If your agency dropped off the face of the earth, would you know what tools and logins you need in order to troubleshoot a problem on your website?

If you answered yes, great job!

If you answered no (no shame), here are the most important logins and troubleshooting starting points:

Logins:

1. Website access – you should have full administrative access to your own website. This allows you to add, update, and delete content. It also allows you to manage users, which is very important for when you want to axe your vendors.
2. Registrar – this is where you purchased your domain. Often times, your DNS is managed here.
   • DNS (Domain Name System) – where you connect your domain with certain pieces of information, like an IP Address that displays your website on your domain, or an MX record that connects your email with your domain name.
3. Host – this is where your website’s information is stored, where you can make redirects for pages within your website, and make backups of your site.

*Helpful hint: sometimes your registrar and your host are the same company.

Troubleshooting:

Most big and scary website issues can be solved if you have access to the three tools above. Once you have access to these, you also have access to the support teams for each company. When in doubt, contact support. Most of the time, they’ll be able to pinpoint the problem, and then walk you through the steps to fix it, or even fix it for you.

Helpful Troubleshooting Tips:

1. Make sure you’re using the automatic backup function through your host. We like WPEngine because they do site backups every night. If something breaks on your site, the easiest way to get things back up and running is to restore a backup from when your site was last functioning correctly.
2. Take a screenshot of your DNS records any time you’re about to make an update. If you make a mistake, you can easily revert back to your old settings.

Most Common Reasons Your Site Goes “Down”:

1. Your website hosting server has changed and your IP Address is different. If this has happened, you’ll need to update the “A Record” within your DNS to the new IP address. There are ways to avoid this, like using a nameserver to link your domain and your website, but that’s a lesson for another day.
2. There’s a big red security warning. This is most likely due to an SSL issue. If it is an SSL issue, check with your website host to make sure your subscription is up-to-date. Another reason could be that you’ve added a file or an image that is not secure to a page on your site. The worst case scenario is that your site was hacked. But talking to the support team at your website hosting provider will help you solve the problem.
3. Your domain is for sale because you didn’t renew. Always set your domain to automatically renew so you never lose your domain. If you do forget to renew, login to your registrar and immediately purchase your domain, before someone else does.

This list is far from comprehensive, but these initial steps and tips should provide you with the knowledge and confidence to resolve the majority of unanticipated website issues.

There are many factors that affect the speed of your website. But one that is often overlooked is PHP. PHP is a scripting language used to develop WordPress themes and plugins.

This language is regularly being updated and improved upon, but without regular back end updates, many sites get left in the dust.

The newest version of PHP, PHP 7.3, has just been released. Upgrading from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.3 can result in a 15% decrease in request processing time (WP Engine).

Speed is a major ranking factor for search engines. Users expect sites to load near instantly, and when they don’t, they move on to the next search result. Knowing this, search engines favor sites with short load times. If your site is too slow, users will be less likely to find your business online.

Even if users do find your business, a long load time may reduce the likelihood that they stay on your site. According to WP Engine, “Slow-loading sites are the number one cause of page abandonment across all audiences.”

Bottom line, a slow website means lost traffic, lost leads, and fewer clients. 

Security

Additionally, PHP 7.3 improves website security. WordPress requires regular software updates in order to ensure security. No major security issues have been detected in PHP 7.2, but it is best practice to keep all components of your website up to date, including PHP. Unlike older versions, PHP 7.3 is actively supported by WP Engine. This means that if vulnerabilities are found, the host will resolve them before a security breach can occur.

Upgrading to PHP 7.3

Updating your website’s PHP is relatively simple, but like any technical change, making this switch does have the potential to cause issues on your site. If you would like your PHP upgrade to be handled by professionals, contact Mockingbird for help.

Your website is ready to launch! Congrats! Now I know you’re excited to get your shiny new site in front of your users, but there are a few critical steps to take before pressing the (figurative) go button.

It may seem like a simple task, but properly launching a website takes technical knowledge and experience. Missing one step can lead to lost domain authority, lost traffic, and bottom line…fewer leads and clients.

Recently a law firm came to us baffled by the fact that their beautiful new website was performing so poorly. Minutes after digging into the site, our team knew that some crucial errors were made during launch. Pages weren’t added and/or redirected properly, 17 backlinks from high domain authority sites were lost, odd pages were being indexed in search results. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on a site that was sinking.

Though these missteps are reversible, it is, of course, better to avoid the traffic drop in the first place.

