I'm back on Google's First Page after a 7 month absence!

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24-09-2015, 07:27 AM
leelive

I'm back on Google's First Page after a 7 month absence!

My business has suffered greatly in 2015. I used to be at the top of Google's search results for my keywords.... but all that changed at the start of this year.

I knew my website was not mobile friendly and ought to have done something about it last year as enquiries starting to plummet towards the end of last year.
... but then in February I was dealt a killer blow. The company hosting my website had a major catastrophe and I lost it my it completely.
They were managing my email system too so I had no email and no website for 1 month!!!
I waited for a couple of weeks hoping that they could recover everything... but they eventually told me that it was all to costly to fix and the company had to close!!

To let you know what that did for my business in financial terms - here are the figures. I have been doing over 70 jobs a year for the last 5 years and turning-over around £28k
This year I will have only turned over just £20k -- Next year it is looking worse... A few months ago when I was thinking about moving down south (until I realised how expensive it was!)... I looked at my bookings for next year and only had 16! When normally I would have had a least 30 stacked up for the year ahead. So it wouldn't have been that painful (though certainly heartbreaking) to have cancelled all those bookings.

So now that we have decided to stay in Edinburgh I have been on a major marketing drive...... and finally after 7 months I now believe that I am back on the First Page of Google.

... what a difference being on that page makes.... for most of the year I have been getting around 15 enquiries a month (and most of them via needadisco - so they didn't turn into bookings).... but now I am back to getting around 40 enquiries a month and the bookings a coming back in again.

So, things ought to now pick-up... but unfortunately I am feeling the effect of that website crash just now. Only 2 jobs this month (would have been around 8 normally)... my wife isn't complaining though... she is finally getting to spend some weekends with me!! and I am having time to work on my photography business. But it is good to be back.

Lee
24-09-2015, 07:58 AM
Nakatomi

Just goes to show how important backup is. Not just for your DJ gear, business machinery etc.... Your website should be backed up a well.

Me, I have a script which runs every night. The sit e & its database is backed up to a file then the file is uploaded to my server at home, which uploads the last backup to a cloudy storage thing. The last weeks backups are kept in the cloud and on the server my site runs on but I keep up to 6 months backups on my home server. Sorted? Just about. I should really get it doing email backup as well.

Don't assume your web host takes backups folks. I'm glad things are looking up for you Lee :)
24-09-2015, 08:25 AM
leelive

Back-up

Quote:

Originally Posted by juski

Just goes to show how important backup is. Not just for your DJ gear, business machinery etc.... Your website should be backed up a well.

I never really worried about retrieving the content as the Archive.org/web has a copy most websites. So I was able to get the data back.....

My website host also owned the domain name.... so I couldn't quickly redirect it to another site. Just from having no web presence for over 3 weeks cause my old domain lee-live.com to be de-ranked!! If I had been able to save that sooner I wouldn't have had so lost first page listing.

All the best
24-09-2015, 04:57 PM
Nakatomi

Quote:

Originally Posted by leelive

I never really worried about retrieving the content as the Archive.org/web has a copy most websites. So I was able to get the data back.....

My website host also owned the domain name.... so I couldn't quickly redirect it to another site. Just from having no web presence for over 3 weeks cause my old domain lee-live.com to be de-ranked!! If I had been able to save that sooner I wouldn't have had so lost first page listing.

All the best

Don't rely on archive.org. One thing it's not very good at is image caching, and secondly you'll be lucky if it archives every page. No, pre-emptive backup is the best plan. You don't even have to do it every night or every week - just whenever you make changes. Backups have saved my bacon more than twice. Oh, and don't just think you can manually save all your site from home either. if it's based on a Content Management System you need a backup of all its files AND the database. Most CMS have free backing up tools available, so install em & make use of them. Even if your web service provider includes 'free' backups as part of your plan, do your own too. For the effort involved, it could save you a hell of a lot of time & bother in the long run :)
25-09-2015, 07:21 AM
DazzyD

I learned early on that it's much, much better to be the domain owner than to use a name owned by your hosting company that is thrown in with your hosting. This is because I originally went down that very route with 1&1 Internet. But, after the first year when the trial prices were reasonable, they banged the price up to full whack which was a lot more than others were charging. I moved to Heart Internet but had to pick a different name as 1&1 wanted an unreasonable amount of cash to sell me the name to take with me. So I chose a different domain name, bought and owned by me, then waited nearly two years for my original domain name to become available and then bought that as well.

I currently have 8 domain names in my portfolio and all are administered through GoDaddy. Their customer service were exceptional so I think I'll be with them for some time to come.

As for backups, my sites are all backed up locally and are scheduled to back up on a weekly basis. The default setting was daily backups but I really didn't think this was necessary (except for a forum I run which is backed up nightly).