Site icon Sycosure

Rebuilding Sycosure: Part 1

Alistair Kavalt

Due to the years working for Black Hat World, I began letting this site and my overall business fall to wayside. This was not entirely by choice as my contract with the company meant that I was required to work 8 hours during PST (usually 9am 5pm or 10am to 6pm), and as a result of some other obligations, I had little time leftover to grow my company.

But enough about that nightmare. I wanted to take today to analyse what I need to do to rebuild this site and start getting real clients again.

I want to document this in order to give others some insight into the exact procedures I follow to build up websites and to give those of you some hope that you can pick up the pieces should anything ever fall through.

So let’s start off with the analytics for Sycosure.com as of today.

Analytics Data

Oh jeez, oh god, oh man… Yeah, I really let the traffic drop for this site.

Okay, but not all hope is lost. As you can see, the site and articles are still receiving some traffic. This is a good thing! Something important to note is that I currently have people from Black Hat World sharing an article explaining why I’m no longer there, so I should expect traffic for that to die down at some point.

Current State of The Website

Next up, I need to look over the current state of the website. After all, my website should be a representation of the work that I can do for others. Think of this way: if you had a house cleaning business but your own house was dirty, you can’t really expect anyone to trust that you’ll adequately clean their home, can you?

Below, I covered some of the issues I identified with Sycosure after a brief analysis.

Contact Form

Unfortunately, the contact form stopped working at some point, which I suppose explains why I stopped receiving business inquires. Great…

I can’t really be bothered to fix the contact form, so what I did instead was put up my e-mail address and create a Telegram account. The Telegram account isn’t for business though, it’s just so people from the forum can have a way to casually chat with me if they want to stay in contact.

Services Page

My services page has been outdated for quite some time. For one thing, there were no services on there because I was limited by my old “workplace”, if you can call it that, in terms of what I could offer. I mean, I could not offer services to members of our community because of my position.

Now that I no longer have these limitations, I quickly just set some sections on the services page to offer some consultancy services for online marketplace (you can guess why given my experience with this). Even during my time with the last client, I still offered web design services to people local to my area here in California, so I’ll be putting up a section to advertise this worldwide.

Outdated Themes & Plugins

I’m not going to post a screenshot of this, but I had about 21 outdated themes and plugins on this site. I personally don’t enable auto-updates to avoid others taking advantage of zero-day exploits.

I have a child theme of a parent theme that I purchased ages ago for this site. I customised it a bit and just use that, but I like to keep at least one extra theme on the site as a backup just in case anything happens to this one. With that said, I deleted all of the other themes.

As for the plugins, I took the time to remove the ones I don’t use and update the ones I do still have a need for. Since the site is receiving a bit more traffic than usual, I’m being careful to update these one at a time so as to not disrupt users reading my article about why I left Black Hat World.

About Page

I’m no longer hiding who I am from the internet marketing community, so I’m going to take the time to spruce this page. After all, as someone very wise once told me, people buy from people, not businesses.

SEO

I have really have neglected the site in terms of SEO over the years. The on-page SEO isn’t exactly what I would call great, but I did keep with the off-page SEO in ways I will not publicly mention. At the very least, I will say I feel I have some decent backlinks. I should really check this at some point, though.

Roadmap

Now that I know what some of the issues are with the website, I can begin fixing these issues. Once all of the issues mentioned above have been fixed, I can start improving the website. But first, I’ll be creating a roadmap to things I’d like to do for Sycosure.com and my company:

I am going to end this by saying that I plan on doing all of this myself. Please don’t contact me to offer me services because, I’ll be honest, it was beginning to cost me just to work for BHW, so I’m trying to conserve funds for now.

In part 2, I’ll cover what I did to work on Sycosure’s SEO, because we all know this is in desperate need of attention. As I go along the roadmap, I will continue posting my analytics data to show how much the site has grown. In the meantime, be on the lookout for articles as there’s so much I’ve wanted to share about the experience I’ve gained and had working for BHW.

Latest posts by Alistair Kavalt (see all)
Exit mobile version