Yesterday was a culmination of several days worth of work. Of almost breaking the company website multiple times. Of chasing a meaningless score. Then finally achieving that meaningless score.
I spent a good portion of last night with one question, why. Why did I, as an owner of a pet sitting and dog walking company, need to have a high performance score on Google’s Page Speed Insights tool? Why did I feel that need so strongly? I cannot explain it.
I had to though. I had to find and solve the major hold-up of the website. It is a legacy issue that goes back to the SEO company that did nothing. As I have dug more and more into what Google values I have found that they truly did nothing. They made 36 dummy pages and called it success because of the clicks. Looking back now is like looking back into the poor spending from my father’s household for the same time period. It is all meaningless.
Maybe that is why I was chasing core web vitals and updating local directories this past week. I wanted to correct the mistakes of the past. Of having worked with a company that does SEO but doesn’t do alt text or content or build a website out of anything other than a free template. It is also, partially, about the money I spent on it and the strategy I put behind it. Here was an issue I figured would be solved, have a huge ROI, and would lead to more outsourcing. None of that happened.
It is one of the most disastrous episodes in my company’s history. So many things were done wrong or incorrectly by people claiming to be experts. I never received a single concrete report from them that told me what was going on or why. It is frustrating, and has left me trying to do what I can to get everything good and making the same mistakes as everyone else when I can’t just wait and let things happen. I really do need to stop tinkering with the website for a bit.
David Huzzard Writes 