Fight complacency: make your websites even better

It’s easy to feel comfortable when a website is successful, but this is an illusion created by a sense of complacency.

Every time you raise a site’s profile and rankings, you are pushing others down. SEO is a zero sum game - winners do so at the expense of losers.

Many SEO’s will look at their client site and compare to competitor sites, and look for different ways to leverage what they have. You don’t have to be spammy to apply key changes to a website in order to improve it’s overall performance.

In doing so, you are taking a long look and what advantages you could apply that will beat competitors.

And if you do so it’s not always so much because what you have is great, but simply because you are trying to make good better - while the competitors who fall are simply complacent with good and suffer for it through lose of rankings and presence.

It’s easy for people and businesses with good websites to feel complacent, so this is a mindset you need to actively fight.

John Andrews once posted a list of things you should be doing on a daily basis, and this includes updating a site template each month to constantly polish its user experience.

Even if you own multiple sites and this is too much a stretch, you can at least isolate your key websites and focus on those.

I’ve already posted a list of potential quality indicators but there are other improvements you can look to apply to a site, including architectural, focus on link equity, content value, and a ream of other small changes you can make to increase repeat traffic and improve conversions.

Sometimes the improvements you can make are simply to eliminate error messages.

I just took a look at a very niche news site I run - looking through the logs I found a rewrite error I’d overlooked was killing access to the news archive.

While I was correcting that I realised that rather than use default mod_rewrite as used, I can change a useless keyword in the URLs to a useful keyword, and redirect older URLs to the newer ones.

It’s a single simple change that took minutes, really, to apply, but is one small step among many that I’ve taken in an effort to built up real value for the site.

And this is a site that 18months ago was running on a very ugly default template and was hacked for weeks without my noticing. Now it’s a significant niche financial news site I’m apply constant tweaks and improvements to.

It’s easy for some people to feel comfortable when a website is successful - but if you’re serious about building long-term success online with your websites, you should never allow yourself the mistake of feeling complacent in the first place.