Tag: webdesign

Is SEO Always Worth It?

April 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 89 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith. He’s answering the question “Is SEO always worth it?”

Sections

How Fresh Should Your Content Be?
Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent
Commercial Intent
When SEO Fails Expectations
Three Parts of SEO: Technical, Content, and Link Building
Developing a Content Calendar
SEO Doesn’t Have To Take a Long Time
Go At Your Own Pace With SEO
Is SEO Always Worth it?
Call To Action
How To Call Customers To Action
Tools For Marketing Automation
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

Is SEO Always Worth It?

How Fresh Should Your Content Be?

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger. He’s the founder and CEO. So, you’re an SEO company.

Okay. So, you talked about this content as being key. So, an SEO plan – is this fair to say? – an SEO plan without content is not an SEO plan?

Jeremiah: Yes. Insofar as Google is concerned, that’s correct. I would say that that could be a broad descriptor of SEO as well because of Amazon clearly needing content, iTunes search needing some content. But yeah. Generally speaking, you’re absolutely right. If you don’t have content in your SEO plan, then you just don’t have an SEO plan.

Paul: Okay, then how fresh does that content have to be?

Jeremiah: That really depends actually. Freshness is a powerful tool where the content needs to be fresh. But if we think about who has dominated Google search results for the longest time, that’s Wikipedia. And a lot of the content in Wikipedia, though it is user generated and created and optimized and it gets updated frequently and stuff like that, there are pages of content in Wikipedia that have kind of sat there for a long period of time and consistently dominate.

Paul: Good point.

Jeremiah: So, we need to keep that in mind. I’m sure if we searched for The Declaration of Independence in Google, and we read it now – its’s probably on Wikipedia – it’s probably not much different than it was five to ten years ago. It may have changed a little bit but the freshness of that does not corelate to how well it ranks.

Paul: Sure.

Jeremiah: So, freshness is important but it’s a system of factors. It is almost kind of like saying something like, “Why do you like vanilla ice cream?” or, “Why do you like jazz?” That’s hard to answer, right?

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Jeremiah: It’s a system of feelings. It’s a system of things in you that cause you to make that decision. With Google, it’s not so much feeling but there are a lot of factors that are influencing it, and in varying degrees, that aren’t outwardly published by Google. They don’t give their full science away. They give an idea of their science away, so we have an idea. But we’re constantly reverse engineering to kind of nail that down.

Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent

Jeremiah: If I were to give you my list of top-ranking factors, kind of reverse engineered, from what I’ve discovered through doing this, the first one on that list would probably be Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent. So, accuracy of the piece of content that you have to the searcher’s intent to the keyword that they searched. So that’s really hard to determine. If you don’t have Google to use right away, but if you do have Google to use, which you do, then you can go ahead and search the keyword that you want to target and see what does come up. And you’re going to find that the searcher intent for content, at the top of Google, is kind of clear.

If you’re looking for best pizza shop near me for example, then Trip Advisor is probably going to give you the top fifteen pizza shops, but that’s going to be the organic listing. Google Maps is probably going to give you a few pizza shops that are highly rated and stuff like that. So, Google is ultimately going to do their best to figure out what you want based on what you’ve asked.

Paul: Yeah. Interesting. It’s a different way to think in some ways. You have to sort of think about how the organization happens. I liked your analogy of organizing the spice cabinet because you would organize it so that you could find it. And that’s very cool.

Commercial Intent

Paul: So now we talked about fresh content and that not being super critical. Because if we’re writing a story about Lincoln, the facts about Lincoln haven’t changed all that much. He was a certain height and he was the certain president and excreta, excreta.

Jeremiah: Right.

Paul: I can see that. Does the content have to have a churn to it, or does it have to have more? So, we’re not talking about Lincoln. We’re talking about the headphones we sell or the semiconductors that we sell, and so does that need to have an ever fresh look or feel really from a content point of view?

Jeremiah: It’s so frustrating to try to understand SEO sometimes or to, in my position, try to explain it because I hate when I get these answers, but it depends.

