Good day, all you wonderful business owners who manage your own sites! Do you have web access for your site to where you can add or modify content, be it web pages and blog posts? Well, if you don’t, please read on and understand how this kills your ability to do your own search engine optimization (SEO)!
More and more, I’m working with students and clients who have had a site built, but were never given access to it for any reason by the web designer. Usually, they just live with this, but it becomes a problem when they want to either do SEO themselves, or have me do the SEO for them. Then, we go through this dance of getting access from the designer. Sometimes it’s easy, and there are times when I swear I want to send a ninja after these people to get them to give up login credentials to the student or client!
The first big issue is you have to probably depend upon a web designer to upload or change content for you. What if you wake up at 3AM with a great web page content idea? Too bad, so sad – you will need to wait for the web designer to fit into her schedule to make it happen for you!
What if it’s a time-sensitive promotion or event? That hurts, comrade.
The next big issue is that if you’ve been trained on SEO by Search Engine Academy Washington DC, and you’re all fired up to re-do your meta data and content, you still have to wait for someone else to upload it. You also have to hope they upload it EXACTLY as you’ve written it!
Let me stop right here and make it clear I’m not trying to trash designers. I’m really not, but they are good at web design, and once they’ve done that for you, I strongly believe you have the right to access your own site anytime, anywhere. After all, you paid for it, and you probably paid a lot.
More Issues When You Don’t Have Web Access
Not only can you not do timely updates on existing content or make new pages, you probably don’t have access to your web analytics or webmaster tools. Many times, designers don’t consult with you on the critical need to install web analytics and set up webmaster tools for you to measure your site’s progress and see if there any issues with search engines accessing your pages. Both of these hinder your SEO efforts.
Why?
If you can’t see how your web pages are performing through analytics, you have no clue as to whether or not your site is working for you – getting your prospects to become customers. You’re just shooting blindly.
As far as webmaster tools are concerned, you need to know if your pages are accessible by the search engine crawlers, if there are any manual penalties or security issues with your site that drops you right out of search results.
It’s becoming more common for me to have to halt any SEO training or work until I help the attendee or client get access to their site, install analytics and verify webmaster tools. I wish this didn’t happen, but it seems to be a reality that I’ll continue to deal with on a case by case basis.
Do you have access to edit your site and blog? Is your analytics and webmaster tools set up and working? I sure hope so!
Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!
All the best,
Hi Nancy, great article. Having the access to Google Analytics & Webmasters is the basic thing with high importance. Most of the web designers, at least the ones I knew, are really ignorant when it comes with SEO.
I want to add 1 more thing. It is safer to change the FTP/CMS logins, once you are done with the web designer. This will eliminate any misuse of the site in the future.