Why the Six Year Blog Hiatus?
Long story short, as ludicrously busy as I’ve been growing the business the last six years whilst working on every kind of project you can imagine. Add the birth of a wonderful little girl into the mix in February 2014, and well, you start to see the picture.
I personally started a healthy obsession with running in 2014 also, when I can stay on my feet (but that's a story for another day). So between working on all new and existing clients projects, life with a little one, and out running local trails as often as physically possible. Unfortunately it meant the design dpi blog, the social media posts and website updates in general all took a backseat.
OK, let's be honest the website got left behind, forgotten about, consigned to the scrapheap of the internet Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), languishing, dropping down the rankings. It's no secret that Google et al like nothing more than a regularly updated website with fresh content. I mean, for the best part of those six years I've been developing blogs whether through Wordpress or other content management systems (CMS) for many of my clients. Extolling the benefits of regularly updated, fresh content as often as I can, but never heeding my own advice.
That said, anyone who has an ounce of knowledge in search and search engine optimisation (SEO) knows, it's not necessarily how fresh the content is, but the quality of fresh content. Regardless, leaving a website to lay dormant, not even allowing myself the time or opportunity to simply update it with recent projects completed. Letting the old website to just sit gathering dust and dander for six years, no matter the excuse is really, really bad.
Being remiss with both content update and SEO duties has meant the website has paid the ultimate price. It's going to be very interesting to see if I can recover the organic rankings for the website. As it stands today, we are languishing back on page 10 of Google for the keyword phrase "web design Doncaster", similarly, page 10 also for the keyword phrase "website design Doncaster".
We've really let our eye off the ball there! OK, I may be going back four or five years here, but design dpi used to be on the first page of Google rankings, often jostling for position in the top three spots?
I guess we can set ourselves a challenge? This new website is locked and loaded, but as well as it's setup for search and SEO out-the-box, the very first day after we launch the new website, our next task will be to get back up the rankings, ideally, as quickly as possible. Just how long that may take is going to be very interesting indeed, but the plan is to document the process up here on the blog. So keep coming back to check on progress.
We've certainly got our work cut out for us to get the site ranking again, but we do love a challenge. I suppose in some ways this post is nothing more than a lament, a letter of forgiveness to Ask.com, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Yandex etc. I promise there won't be such a long hiatus ever again, OK? Time will tell if you can you ever forgive me?
Challenge accepted 🎓🤓🤜
