I can’t believe it’s nearly the end of the year already. I thought this would be a great time to list out a lot of the accomplishments, improvements, and additional features added this year for assisting all of my clients meet their online needs.
- Improved SEO audits & rank tracking with a new annual subscription to a product known as SE Ranking. This allows me to greatly improve my SEO capabilities for you, including performing more regular site audits & corrections; rank tracking for expected keywords; competitor analysis; and much more. This will help ensure that your websites have an edge on ranking higher in search engine results such as Google searches.
- A new dedicated server means your website loads even faster without any site-specific tweaks. Also allows for greater growth with greater storage space, better processors, and more. This meant a migration of all data between old and new servers which went very smoothly.
- Replaced WP Rocket with FlyingPress for improved webpage caching and more performance tweaks for your website. FlyingPress offers superior performance resulting in higher PageSpeed scores (which is a Google ranking factor) and much more. Between this and the new dedicated server, performance metrics have greatly improved.
- Improved backup plans of servers so that they are located offsite (in case of physical disasters in the Datacentre) and with a different company too in case the Datacentre provider revokes my account by accident. These are all horror stories which I’ve been lucky enough not to experience but I pride myself in learning from these types of stories shared online and finding a way to avoid them. The backups are currently run nightly and the data is of course still located in Canada.
Naturally there were also some hiccups as most businesses (and individuals) have encountered the past year – specifically with inflation as a factor. This meant my prices had to go up slightly, but I kept the increase as minimal as possible and offered discounts for the 2023 annual hosting packages for existing clients. The nominal price increase should allow me to continue providing excellent service with even more bang for your buck as new services are included in the hosting packages (such as the SE Ranking feature for example), while still maintaining a reasonable profit margin for continued growth.
I unfortunately lost a couple of clients due to the economic changes but thankfully also gained a few more this year too. One such new client runs an online e-commerce store for cancer patients (read: survivors!) undergoing chemo therapy. Another is a union-backed advanced technical training for telecommunications engineers who needed a new website for allowing online course registrations and payments. And of course my existing clients remain successful in various fields including medical/healthcare, city services, business coaching, and more and I’m always so happy and proud to be a small part of their business and helping them achieve their goals for the online world.
For 2023, my business goals include the following:
- Continuing to improve SEO keyword rankings and ensuring the websites are kept free of technical issues from a search engine perspective, utilizing the newer SE Ranking subscription for improved SEO services
- Re-do my own www.d19.ca website, it needs an overhaul!
- Ensuring that my client’s websites are cleaned up of any technical debt (i.e. clean the databases of old/orphaned data) and are kept up-to-date
- Look for further areas to improve in both my own business workflows & processes and also websites that can be re-made using newer technologies
- Send out the odd survey/poll to clients for better insights into what gaps may exist in my services and what is working well, what needs to be changed or added, and general satisfaction with my services so I can continue to evolve and be the best that I can be for my clients