

Many agencies charge hundreds of dollars per month alone just for this service, which is taking things way too far for most small businesses. We include it within all support packages as an added benefit.

Performance Optimization

There are several areas of web performance that are often neglected by even some skilled designers. We make sure sites are set up to use aggressive caching, image compression, the latest version of PHP, and more. We also make sure databases are optimized and performing well, and will use CDNs (content delivery networks) on larger sites to offload bandwidth.

We also make sure sites are not bloated with unnecessary plugins and heavy javascript-based code. While these types of software can do cool things, it’s usually not worth the performance drain.

All of this combined creates faster websites with better experiences, which are proven to increase business revenue.

Again, we include this service in all of our plans and every website we build and maintain.

Uptime Monitoring

Downtime can happen. Servers break. Networks get congested. Software updates can fail. It’s a fact of life with a website.

Has your website ever gone down? Maybe it has and you just didn’t know about it. Are you sure it’s up all the time when people are trying to reach it?

For all of our clients, we know the instant when a website becomes unreachable. Using proactive monitoring technology, we will get an email and a text message alert if any of the websites we monitor go down for any reason, whether we host it or not.

We’ll then diagnose the issue, work with support reps as needed, and make sure the website is down for as short of a time as possible.

If you were to purchase uptime monitoring on your own, you’d pay close to $20 a month for it. It’s included in your plan with us, and we’ll be on the hook to monitor it.

Email Deliverability Through SendGrid

Many of the older websites that come to us for redesigns have an old email delivery system that may or may not actually deliver email messages through forms.

You’ve probably had it happen to you before. You fill out a form on a website, and never hear back from the owner.

We make sure this never happens to the websites we manage. Through our partnership with SendGrid, the global leader in email deliverability, we route all emails through their servers, which is delivered from an email address that we know won’t get blocked. This setup virtually guarantees that business opportunities won’t be missed because of poor email settings.

Just one missed email from a prospective client can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars for your business.

Many agencies would charge a premium for this service, and a Professional SendGrid account costs $15 a month. You get to take advantage of it in our plan as an included benefit.

Miscellaneous Technology Support

Last, but not least, we’ve been doing this stuff a long time, since the early 2000s. If you have a technology question, toss it our way and we’ll do our best to answer it, or we will point you in the right direction, and we won’t tack a fee onto your bill for it.

We typically bill $75 an hour for technology consulting, but we’ll go ahead and answer your questions as part of your support plan. We want our clients to succeed, so why wouldn’t we support their businesses, right?

An Incredible Partner for Your Business

As you can see from everything above, we have packaged several hundred dollars worth of services into one powerful support package that makes perfect sense for any small business.

Our goal is to be an efficient strategic partner for your business.

If you need someone to take care of your website so you don’t have to, we hope you’ll check out our plans and drop us a message.

To get started, you can visit our support plans page to learn more, or go ahead and contact us today.

As anyone who has ever managed a website knows, it can be difficult to keep up with, all the time.

This is especially true when software updates are applied, pages are updated, images change, or old pages are moved and / or removed. This is just some of the maintenance we deal with on a daily basis with our monthly support clients.

While one website is difficult enough to keep up with, it’s exponentially more complex to apply updates and maintain the quality of dozens.

As Louisville Web Nerds has grown over the past two years, the manual process of checking for broken links, missing images, broken javascript or CSS files, 404 and 500 errors, and the other issues that can come up with routine updates, has become far too cumbersome to be a manual process.

This is why we chose to license the Screaming Frog web crawler, one of the top web crawlers in the world, to increase the quality of the websites we manage for our clients.

How do we use Screaming Frog?

Well, this is a pretty sophisticated piece of software with an extensive feature list. You can use it for dozens of different things, including taking down a website if you’re not careful with the crawl rate. 🙂

We use it to do a full crawl of all of the links on our clients’ websites once a week, in a slow and controlled manner.

We check for things like:

• Broken links that are causing 404 errors
• Server errors that are causing 500 errors
• Redirect loops that are causing memory errors
• Missing images that may be causing a strange appearance
• External links that may be pointing to malicous sites (this occurs when a website may be hacked)
• CSS and Javascript files that may not be loading correctly
• SEO issues including blocked URLs, blocked websites (gasp!), and many others

All of these things can happen after routine updates, so we check for them often, once a week.

This process would take a human hours for a single website. Believe me, I used to do it. And that human still may not find everything.

By using the Screaming Frog software, we can run through a dozen or more websites with thousands and even tens of thousands of URLs (when configured correctly), in a safe manner that will show us everything we need to know.

We can do this with an automated process that runs in the background while we’re busy building websites, and then check it when it’s finished. We’ve even done a few scans with over 1 million URLs, which were quite exciting to be a part of.

Sometimes we’ll find a few broken links and fix them. Most of the time things are pretty good. Since we run this software weekly, quality issues tend to diminish over time for each website where we deploy this process.

Many sites often have dozens of broken links that they’re not even aware of. This can not only contribute to search engine rankings falling, but can also cause users to lose trust, and be unable to find important resources on these websites.