Paul: Okay. That’s fair.

Jeremiah: But I’m going to go into why that depends. So, if we are talking about Lincoln, everyone is pretty much going to say the same kind of stuff and very rarely is new information going to come out. However, if we are talking about headphones, that’s in the technology, retail space where things actually change pretty quickly. A new product comes on the market by Sony, another one comes on the market by Bose, another one by Sennheiser. It happens a few times a year, every year and everyone goes crazy about all of it. So, there’s a lot of new stuff happening in that industry and so there’s a lot of frogs leaping over each other there. So, if you’re going to play that game, you have just got to get used to being a frog playing leap frog there.

Whereas if you are a historian and you’ve written some really good stuff about Lincoln and you’ve published it, and it took you a while to get it out there. Well, guess what? You’re playing a game where a lot of people are not leap frogging each other. It’s just kind of sitting there. So, you’re in a lucky space if you’re a great historian and have written a long piece of content about that because you’re probably going to rank well, and you don’t have much competition to worry about. But then again, what is your commercial intent? What kind of money are you expecting to get for it? I hate to say that but at the end of the day, that’s where Google really starts playing commercial value, especially for me, a marketing agency.

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: My clients all have a commercial intent with what they’re doing. In my client spaces we have a lot of competition. We have a lot of people playing leapfrog and we just have to help our client be a good racehorse, or I should say a good leapfrog in the game of it and grow some strong legs which comes down to building content, building links, ensuring user engagement is there, and that that searcher intent is accurate to the piece of content. So, it really depends on the space that you’re in, is the sort answer.

When SEO Fails Expectations

Paul: How do you see both good examples and poor examples of companies that sell the SEO magic, if you will, and then don’t fulfill the expectations? Because I would imagine, that an uneducated SEO buyer has unrealistic expectations.

Jeremiah: One hundred percent! And I see it way more than I’d like to. Unfortunately, it’s a situation in my industry where I’m kind of acting and serving as really an ambassador of my industry, to a world of businesses who have been burned by or have a bad taste in their mouth around SEO and working with an agency or someone who says they know anything about SEO. I liken it much to snake oil which sells the magic cure two hundred years ago, where some people probably do have the cure but their reputation and the likelihood that people buying from them, have been ruined by so many other people claiming they had the cure and being completely wrong about it.

And so, I think the same thing is true with SEO. I really work to try to take people into that new line of thinking and make that paradigm shift that I’ve watched you follow me through with the spice cabinet and Amazon and iTunes and showing that search engine optimization applies to a lot of things.

My favorite example of search engine optimization is using a library. Any one of us can go into any library in the United States that we have never been to and in a matter of a couple of minutes, find a single word, on a single page, in a single book, in a single section because of the way the library is structured, and books are structured with tables of contents and indexes.

So, I think really, we as a people in SEO, we owe it to the community at large to first be clear with everyone with what all SEO includes and is and requires to do properly. And then if you are a practitioner in the SEO realm in some way, pick an angle of what you want to specialize in and do it well. If you do want to be a generalist that’s fine. You’re most likely going to fall into the camp of doing a lot of consulting in a bunch of random tactics and tasks that add up to a SEO effort but ultimately, it’s a good idea to kind of pick a specialty like we have and zero in on it.

So, within the SEO space, we focus a lot on keyword research, content strategy, and link building. With that, we then produce content and build links and we find that according to our strategies if we do that properly, our clients just see really good results. And so that’s our specialty within SEO. But I only get to that after kind of laying everything out for my clients and showing them first and foremost what SEO is made up of so that they can feel comfortable and confident analyzing us and other agencies. It’s funny how many agencies go straight in, assuming that people know what SEO includes and then sell them on an aspect of it, and then the client buys it thinking that they’re getting the full part. The most common thing that we find is that a lot of companies out there claiming they know SEO, are just doing the technical portion.

