Your Website Is Like A Garden

Imagine that your website is like a garden. Every garden requires care and attention to thrive. In a garden, you don’t simply plant seeds and walk away. You plan your garden, choose the best location, prepare the soil with care, plant your seeds, and nurture the garden to encourage healthy growth.

For a successful harvest, you need to nurture your garden’s growth in a variety of ways. You’ll need to add stakes or cages to help the tomatoes and cucumbers grow. You need to thin some seedlings to give room for the best sprouts to grow. You need to weed your garden periodically and you need to water your garden regularly. You might add fertilizer, mulch, or compost. And with proper care, your garden can become a consistent source of pride and bountiful vegetables

Another important issue is addressing threats to your garden. Some threats might be just a nuisance. Other threats can make your garden less bountiful. A few threats can kill your plants or completely destroy your garden. So how do you keep your garden safe?

Some threats are easy to fix, like monitoring and rerouting cucumber vines so that they don’t strangle other plants. But there are many other more serious threats. Deer can eat up your garden. Rabbits love that you’re providing them with so much to munch on. And birds? Birds love to dine on your garden’s bounty. Then there are pests, molds, and plant diseases.

Protecting your garden is an everyday task! There is no one solution to keep threats at bay, so you need to regularly monitor, protect, and keep an eye on your garden. You can use tall fences to deter deer and short chicken wire fences to stop rabbits. Tin pie pans can scare away birds when they bang loudly in the wind. Coffee grounds work well to deter pests and protective sprays like insecticides and fungicides can also protect your plants. Overall, a multi-layered security approach is the best solution to keep your garden healthy and green.

Even if your garden is very successful for the first year or two, you can’t rest on your laurels and think your work is done! A garden always needs attention, and must go through this cycle year after year! It can quickly wither away at any time now or in the future if ignored - weeds can take over, pests can feast on your plants, and disease can ravage them. For a continuous harvest of vegetables, you need to put in the effort throughout the entire growing season, year after year.

If you read the entire previous section again and just substitute “website” for “garden”, you’ll see that it usually fits, and makes sense pretty well. But we’ll save you that trouble and explain the parallels below.

If you think about the effort and the steps required for successful gardening, you should see that the same is required for a successful website! Basically, you can’t expect a long-ago-built website to produce bountiful results year after year if you fail to do anything to make that happen every single year!

And don’t be fooled by an occasional good opportunity that might come your way from your old website. Even an old, untended garden might produce a sporadic new plant and a few vegetables periodically for a few years. But neither your old website nor a neglected old garden will ever be as bountiful as it could be if you made an ongoing effort to keep nurturing and protecting either one.

So let’s look at some of the similarities.

An image of a tomato plant showing the tomatoes as sales leads, keyword rankings as leaves, all supported by important SEO factors as the roots holding up the plant.

Click to enlarge

Just like a garden plant, your website needs deep, broad, healthy roots to create better and bountiful results. Your bountiful results can include…

Higher search rankings for more and more of your keywords
More clicks to your website from the search results
More contact form submissions with quality inquiries that can lead to sales from the website
Repeat visitors and site visitors who stay on your website longer show that your content is compelling.

As illustrated in the tomato plant diagram included here, there are a variety of factors that represent the roots of your website presence online. You’ll notice that every root mentions one or more of the E-E-A-T factors (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) that are critical to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These are also vital to the website visitor’s user experience.

The Deep Roots That A Website Needs

In addition to great content about your company and your products and services, strong roots and a good website come from...