Personally, since I started using this software on my own websites, I’ve slept a lot better knowing that I have a full understanding of what every link is doing on my website.

You’ll feel equally at ease with Screaming Frog and Louisville Web Nerds in your corner, which is our goal. We want to take the worry of your website out of your hands so you can focus on building your business.

All of our monthly support plans include this service, which is a $200 value for the software alone, and an extensive amount of training and experience to know how to use it.

If you need help with your WordPress website, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to see how we can help.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get whenever we’re bringing on a new client is what we’re doing behind the scenes for our monthly WordPress Support clients.

Aside from the various levels of maintenance and support we offer in each package, there is also a lot that goes into keeping a website running smoothly, from ongoing security monitoring, to ongoing image and script optimization, to software and plugin updates (and the testing that comes with this), to keeping things like PHP updated, and beyond. We spend a few hours each week behind the scenes keeping all of these things running smoothly, and our clients can sleep easier knowing this.

Yes, you can absolutely get away with not doing a thing over the course of a few months and be OK, but eventually, it’s likely to catch up with you.

On a number of occassions I’ve personally been called on to fix websites that have gotten outdated over time and have gotten hacked by spammers, or gotten into situations where their software no longer worked correctly, or their site simply wasn’t up to date with modern technology.

These types of situations can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to fix, depending on their severity, and even worse, can drive away business while they exist.

For these reasons and many more, we urge everyone who we build website for, and those who just need help time to time, to get on one of our monthly support plans. Even at the lowest rate, software and technology is kept up to date in the background, which prevents many of the bad situations listed above.

But often at just the next tier up, a website can be kept completely up to date over time, avoiding costly rebuilds that come with letting a website get “stale.”

But enough about that. You came here to check out some of the software we use. Here is the list of what we use in the background to keep your website fast and safe, as well as how we use it!

The Basic Foundation

WordPress

WordPress is (almost) exclusively what we use to build websites. Sometimes we’ll make an exception for clients that already have sites built on platforms like Wix or SquareSpace, but these platforms are often more costly and less effective, so we don’t like to.

WordPress powers nearly 1/3 of websites in the world, so it’s community and level of support is massive, making it an easy choice.

Genesis Framework and Add-Ons

Next is Genesis by Studiopress. This framework that sits on top of the WordPress basic layer offers several powerful and turn-key features which make building and managing websites a lot more efficient. The basic idea is to make the building process as quick as possible, to save money for small businesses using our services.

StudioPress Themes

A theme in WordPress is a basic layout and design. We’ll generally start with one of Studiopress’s several dozen themes, and make many customizations based on needs from there. Outside of creating content, this is where most of the work goes into building a website.

The Optimization (Extra) Pieces

WP Fastest Cache

One of the main differentiators from one website to another is speed. Users will often abandon a website if it takes more than just a few seconds for a page to load. People are impatient these days. We use WP Fastest cache and a variety of configuration options with this tool to keep your site running quickly.

AWS CloudFront

Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront service allows simple offloading of larger files like pictures, stylesheets, PDFs, and javascript. This costs us a couple hundred bucks a year to run for everyone, but it offers a huge speed increase and more efficient server utilization, so we’re happy to offer it for our clients.

WP Smush

WP Smush is another performance optimizer. Keeping file sizes small is a large part of keeping a website fast. This piece of software automatically resizes and compresses uploaded images to make them efficient for browsers to download. It makes a huge difference vs non-optimized images.

Yoast SEO

Getting found in search engines is one of the key wishes of small businesses we work with. Yoast SEO offers some very simple configuration options to give customers a head start on this. With each site we build, we configure this piece of software to give customers the best chance of optimizing each page they build for search engines without doing a ton of extra work.

Wordfence

Because WordPress powers a huge chunk of the Internet, this makes it a target for hackers and spammers. Wordfence is the key piece of security software we use. It offers an unparalleled array of options to protect websites from brute force break-ins. We set up each client with our own hand-picked array of settings, and will adjust these over time as we monitor the activity reports it provides.

This is one of the largest things we spend time on after a website is built, keeping it safe.

Backup Buddy

Backups are important to keep, because software updates do sometimes fail, and it’s important to be able to restore to a previous version if needed. Backup buddy offers simple offloaded backups to storage buckets that are indepedent of the webservers we use. We run a backup each week for most clients, and some even daily.

Wow. That Was a Lot.

Some of this software is free to use, and some of it requires a bit of overhead for us. But the main takeaway is that all of this takes time, quite a bit of time. Keeping all of this software up to date, along with the many individualized pieces of software we use, is one of the most time-intensive things we do for our clients.

Each website we support is updated weekly with the latest software released from WordPress, its plugin providers, and its theme providers. On top of that, we’re constantly monitoring the industry for improvements we can make for our clients, which is how many of the pieces of software you see above were chosen.

All of this together keeps the websites we manage running quickly and safely, for a price far lower than what you’ll find at most large agencies.