Keeping Your Website Healthy: Monthly To-Do’s for Therapists and Coaches
Whether you’re a therapist, a coach, or both, you’ve likely spent a good chunk of time creating your website and launching it into the world. You’ve worked hard to make sure that your website reflects your personality, speaks to the right people, and books clients on your behalf. But what about maintaining your website over time?
If you already have a website that you love, you may be wondering, “Now what? How do I keep my website healthy?”
Similar to therapy or coaching, your website isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ type of thing. Think of it this way: When you finish working with a client, the work doesn’t just stop there. It’s up to the client to use the insight and awareness gained throughout your work together to maintain and build upon the progress made.
Similarly, after launching your website, it’s up to you to continue giving your website the TLC it deserves so that it can keep working hard for you in return!
By making simple website maintenance a part of your regular routine, you can help to ensure that:
Your website visitors continue to have the experience that you want them to have
Your website continues to build authority on search engines
Your website continues to send you clients 24/7
In this guide, I’m going to share the four things you should be doing every month to keep your website running smoothly and performing well.
I’ll follow up these to-do’s with some questions from my Website Supervision members, but if you still have unanswered questions by the end of the post, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out!
Monthly to-do #1: Publish new content
One of the best ways to keep your website healthy and current is regularly publishing new content. Updating your site with new content serves two purposes; it gives people opportunities to visit your website again and again (building trust over time), and it also shows Google and other search engines that your website is active.
Why is it important to show search engines that your website is active? Google and others want to show relevant, high-quality search results, so they’re more likely to include active, regularly updated websites in search results than websites that have been sitting stagnant for months.
“New content” can be anything from new pages, blog posts, products, or a membership area that you add to regularly.
If you don’t currently publish new content monthly, here are some ideas to get you started:
Add a blog to your website and publish written or video content.
Content that you add to a blog should be educational in nature and should appeal to your specific niche. Think about what your most aligned clients want to learn from you. Website content isn’t therapy, so consider how you can use your expertise to teach instead.
To add a blog to any Squarespace website, navigate to Pages > New Page > Blog.
Start a podcast and publish each episode + transcript to your website.
Similar to a blog, podcast content for therapists and coaches tends to work best when it’s educational in nature and niche-specific.
Use a blog page to organize your episodes. Just make sure you rename the page from “blog” to “podcast.”
Create a members-only area of your website.
If you have an online course (or you’re thinking about creating one), or you offer online classes or video trainings, a members-only area on your website can be a great way to keep your website active and healthy.
Squarespace now offers Member Areas to help you separate exclusive content from free content on your website! Learn more here.
Start by publishing one new piece of content per month. If it feels good and sustainable to you to increase your frequency, go for it!
The main takeaway here is that a stagnant website is not ideal. Life happens and things get busy, but establishing a regular content plan now will keep your website healthy in the long run.
Monthly to-do #2: Update old or inaccurate content
Just like your closet, your website can benefit from a little “spring cleaning” every so often. I recommend routinely reviewing your website copy, blog posts, and page structure to make sure all of the information and content is still accurate. If you find anything that no longer fits, don’t be afraid to update!
One common myth is that once you publish a piece of educational content, like a blog post, you can’t change it. That’s not true! Sometimes, you may want to add new SEO keywords to old blog posts or update outdated content with new information. Making these types of changes is a good idea both for your website as a whole and for website visitors as they’ll benefit from getting the latest and most up-to-date information.
However, a word of caution: If you update a page’s content, try to keep the page URL the same. Changing page URLs on a whim will confuse search engines, potentially having a negative impact on your SEO. If there’s no way around changing a page’s URL, see my note below*.
If you’re having trouble discerning if anything on your website needs updating, try “walking” through your website from the perspective of a new visitor. Take off your therapist or coach hat for a moment and ask yourself:
Is the path through my website clear and intuitive?
Is it clear what I want visitors to do?
Am I giving my visitors too many options?
Would I be confused if I was visiting for the first time?
Use your answers to these questions to update and streamline accordingly.
*A NOTE ON DELETING PAGES OR CHANGING A PAGE URL:
Occasionally, you may find that a whole page on your website is no longer relevant. Before you delete it or change its URL, follow best practices to maintain SEO:
Redirect the page URL
Just because you delete a page, doesn’t mean people will stop going there. We share page links all the time, so the likelihood of the page URL you’re deleting being somewhere out there on the internet is strong.
If someone finds it and clicks it after the page was deleted, they’ll end up at a “404 Not Found” page, which isn’t great from a user experience standpoint, and also not ideal for your SEO.