Links - Links back to your website from high-authority websites like government agencies, universities, industry groups, and industry directories, help establish your website’s authority.
Citations - Accurate, widespread, and consistent citations across the internet help establish trust in your website. These come from the many automated listing websites like YellowPages.com, BBB.org, Yelp.com, Manta.com, CitySearch.com, and many more. These might seem meaningless for some websites, like industrial company websites, but they are important to the search ranking algorithms.
Deep content - Quality website content of sufficient depth can demonstrate every part of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) and is helpful to both the reader and search engines. "Thin content", on the other hand, is so brief that it can fail every part E-E-A-T and is frowned upon by search algorithms. Demonstrated expertise helps build your authority and trust factors. Or as we like to say... You have to have enough content for search engines and for site visitors to chew on.
Fresh content - Fresh website content on a regular basis and removal of old content that is no longer relevant also demonstrate E-E-A-T. Ongoing, fresh website content can feature any of those factors. We also have a saying for that... You have to feed the search engine beast!
Onsite SEO & SCHEMA Markup - Good onsite SEO and Schema markup are essential to properly structure content for search engines. These enable your website to specifically tell the search algorithms what is most important on each web page. Otherwise, you leave the search algorithms guessing what your page is about.
User experience - Great user experiences result in more visitor engagement, more contact form submissions (RFQs) and more repeat visitors. This comes from helpful, in-depth, interesting, accurate, and expert page content. It also includes great, easy-to-use navigation. These items will help your website become trusted and authoritative.
Google Business Profile (GBP) (formerly Google My Business) - There is a lot more to a Google Business Profile than simply adding your hours, some pictures, and a brief description. A robust GBP needs to be updated regularly in a variety of ways. This includes listing multiple products, using the update function regularly, using multiple categories, and adding service descriptions for each category. It also includes adding multiple geographic areas served and robustly gathering reviews and responding to those. A Google Business Profile is often the most noticeable thing on a search results page, so make it count! And one more thing... You should also have a complete Bing Places for Business profile.

If any of these roots wither away, your website, just like a garden plant, will be weaker and less productive.

In a garden, you usually plant a variety of vegetables. And when someone asks what you’re growing, you probably don’t say generically that you’re “growing vegetables.” That is not only uninformative, it is also uninviting. You’re more likely to say that you’re growing tomatoes, green beans, leaf lettuce, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, etc. When your answer is more relevant with more information, it often leads to more interest and more conversation.

Your website is no different. If your garden were a website, each type of plant would be a separate page on your website. So on your website, you should never bundle up everything about your products or services into one simple, mostly uninformative, generic description on a single page for “services” or “products”. Site visitors expect more and search engines respond better when you properly and fully list each service or product on its own web page. Remember, "thin content" can hurt your website in search results, so a web page that only has a simple bullet-point list of your products or services is wholly insufficient. If you want to let people and search engines know what you do, then feature your products and services robustly on your website!

There are even more similarities between your garden and your web pages. A garden needs thinning, pruning, and weeding. So do websites. This means checking for dead links because they can harm your search engine ranking and make your website appear unreliable. Prune off those dead links! Just as you would remove plants that have died or reached the end of their productivity, a website also needs to remove content that is no longer useful, that might have become inaccurate, or that is just too old. Another option is to update pages or blog articles with new information.

Your website also needs ongoing nurturing so that it will grow, just like your garden plants need nurturing to grow. This website nurturing includes adding new content such as new pages, new blog posts, and expanded content via updated pages and posts. Since we know from experience that most small and mid-size companies will never actually write blog posts on their own and that they’re usually unwilling to pay for professional blog writing, we have a very effective and new GEO-SEO mini-blog service that is optimized for search engines. The GEO-SEO mini-blog service is like fertilizer for your SEO and can improve your search engine performance.

Website nurturing can also include adding SEO-friendly FAQ sections or Q&A sections. It can include reducing image sizes to improve page loading time. And optimizing images with keyword-rich descriptions can help your pages perform better in search results and can also enable your photos to show up independently in search results. All of this nurturing improves your odds of generating a more bountiful harvest from your website.

Protecting A Garden & Protecting A Website

And just like your garden needs multi-layered protection, your website does too. Websites should have a fence, like a secure socket layer (SSL). That is the “S” in HTTPS, which is the factor that puts a padlock in the browser address bar next to your website address. SSL is like a small fence for the bunnies. The bigger fence for your website, similar to a garden’s bigger fence for deer, is called a WAF... a web application firewall. A WAF helps keep bigger threats at bay. And then there are security scanning tools to identify and remove viruses, malware, and other malicious codes that find their way into weak spots on your website. Website security scanning is like using insecticides and fungicides Both keep seemingly tiny, almost unnoticeable threats at bay, because such threats, though small, can wreak enormous havoc on a garden or a website.

