Skratch SEO Vol. 9

Your Website Is Never Going to Be “Finished”

And I actually think getting comfortable with that might make maintaining it a whooole lot easier.

Cilla and I are habitual summer over-planners.Something about the freedom of summer mixed with the bland, cold, windy Midwest winter makes those precious two or three warm months feel VERY important to us. So naturally, when this summer started, we wanted to do everything.  🏖️ Go to the beach whenever we felt like it 🏡 Explore our new home 🌮 Try new restaurants ⛳️ Golf. A lot.  🐶 Take Luna cool places 🚗 Take little day trips Actually enjoy living somewhere that people literally plan their vacations around. Oh, and obviously still work, run a business, maintain a house, be functioning adults, and handle all the other real-life shit that does not disappear because it’s 78 and sunny outside. At some point this summer we had to accept something:We physically cannot do everything. Some plans are going to stay on the list. Funny enough, I have the exact same relationship with our website SEO.

HERE’S THE THING

I work in SEO and the website industry every single day.

And I can name at least a dozen things on our own website that I want to fix.

Pages I want to tweak, copy Cilla wants to update, keywords I want to revisit, and just little things that I’ve noticed along the way.

& let me be clear, this doesn’t mean that our website is bad, it just means that businesses change, SEO changes, offers change, and priorities change.

Your website will probably never reach a magical point where you say, “Yep. Finished forever. Nothing left to touch.” And that is okay.

Sometimes another part of your business needs your attention more. While other times, your actual life needs your attention more.

Knowing something needs to be fixed does not mean it needs to be fixed today.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO

Instead of treating every website issue like an emergency, start keeping a running website list.

 When you notice outdated copy, a keyword you want to revisit, write it down instead of stopping everything and fixing it immediately.

Then give things a priority. What is actually hurting the client experience, rankings, or functionality right now? 

Your website can still work while there are things you want to improve. 

You are allowed to maintain it over time instead of constantly rebuilding it.

There will always be something else.

There are still places around Traverse City we wanted to visit this summer and golf courses I still want to play—my summer bingo card is looking a bit bare…

Summer is eventually going to end whether we check every box or not and that does not mean we wasted it. Se just had to decide what mattered most with the time we had!

And your website works the same way.

So, if you have twelve website updates sitting on your list, cool.

Pick the one that actually matters. I promise the other eleven will still be there when you get to them.

Mine is for sure keyword updates 🙄

I promise you probably aren’t the only one with it on your list.