Three Parts of SEO: Technical, Content, and Link Building

Jeremiah: If I break SEO down, I break it into three major categories – Technical, Content, and Link Building. The technical portion is, to me, as good as grading the property you’re about to build your house on and maybe laying the foundation. But that’s as far as it gets with technical. All the technical in the world is still not going to help you compete with really good content out there. It’s just going to help you have a platform to publish your content on and do it effectively. But you still have to publish the content and build links to the content. A lot of companies out there sell SEO and then just deliver the technical portion and the clients are scratching their heads because nothing is happening to their content, nothing is happening to their links. They don’t know anything about needing either one of those anyway but regardless, they’re upset anyway because rankings, traffic, and conversions haven’t improved. So, they fire the SEO agency and say SEO doesn’t work.

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: So that’s the most frustrating scenario that I hear about all the time. And I have to take them and say, “Look, that’s just the beginning. You’ve taken the first step in a thousand step journey of building content and of building links.” So, that’s really what it is going to take to see the results you want.

Paul: The technical thing is like carpentry. It’s not terribly difficult but a good carpenter is worth his weight in gold.

Developing a Content Calendar

Paul: So, do you develop a content calendar? Or how deliberate is that? Or is it just, “I’ll write an article about this.”

Jeremiah: Oh, it’s very deliberate. So, we don’t espouse the idea of producing content for the sake of producing content or because somebody told you that you need to. Content ought to be produced to answer questions and problems within your industry that people are already asking. And if you do a good job of answering every single keyword with a solid piece of content, and maybe even a few different pieces of content attacking that keyword from different angles, then you’re doing a fantastic job.

I think one of my favorite examples of a content production powerhouse in the world is HubSpot. Of course, in my space, they’re very dominate. They’re a marketing automation platform. But if you look up anything about marketing, odds are you’re going to come across a HubSpot article at some point, that’s going to attack that very subject very well. Because they just do a good job of producing content. So, it needs to fall under a content strategy and that content strategy can begin in one place.

When we do SEO for a client, we will start a content strategy. We will deliver that content strategy, but that strategy document is just the beginning. We have what we call the content road map which comes after the strategy and the road map includes some of the things you referred to. A content calendar, where we say, “Okay, we have a calendar.” For us, it’s not like a schedule of two articles per month, every month. It’s more of we need to cover this list of keywords with content. Here’s how many pieces of content at the minimum we’re going to have to produce. Now let’s try to fit that into a calendar because a client only has so much budget. They can’t afford to have a hundred pieces of content written this month and neither can we scale up quickly and do that as effectively.

SEO Doesn’t Have To Take a Long Time

Paul: Let me interrupt. Even if we could scale and they did have the money, would it be wise to? Would it overwhelm?

Jeremiah: Actually, it can be. It can be wise to. So, there are some case studies in our industry of a few companies that have done that and we actually have a case study of a client who did that. On our site we have a case study for Segment where we did an SEO project and they had about a hundred and fifty pages that we did some massive optimization on very quickly. And we leveraged their internal content team, broke it out into sections, and we gave them a whole bunch of recommendations for those pages. They edited those pages. Then we built some links to those pages and then in the span of a couple of months, we improved their organic search traffic very fast, very effectively, to the order of about a hundred and twenty eight percent increase in organic search traffic. So, you can dump a flood of content on Google and if it’s well done and it’s according to a strategy, you’re going to reap the rewards and you’re going to reap them fast.

Paul: Well, that’s cool.

Jeremiah: The problem there is mainly too full. Number one, budget. It’s all manual. So, producing that content is not something that happens automated. I do not recommend any kind of automated content for SEO purposes. It might work in other capacities but from an SEO perspective, I don’t recommend it. So manual handwritten, hand edited, human content is key. And that takes time which costs money. If you pay someone to do it, and then scale, usually to get a hundred and twenty pieces of content quickly, usually one person can’t do that so we have to scale that out across a team of five, ten, fifteen people. Break it up into five, ten pieces each, something like that. And then we’ve got a scalable system to quickly build it. But that’s only if we have the resources in place. Where Segment already had a team of people that could handle that.