Keeping Up The Effort Every Year

With sustained effort, your garden might produce more vegetables just as your website might produce more sales or sales opportunities. But you can’t rest on those laurels. Your garden and your website will not produce great results next year based on what you did this year. You have to keep up the same effort next year and every year after that. And by keeping up with it every year, you can also learn new methods, make smart changes, and add new things to your garden and to your website.

Let’s be clear. If you don’t nurture your website, then your website and online presence will wither away just like a garden would. At a minimum, these 4 things will happen to your website if you don’t nurture it. These issues will significantly weaken your website and your online presence if you effectively abandon it by failing to nurture it year after year.

Any search engine rankings you had previously achieved will erode steadily due to competition with companies that continue to nurture their own websites and due to lower scoring in the search engine algorithms. To put this in perspective, would you expect an athletic team to maintain top ranking if they didn't keep in shape, if they never practiced, and never improved? Everyone is gunning for them so they can never rest on their laurels; Nor can you. In website ranking, your competitors are without a doubt working to achieve top ranking. So you can't count on ranking well yourself if you don't keep working to improve. Additionally, search engine algorithms will demote your website, deeming it to be practically abandoned, if you never change anything on your website. Search algorithms are more likely to reward websites that are continually updating, adding new content, weeding out old content, improving site function and speed, etc. What are doing to improve or maintain your search rankings?
Your site traffic will inevitably decline. You will have fewer visitors and fewer pages visited. You will also have fewer contact forms submitted which means fewer quality sales opportunities. When there is a steady decline in your traffic, it is very clear that your website has lost rank in the search engine results pages. And that happens from neglecting your website while your competitors are improving their websites.
Your website can visibly decay and have its layout and functions broken when the website is neglected. This happens when plugin versions, WordPress core engine versions, and theme/template versions become outdated and are never updated. And it happens when a website uses features, design methods, and technology that are out-of-date. Images may stop show properly on your website. Your header and footer can become broken and visibly messed up. Your navigation can lose function. Your contact forms might stop working. Your page layouts might become skewed. Any of these areas might display error messages. Are these the impressions you want to leave with a potential customer?
An untended website will likely develop security vulnerabilities that open the doors to all kinds of havoc inside the guts of your website. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, because when it does happen, it might be too late. For example, if you no longer have backups of your website, you might face a costly rebuild of your website from scratch. Or you might have to hire security experts to root out the effects of various nefarious attacks your site suffered while you left it unprotected. You might even find your website held hostage in a ransomware attack.

Once neglect allows these negative effects to take hold on a website, it can be difficult to recover and it takes a long time to regain any search engine ranking you might have once had. Fixing all of the broken parts can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Don’t let this happen to your website!

There is one big difference between your garden and your website. Your garden is something you do on your own without hiring experts to help you. With your website, it is also possible that you could update it and maintain it on your own. However, it is crucial for website owners to recognize the need for professional assistance in order to achieve an ongoing, successful website effort. And it is important to ensure that the person or agency you hire has a deep understanding and relevant experience in your specific industry.

Over my 20+ years of experience in website design, maintenance, and SEO, I have observed that despite their best intentions, very few small and mid-size companies have the time and expertise required to effectively nurture, protect, and grow their online efforts. As a busy business owner, your focus is on running your company and getting your products out the door. Even your most computer-savvy employees have their hands full with other daily responsibilities. Realistically, neither you nor your employees have the necessary time or expertise to dedicate to the continual nurturing, growth, and maintenance of your website.

So while it is extremely unlikely that you would ever hire a professional gardener to manage your home garden, you should, without a doubt, allow a professional website expert to manage and grow your company’s website and your entire online presence on your behalf. It is time to start nurturing your website and growing it like you would grow a garden. Contact us and let's get started!