I don’t know about you, but I’m a natural skeptic. But I’m also a romantic, which means I’m usually stuck in the middle of really believing great things can happen and knowing they probably won’t.
Take vitamins and supplements, for example. (This story really is going to come full circle about business–hang in there.)
I am the world’s greatest skeptic of alternative medicine. But I really want it to work, so I keep trying new things in hope that I can prove my inner skeptic wrong.
My cousin is a chiropractor and a couple of years ago he told me about these really “amazing” vitamins that were exclusively sold from medical professionals and had about a hundred and fifty benefits.
I rolled my eyes and handed him my credit card.
It took a year or two of running out and purchasing them again to realize a pattern: every time I took these vitamins, I felt really great. And it just so happened that every time I ran out of them, I started to feel a little less-than-great.
Last month I ran out of a couple supplements that I had been taking for months and months. My inner skeptical rebel thought, “I don’t need no stinkin’ supplements.”
Except that… about a week into zero supplements and vitamins, I felt like garbage. It took my stubborn self a little too long to realize the correlation.
A friend said, “You shouldn’t have to depend on vitamins and supplements to feel good!” Touche. But did I buy them anyway? Heck yes.
A long-term solution would be to figure out why I don’t feel great without them, but I shouldn’t have to feel like garbage until I figure that out. It feels a little like superficial health, but until the root problem is figured out, are vitamins bad? No!
Similarly, if your business growth isn’t healthily rising year after year, there’s a reason for it. It’s important to research why that is, but until you figure out why, “taking your supplements” in the business world equates to continual marketing.
But marketing doesn’t always have to be flashy. Sometimes it’s has humble as maintaining your behind-the-scenes health (your vitamins), like:
- Keeping your search engine optimization up to date
- Tweaking your website for more conversions
- Diving deep into your Google Analytics to figure out what visitors liked and didn’t like
- Updating your website plugins and themes to keep them safe from hackers
- Keeping up to date with Google and Facebooks ever-changing algorithms
- Strategically boosting social media posts
- Removing excess code from your website that’s slowing it down
- And about a hundred little things necessary to maintain your business
These maintenance items are oftentimes the first thing to go when your budget gets tight, but as I experienced when I ran out of vitamins, you’ll look at your books and wonder… why were we slow this month? Your phone may not ring off the hook overnight, but without this maintenance, your business health will slowly and surely decline.
Did you know that in May of 2018 Google rolled out Mobile-First Indexing, which means “the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings”?
In other words, if you don’t know if your website is mobile-friendly, it’s probably not. That means if you don’t have a mobile-friendly version of your website, your ranking on search engines is about to plummet. That means fewer people will see your website, which means lower revenue. These rules and algorithms change continually, and it’s our job to follow these trends to improve your business.
The top-ranking positions on Google all had the same thing in common: Fast page speeds on their websites. And did you also know that high bounce rates affect your search engine rankings? High bounce rates mean that visitors went to your website and quickly backed out because it wasn’t what they expected.
Below you’ll see that bounce rates correlate with search engine rankings.
The top-ranking sites also had very low bounce rates when compared to second- or third-page results. Maintenance isn’t sexy, but it sure is important, and it will affect your bottom line.
And here’s the best part: if you’re a business owner, you shouldn’t be worrying about it. It’s not your job. It’s ours.
I remember the feeling of waiting for my supplements from Amazon in the same way I waited for a website security company to fix my website that had just been hacked. Many years ago, I didn’t think that keeping my food blog safe from hackers was even remotely important. Why would a hacker care about food? Until I got the email that said my site was down because it was hacked and spent hundreds of dollars to fix it.
Don’t wait until you’re in a desperate situation to ask for help.
Don’t wait until you’re on page 3 of Google search results, or you’ve realized you’ve been sending people to a page with broken links, and please, don’t wait to call us when you’ve been hacked because you didn’t upgrade your WordPress plugins.
Dealing with digital maintenance is like dealing with car maintenance–it simply has to get done.
If you’re a business owner, you shouldn’t be the one dealing with maintenance. If you are, or if no one is dealing with these things, it’s time to delegate. Shoot us an email at info@growfly.com and tell us, “I’m ready to delegate my digital maintenance.”
These are tasks that we want to eliminate from your radar so you can focus on doing what you do best. Give us a call and we’ll take it from here.