Paul: Sure.

Jeremiah: So, that’s a great example. I’ve seen examples where a guy named SEO Nick – He goes by SEO Nick, Nick Eubanks. He’s huge in the SEO community – He published a case study where he took a site and he built the site and built all the content, did all the keyword research, did all the content strategy and everything before launching the site. He had had the domain name but nothing on it. And he built all this and then launched on the domain name, and within like a month or two months’ time, had something on the order of a hundred thousand hits a month flowing in. Within a month to two months. 30 to 60 days. That is insane! And that required a massive effort, but I think he did the whole thing just to see first and foremost, how quickly you can actually show results from zero to one hundred with SEO and kind of break this theory that SEO has to take a long time. Of course, it took a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of money internally to produce all that content structure and everything, but once he hit publish, it just worked.

Paul: Okay, so now that’s great. I would not have believed it if you had not taken me through it. But if Nick had not done that in one big turn it on and it’s all there, if he had done the same thing but metered it out month by month, do you think he would have gotten to the same number of hits, or page views?

Jeremiah: Yes, I think he would have. I think he would have gotten the same number of page views. It would have just taken the total amount of time that it took him to hit publish on each one of those pages metered out and then the time for Google to actually index, simulate, and determine the value of all that content allowed to rank. So, Google can move very fast especially if Google sees a hundred and fifty thousand view urls on a site that is a huge site like eBay. Guess what? All of those urls can show up on Google within an hour or two. So, Google can move exceptionally quick. And all those pages, by the way, can rank because Google has a relationship with eBay that is like chocolate and peanut butter. So, we have to keep that in mind that that can happen. But then, the alternative scenario of spreading it out over a long period of time is why most people say SEO takes a long time. Well, because it took you a long time to do everything necessary for SEO to work.

Go At Your Own Pace With SEO

Paul: Right. Okay. Good insight. But that’s also somewhat of a comfort because it means if you go at your own pace, you’re not doomed to failure.

Jeremiah: Exactly. And that was one of the most exciting things that got me into SEO twelve years ago, or over twelve years ago. I was working for a small mom and pop shop who hired me to build their site and then after their site was built, they were happy with it and they wanted it to show up in Google. And I said, “Well, look. I don’t know anything about this new SEO thing. I’m going to teach myself here. I just discovered it. But if you guys don’t mind, I will spend every day practicing what I’ve learned, to try and get it to show up in Google well and we’ll see what happens.”

And I was very lucky and blessed that they agreed and said, “You know what? Yeah. Do it. But it has got to show results and if it doesn’t show results, we’re going to stop doing it.” So, I was like alright cool! So, I got to work on it and I spent eight hours a day inside a small mom and pop shop that sold ATVs and dirt bikes to retailers throughout the country, trying to get them to show up for the keywords they needed. And with a six-month effort, we added two million dollars onto their four million dollar revenue, just from organic search.

Paul: Wow!

Jeremiah: So, that dedicated effort internally, allowed me to work – and by the way, that was me teaching myself by doing this. That wasn’t even me knowing how to do it yet. – So, yes. You can work at your own pace with SEO and that’s probably my favorite thing about it is, whatever your pace is, you’re going to have proportional, directly proportional results to that.

Paul: Interesting! So, we’re going to shift gears here in just a moment, but do you think that we fundamentally interact with the world differently now that we have Google? I mean, I think the answer is implicitly yes, because if I’m doing anything…. That’s really a stunning fact. Adding two million dollars, adding fifty percent more revenue to a dirt bike company.

Jeremiah: Right, yeah.

Is SEO Always Worth it?

Paul: So, it’s like, wait a minute. What excuse can I use that I can’t do that in my company. I am a semiconductor manufacturer, or I’m a bicycle shop or I’m this or I’m that. So, I guess, if you’re trying to talk yourself out of SEO and you say well nobody that wants my products – let’s talk about the semiconductor stuff – is searching on Google. That seems like a silly thing to say.