Here are a few steps you can take to avoid tanking your site traffic:

1) Ensure URLs Match (or Are Handled Properly)

Make sure your new website URLs exactly match your old website URLs. If your old Traumatic Brain Injury practice area page was domain.com/tbi-injury/ make sure it is the same on the new site. If you would like to change it to domain.com/practice-areas/tbi-injury/ make sure that you have a redirect in place. These redirects should ideally be made at the domain level.

2) Uncheck Discourage Search Engines

This may seem like a no-brainer, but this little checkbox can easily go unnoticed. Make sure that you are not asking search engines to ignore your site. Uncheck the box!

3) Update Robots.txt

Make sure that you aren’t asking search engines to not crawl your site through your robots.txt either. The “/” below signifies that you want to block search engines from crawling your entire site. Remove this. Also, not as detrimental, but add your XML sitemap here to show search engines where to find all of your pages.

4) Run a Screaming Frog Crawl

Run another crawl of your site. Make sure that there are no internal 404s or unnecessary 301s within your site. If there are any, fix them!

And much much more…

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to properly executing a site launch. If you truly want to ensure your site launch goes off without a hitch, call a marketing company that knows what they’re doing.

Mockingbird is opening up our Marketing Manger job to someone who hasn’t spent 4 years and a small fortune attending College. The Marketing Manger is an entry-level role designed to transform recently minted College graduates into highly effective tactical online marketers over a 12-36 month period.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that key to success for our clients and therefore my agency, is hiring the right people and providing them with a heavy focus on ongoing training and support combined with the real world, trial by fire reality that is impossible to experience among the vaunted ivory tower of higher education. It has nothing to do with my employee’s alma mater or even their degree. This perspective has been strengthened when I interview business school undergrads – 90% of which can’t calculate a simple ROI.

The reality is that a College degree is simply a marker, albeit a poor one, of the potential in a candidate. And that potential (at least for us) is much more determined by an individual’s analytical curiosity, innate professionalism, genuine nerdiness, and a proactive out-of-the box thinking.

At Mockingbird, our Mission is to “vastly improve the lives of our employees and clients (in that order) through exceptional marketing.” There is no reason that Mission shouldn’t embrace those without the luxury of a College degree. Special consideration for military veterans trying to enter the civilian workforce.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that Google values its own reviews more than those left on other platforms. An online business review is a written sentiment left directly by a client on any website or platform. Reviews represent an ongoing conversation your customers are having about your business online and they can contribute to building the type of positive reputation every firm strives to achieve. The top three platforms clients can leave reviews on are Google, Facebook, and Yelp. There are also legal-specific platforms clients can leave reviews on such as Avvo and Lawyers.com.

According to Moz, it is important to not put all of your reviews in one basket. Not only for algorithmic reasons, but because Google and other search engines sometimes filter, mistakenly loose reviews, or pull reviews from different platforms. While it is nice to have client reviews across different platforms, be careful because not all carry an equal amount of value. To identify which industry-specific platforms carry value, simply search a specific keyword phrase in search. When I searched, “criminal defense lawyer reviews”, I found that the top search results were dominated by yelp and top legal directories. This shows that Google values reviews from these top directories within the legal industry.

By using Google My Business I was able to identify other review platforms of value. In the example above, data is being pulled from Facebook and Lawyers.com. After looking at a few different Google My Business Pages I found this space to be dominated by legal directories, social platforms, yelp, and even client testimonials from the firm’s own website.

When prioritizing review efforts it is important to remember these key factors:

• Reviews across multiple platforms can help build client’s trust. Focus on not having clients leave reviews only on one platform because search engines may filter, lose, or pull reviews from different platforms. Additionally, these platforms feed each other, for example, Yelp pushes reviews to Bing, Yahoo, and Apple Maps.
• Acquire reviews at a natural rate for your firm. It can be viewed as spammy for a firm to acquire a large number of reviews in a short time period. Tipping off search engines and potential clients that the reviews may not be legitimate.
• Rankings may have an impact on your reputation. It is important to actively respond to the platforms that are most prominently displayed in search results; responding to feedback that clients leave and helping implement changes if needed.

Reviews are beneficial to a firm regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. These platforms provide a space where clients can have a discussion while providing owners an opportunity to respond to, and implement, changes. It is important to have reviews be a part of your local search engine optimization strategy. Focus on determining which platforms have value and perform the best in your firm’s search results.