Having just conducted site maintenance for a number of clients, a few easy tips come to mind for ANY business owner. Chief tip: Before they search you—search yourself. A whole reputation management industry has developed online to monitor your online presence. If it’s your business, don’t you want to know how you appear to the public?

1. Check your websites regularly.

Your website is your public digital storefront (whether or not you sell anything from it). What happens if someone arrives and the “door” is locked? You’d be surprised how often someone forgets to check on their domain or hosting account renewal and the site simply isn’t there online.

If I built your site, I check your site when I perform routine maintenance, which may be monthly or quarterly, depending upon the frequency of WordPress updates. I don’t, however, check to see if it’s running every day or even every week because it’s YOUR business.

I’ll surely notice if your site is down when I attempt to visit for maintenance! When I’m not conducting maintenance, your site sends me notices when it completes external backups, when someone else logs in, or even when a hacker attempts to login (and is thankfully thwarted by our security measures).

Your site also sends me notices when software automatically updates. Your site is set to automate as much of its maintenance as is safe to do. That means updates occur between my personal visits to your site. And conveniently that means I occasionally get alerts for concerning activity. If I do, then I’ll be visiting your site outside of regularly scheduled maintenance (such as a hacking attempt).

When these unscheduled events occur (highly infrequent!), I’m hands-on for as long as necessary to ensure everything is running smoothly on your site. Sometimes this means I’m checking it daily for a few days. Other times, it’s just a one-off check-in to ensure an update or special process ran smoothly.

Check-in on your own website(s) regularly. Add it to your routine task list to view for a few seconds.

2. Check your business in Google

When’s the last time you ran a Google search on your business? Be sure you do this from an Incognito window [Ctrl+Shift+N] in a browser. If you are in the habit of checking your Google business listing on a regular basis in the same browser, you won’t see how it might display to a potential client on their first visit. Also, be sure you’re searching the business name, not the domain name. Search “Jane Business Name” not janebusinessname.com. Each entry generates different results.

• What search results pop up?
• Does it display as expected?
• If not, take a screenshot and send it to me to research the issue.

Google is constantly making changes to how search results display. For example, have you noticed most search results now display AI answers at the top rather than a series of websites you can view to get answers to your queries? This is a topic for a separate article as so many changes have taken place in Google Search.

3. Check your online presence on your phone!

Now, check both of the above on your smartphone. Results may be dramatically different.

• How quickly does your website home page load?
• Is it displaying as expected?
• Mobile website display can be completely different from desktop display. Ensure yours looks as expected.

How about your business name search? Google may display location results before others. It depends upon your type of business.

Checking your online presence before someone else searches you can prevent embarrassing gaffes. If you’ve referred a prospective client to your site or suggested typing your business name in the search bar, you better know what results that prospect will see. You may be surprised at the number of panicked phone calls I receive, “I forgot to renew my hosting!” or “There’s a Error 404 message where my website should be!” Wouldn’t you rather catch a goof before the public finds it?