Jeremiah: It’s a very rare scenario but it does happen from time to time. But it is rare.

Paul: So, can you think of a business that you would be able to call out that you would be able to say, “No it’s probably not worth doing.”

Jeremiah: And even with those, there’s an angle where you could show up because people are searching CFO headhunter, CIO head hunter, so there is still an SEO angle. You really – Aw man, I hate to give this answer – Again, it depends. It depends on the potential value or ROI that you’re going to get in return from doing SEO as to whether or not it’s worth it to do.

Now the general question of, “Are there industries where there is just no search volume?” That’s so extremely rare that I can’t think of one. I can’t really come up with a good example of one of where it wouldn’t make sense to do SEO because of search volume. But I think in places where ROI is key – small local realtors, small local interest sales people – that both work under agencies… So, like a real estate agent or an insurance agent that works under a major insurance firm. Those are examples where there is definitely search volume and it is cut through. And you want to talk about leap frog? Those frogs are killing each other to try and outrank each other.

So the value there in my opinion, for the small independent realtor or insurance agent, is not there from an SEO perspective. I would recommend going to networking events and talking to people face to face and stuff like that before investing in SEO for those types. So, I don’t serve those business models mainly because of that, because it just doesn’t work as well. So, that’s the most common scenario I think, is the cost to benefit analysis and breaking that down.

Call To Action

Paul: So, now, you get the people there, they’re viewing the content. It’s good content, but don’t you have to have a call to action.

Jeremiah: Right, yeah. The call to action needs to take people down the path also of becoming a customer so in some cases – I mean, you always need to have the option of becoming a customer quickly, kind of like the fast lane in self-checkout – But I think that there does need to be this slower option as well, where we’re carefully, steadily building relationship and nurturing our leads along into having a relationship with us.

And then, if you do it right, you have this staggered approach of different scenarios of where there is the long sell person, there’s the medium sell person and there’s the quick sell person. The quick sell clicks “Schedule Demo” or just hits “Contact Us” and calls a phone number and says, “I want to buy it. Here’s my credit card.” The medium sell says, “Put me on a demo. I’d like to look at it and then after the demo you’re probably going to have to send me stuff and I’m probably going to have to have some phone calls and answer a few questions.” And the long sell person wants to read blog articles and collect used letters and consider five different companies over the course of six months and things like that.

So, I think if you’re offering all those different scenarios then your SEO efforts are going to be best suited by already having those assets and opportunities in place. Because no matter where someone is at, in the buying cycle, if you’re bringing them in to that SEO topical source then you’re feeding them through a large funnel that you’ve set up, that takes in to consideration where they might be in their buying cycle.

How To Call Customers To Action

Paul: How do you, as an agency, help a customer deal with that? So, we’ve got the person to the site, we’ve got a “Buy Now” button somewhere there, but how do you actually, technically help them fulfill the call to action because that’s outside of SEO?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so helping them fulfill the call to action that I forgot to, I guess, mention. What I meant by taking them through that process of going through the funnel is the call to action can be a diverse set of calls to action. The most obvious call to action is buy from us. The medium term is going to be schedule a demo and that kind of thing where we’re maybe advertising the demo a little bit more on our site with content talking about what the demo is going to include and what you’re going to get out of it. So, we’re kind of selling that demo really well.

And then other calls to action, like on a blog such as when a person gets to the end of a blog article. HubSpot highly recommends putting a call to action at the end of a blog article that suggests another piece of content that’s larger on that same subject, that goes deeper into it, because if a person read all the way to end of that piece of content, they’re so heavily devoted and they’re right at the point where they’re probably going to be more open to reading more about that same thing. It’s kind of like a movie that ended too quickly and people are sitting there watching the credits, waiting for the last moments, the after credits scene to roll. They could have used more movie. You know?

