Why Your Website Is NOT Finished Once The Designer Says It Is

Why Your Website Is NOT Finished Once The Designer Says It Is

Welcome to episode 159 of The Determined Mom Show. In this episode, I want to talk to you about something that is coming up over and over and over again, with any website clients that I have and just anyone that I come across in general, who has either built their website or had their website built by someone else.

Your website is not finished once the designer says it is. So if you have someone that has built your website and they say, here’s your website, it’s all done. It’s ready. That is not true unless that person is trained in search engine optimization. So what do they need to do? Why isn’t it finished?

So one thing is and this is the main thing that I keep coming across in all of my meetings with clients is that there is no sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is the database for Google searches and so you have the ability as a business owner to submit your site’s information to Google directly.

So it’s going around waiting for the Google bots to search your site. This is a crucial part of ranking on Google and even just not ranking but just having Google know that your website is there.

This is probably the number one most missed thing in web design and it’s super simple. It takes about five minutes and there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be doing it or you can have your web designer do it for you.

Even though you submit it once, after you make any major structural changes to your website, you’re going to want to resubmit it again. That will ensure that Google is aware of any additional pages, additional services, and things like that, that you’ve added.

Another thing is your website is not finished until all of your pages have the proper H1, H2, and H3 designations on them. Your titles are optimized and you also need to make sure that you have a meta-description for every page on your website. What this is going to do, is it’s going to give Google the information about what your website should display on Google search.

So if you search your website or search your brand name right now, you’re going to see a little box pop up and in that little box, you’re going to see a little blurb about your website in that blurb is where you can give Google the information that you want to show up there. 

This is a really important part, because if not and if you don’t give it to them, they’re just going to pick some random stuff off of your website and it might not be what you want it to be. It also might be picking the same thing from your homepage for every single page on your website.

So meta descriptions are another really important part of that. Another part is to make sure that your website is secure and this is something that surprisingly, even in 2022, we are still seeing a lot of people with unsecured websites you need to make sure that you have an SSL, which is when your website has an HTTPS beginning to it instead of an HTTP. 

That way Google will know that it’s safe for people to visit this website. If you’ve ever visited a website without HTTPS, you will see that Google may throw up a big white page that says warning, this page is not secure.

Finally, you need to make sure that your website is backed up. This is another recurring problem that I see and if anything were to happen to the database of your website and this is especially true for WordPress sites, there needs to be a weekly, if not daily backup if you don’t make a lot of changes to your website, it’s fine to have it like weekly or monthly.

If you make changes often, if you post new blog posts, you want to have either a daily or weekly backup for that. You also need to have anti-spam software. There are a lot of things that you need to make sure are done and not just your website is designed. 

So if you are in any of these boats and you found yourself not knowing what I’m talking about, not being familiar with any of the terms that I’m using, please definitely reach out to us and we can help you to get all of these things fixed on your website. So then that way you can be on your way to ranking and just really, it’s not necessarily about ranking these things. Have a wonderful week.