Last week we had a few warm days in Portland but they brought with them some high winds.
High enough that they ripped out the old nails holding a a half-fence up in our side yard.
The wood is old and the nails aren't the right type so the half-fence was half-loose already (would that make a quarter attached?).
A few good gust yanked them the rest of the way out and it was knocking and banging all night in the wind.
The next afternoon we were demoing an old deck and so I had all the tools needed to reattach the fence.
This time by putting in the right sized decking screws. Now it should last until the wood itself fails in the next few years.
I could have left the fence.
I could have also just hammered in the existing nail.
But both of those would have let the problem fester and get worse, probably ending with having the fence fall over.
Or I could have asked for quotes to rebuild the entire fence. It needs it, but that wouldn't be valuable to us right now.
That's why I took the middle approach of solving the immediate problem, the right way.
That'll prevent any future problems and doesn't tie up our resources in an unplanned, unimportant project.
There are hundreds of projects like that with your business.
Some are minor and by investing a few hours you can make due or see a minor improvement. Some require a more significant investment, but you can do a little something now to get started.
SEO, email marketing, content marketing, all three of those benefit from any investment of time you can give them.
And paying for those investments now will make business better in the future when you're ready for the full project.
One SEO feature that actually works in the background is structured data. Mostly because the data helps Google's algorithm which makes their job easier.
You can either audit, code, and test your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have the structured data you need for several types of Rich Results.
It's already helped a few thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.
Eric Davis