Whenever you delete a page, create a URL redirect. Think of it like forwarding your mail after you move to a new address; you have to let your website know where it should direct people now that the original page is gone.
If you’re using Squarespace, learn how to create URL redirects here.
Update your website links
If you linked to the deleted page anywhere on your website, make sure you update those links. Pay special attention to header and footer navigation links, as well as call-to-action buttons.
If visitors click a link thinking they’re going one place and they end up at another, they’ll be confused and likely leave.
Monthly to-do #3: Check for broken links
Broken links - hyperlinks or buttons that don’t work - happen to the best of us sometimes, but routine checks can help to make sure these don’t go unnoticed for long.
On occasion, you might forget to add a link to a button or perhaps the destination page URL has changed (but if you use URL redirects, like I described above, you’ll be in the clear!).
Going through your website regularly and checking for any broken links will allow you to catch these quickly and make sure that your website visitors can successfully navigate to the pages and information they’re looking for.
Every month, do a 5-minute link audit:
Start with any new content you’ve published in the last month. Click every hyperlink and button to make sure they’re working.
Do a quick check of your navigation links; click every link - do they lead to the right places?
Do a quick check of your buttons on the main pages of your website (home, about, services, contact). Click every link - do they lead to the right places?
Link checks may seem monotonous and boring, but it’s a good way to ensure your visitors are having the best experience possible (and not ending up at those pesky 404 pages).
Monthly to-do #4: Monitor your website analytics
Review your website analytics regularly to get to know your visitors’ behavior on your website, to gather SEO keyword ideas, and to learn where your website traffic is coming from.
Your website analytics will tell you if your website is “healthy” or not; in other words, looking at the data will reveal whether or not your website is doing what it’s supposed to do.
Checking in once per month can give you a better overall impression of how your website is performing, versus checking every day.
View your analytics through your website’s analytics dashboard, or use Google’s tools: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Search Console Insights.
Here are some key metrics you’ll want to pay attention to:
Monthly visitors
This number indicates how many people visited your website over the past month. While it’s normal for website traffic to go up and down, if your website is functioning well, this number should increase over time.
If your traffic is declining or stagnant, it might be time to reassess your marketing efforts and find more ways to send traffic to your website.
Traffic sources
This tells you where your website visitors are coming from. Wherever you decide to spend time marketing your practice (Instagram, Pinterest, Google, in-person networking, etc.), watch your traffic source data over time to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment.
Search keywords / queries
This tells you which searches your website is ranking for. Watching your keyword rankings helps you determine how well your SEO efforts are working and can inform further optimization.
It can seem impossible to know what people are searching for as it relates to your services; but with keyword data, you don’t have to guess! Use this information to inspire future blog posts, podcasts, or course content and your website visitors will thank you!
Popular content
In addition to keyword performance, this information will help you understand what’s resonating with your website visitors and help you in determining what type of content to publish in the future.
I like using Search Console Insights to learn about my top-performing content.
There’s so much more to website analytics than I can cover here, but to monitor your own website, stick to the categories above. Consider this list the foundation of website analytics; you’ll learn more as you go, but this is a good place to start.
Q&A
I publish a weekly newsletter called Website Supervision (sign up here), and I asked members to submit their questions about website maintenance. Here are the most common questions I received:
“How much maintenance does a website really require? I’m thinking updated content. What else do I need to know?”
If you stick to the four monthly to-do’s I outlined above, you’ll be set! Of course, there will be times when you need to attend to things outside of this list, but again, to keep your website running smoothly, all it takes is a little monthly TLC.
“I have heard that updating your website periodically helps SEO. Is this true and what kind of updates help your rank?”
Yes, it’s true! As I described above, publishing new content lets Google and other search engines know that your website is active. Plus any on-page SEO you do on said new content will add to your website’s searchability.
If you need more help learning how to rank in search results, I recommend taking my workshop: Intermediate Website SEO.
“Sometimes I will get emails from google about my site being crawled and having ‘new mobile usability issues’.”
In general, try to follow Google Search Console’s recommendations and help documentation here.
If you use Squarespace, I’ve noticed that sometimes the “announcement bar” causes issues with bots. Try increasing the font size and line-height of your announcement bar and monitor the issue.
“Can I have someone else do this stuff for me?”
You can, of course. But as a business owner, I recommend understanding website maintenance before deciding to hand it off.
And if you don’t have the admin privileges to do some or all of the above yourself, that’s a big red flag in my book. Your website is your most powerful marketing asset, and you should have 100% access to and control over how it’s used.
If you need help with the technical side of managing your Squarespace website (such as redirecting old URLs or hooking up your EHR or email marketing platform), we can help you with that! Learn more about our Squarespace Tech Support services here.
