New Year’s Resolutions For Business Owners

Let’s check in on last year’s resolutions:

1. Backups
2. Updates, WordPress 5.0 leaves us with an incomplete heading into the New Year, but we upgraded our important sites.
3. Password Security We still recommend LastPass or just updating passwords, or maybe just getting rid of them altogether.
4. Upgrade to SSL This is free in most cases, so there is really no reason not to do this.
5. Privacy Policy We did it, pretty easy. There are templates to get started or iubenda has
6. Stop Making Resolutions, the point was to make it part of your operations. Mostly incomplete.

Google’s 2018 Year in Search

2019 New Year’s Resolutions for Small-Business Websites

Upgrade to WordPress 5.0 

I put this off after upgrading broke one of my sites. If you have been taking regular backups you can probably upgrade safely, and make sure you test your restore point! Gutenberg takes a lot of getting used to, but apparently we aren’t going back.

Blog More 

We really need to do this. It does help broaden your base of keywords. Although Rand Fishkin recently came out with a report on how ineffective blogging is for creating authority, rankings, and traffic. Not very effective as most people fail at it and audience has a high expectation for production quality for all businesses. Fair point raised, but blogging isn’t for the sake of blogging; it’s for your users and customers and it needs to be interesting. We have all seen (and possibly writtten) blog posts that were little more than just fodder for a search engine. And frankly, I seem to recall Rand started out blogging to generate traffic for Moz and hasn’t stopped apparently since going to SparkToro. Writing helps you organize your own thoughts and generally is just good practice. If you don’t want to blog, maybe start out with a newsletter for your customers. 

Take More Photos

This should be an easy one. Everyone has a digital camera on their phone these days but no one ever seems to have pictures of their business. 

Next year’s resolution is probabaly going to be about producing more videos, so you might want to ease into it with a few simple photos. Try and to fill up the frame with your subject against a simple, well-lit backdrop. 

Community Participation

Conferences, meetups, just getting out of the house or office and meeting more people in the SEO Community. I’ve been doing this for ten years and just don’t do conferences and other industry stuff and we really should be more out there. Have to remember that real life is real and the Internet is just a layer. People enjoy interacting with people more than machines still, at least I hope they do. 

Happy New Year everyone! We have always felt that optimization was an ongoing process of improvement, and that spirit should extended beyond how we code web pages and into our own business practices and personal interactions. And yes, please share and subscribe and we will be writing much more frequently in 2019.