Managing a Website vs. Website Maintenance vs. SEO – What’s the Difference?

It’s not hard to find a website designer to create a website for you. But once you have an online presence that is “google-able,” then what? To keep your website user- and search engine-friendly amid all the changes in search algorithms and trends in user behavior, it needs constant attention. But if you don’t understand the lingo of taking care of a website, you might not be getting the right services, putting your online visibility in jeopardy.

Types of Website Upkeep

If your website is going to be a valuable asset to your business’ marketing plans, it needs to always be live and offer an excellent user experience…and user experience matters because:

  • It heavily impacts your ranking potential
  • It can determine whether your viewer leaves your site or actually converts to a paying customer

In order to deliver the uptime, speed, content and ranking to do that, your website requires three different types of upkeep:

#1 Website Maintenance

Maintenance entails the work of keeping your content fresh and engaging. So, website maintenance may involve:

  • Adding new content via new pages or blogs
  • Adding new video content and/or images (or replacing old stuff that doesn’t attract traffic any more)

For best traffic, you also need to maintain the off-site but online elements that drive traffic, like online reviews and your social media accounts.

Of course, to know what needs updating or enhancing, you need metrics. So, one of the big jobs of website maintenance is monitoring your analytics, assessing performance and looking for patterns in user behavior then creating a strategy to improve performance.

#2 Website Management

Management mostly involves the “back end” stuff that keeps your website live, as in, actually viewable on the internet. Website management includes tasks like:

  • Performing regular CMS and plugin updates
  • Restoring your website from a backup
  • Making changes to your DNS (domain name server) to:
    • (Re)Direct traffic
    • Create a subdomain
    • Setup email using your domain (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com)

Website maintenance requires some quasi-technical knowledge, terms and practices that are basic in the industry but that most end-users don’t always understand, like:

  • The difference between a domain registrar and host
  • FTP and .htaccess
  • robots.txt

Most website maintenance is performed through your host, not the content management system, like WordPress.

#3 SEO

Search engine optimization involves a combination of on-page (maintenance-level) and off-page (management-level) tasks to improve/maintain your ranking performance. SEO upkeep may include:

  • Adding new content and/or revising existing content to better incorporate effective keyword phrases (including long-tail phrases that improve voice search performance)
  • Adding or revising meta data for all on-page elements, including the page itself and all images and videos
  • Implementing schema to ensure meta data and element and/or page rendering conforms to search engine-preferred data structures
  • Cultivating quality inbound links to your website

SEO is not just limited to your web pages. It can—and should—be applied to your ecommerce shopping cart and social media posts as well.

What You Need Is What SonicSEO Does

Every website requires every type of upkeep, some just to a greater degree than others. Unfortunately, most websites have been lacking some TLC, getting hopelessly outdated in their appearance, content or architecture. But if you’re a SonicSEO.com client, your website isn’t one of them.

SonicSEO.com provides website maintenance, management and SEO to make sure your website is highly visible, highly trafficked and highly converting. You may not have noticed because we do so much for you so that you just don’t have to worry about your website.

If you’re not a SonicSEO.com client but would like the same worry-free website upkeep, contact us to schedule a free consultation.