Whereas, these people could use more content, so suggest an eBook or a white paper or a pdf download or another longer article, but in order to capture that longer article, I’m going to capture your email in order to give that to you. And I’ll just send that to you really quick. Also, you’re going to get a follow up email from me a couple days later with another piece on the same subject and kind of take you through the process of guiding you deeper into the funnel. So those are some calls to actions that we recommend at the very least. At the very least, capture emails on your site somewhere.

Tools For Marketing Automation

Paul: Do you implement that for customers? That actual conversion funnel? What tools do you use for that? What tools do you recommend?

Jeremiah: So, we don’t implement that for our clients. There are so many good tools out there and we try to kind of remain a little platform agnostic so we can work with whatever client platform they’re on. But we inevitably run into scenarios where we just don’t like the platforms they are on sometimes. And so, we do steer them towards something a little better. I always recommend HubSpot because they’re just a great tool. I’m not a HubSpot partner agency by the way, so I’m not getting paid to say that, just so you know. But regardless they’re a great platform.

However, they are very expensive, so we do like to look at some other platforms as well. I think Marketo is also great. Also, expensive but less than HubSpot. Sharpspring is the one we just signed up for and that we’re getting on to and I’m really liking it so far. It’s pretty interesting.

So, we will recommend, based on our clients’ needs, a platform. A lot of people don’t need, for example, a CRM. So, a lot of our clients have the nine dollar a month software product that you need to sign up for. And they’re not going to waste time putting somebody on a sales call. Also, nobody’s going to get on a sales call to buy that product. It’s nine dollars a month. That’s a quick credit card decision. You swipe and move along. So, for them, their marketing automation platform and the tools they need for marketing, are just going to be different than that of maybe an enterprise supply change management software. So, that is probably going to require a lot more of a sales effort. So, the calls to action are going to be dramatically different. And then the implementation of those calls to action, those conversion items, the lead caption on that is just going to be different as well.

Closing

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger. He’s an SEO expert, and they’re an SEO agency. As you can tell, there’s a lot of value here in what he said. As you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the Show Notes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah.

Well I want to thank you, thank you for spending the time with us and who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome! I’d be happy to come back! Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you!

More Episodes:

This is Part 4 of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith. Stay tuned for Part 5, coming soon! Jeremiah Smith will be sharing his business advice with us!

If you missed any of the previous episodes from our conversation with Jeremiah Smith, you can listen to them here:
Part 1: An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith
Part 2: SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business

Show Notes:

SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business

April 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 88 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith, about SEO and how to create good content for your business!

Sections

How to Execute an SEO Plan
How Much Should You Spend on a Google Ad Campaign?
Making Sense of SEO & Google Search
Advice For Businesses Who Want To Start Doing SEO
When Would SEO Not Apply?
Why Does Your Business Exist?
Who Does Your Business Exist For?
Beginning SEO: Creating Personas
Appealing To Your Clients: What Are You Going to Do About It?
Producing Content To Match Client Personas
Bad SEO, Good Content
Defining SEO
Amazon: The New Dominant Product Search Space
How Does Search Engine Optimization Apply?
Producing Good Content To Help Your SEO
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business

How to Execute an SEO Plan

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger.

So, let me ask you this question. I have a friend who owns this semiconductor manufacturing company, they make packaging for semiconductors. Not like the box but the actual little case that the actual semiconductor goes in. Now, I would imagine that we could look at his client roster and develop some personas. A lot of engineers, a lot of purchasing agents, a lot of, who knows even what, maybe product designers, things like that. How would you recommend, trying to get really practical here, that they execute an SEO plan or begin that so that they could see some positive impact?

Jeremiah: Good question!

Paul: What are your thoughts?

Jeremiah: My immediate direction that I would suggest would be to first and foremost, run – actually, this seems counter intuitive – run a paid search campaign first and foremost to see if you can sell or at least garner interest for your product to a broad audience. And the whole idea there is, that we want to cast a wide net with keywords.

The way we do that is, set up an Ad Words or Google Ads nowadays, a Google Ads count. Run these ads across all these keywords and see what happens. We are kind of testing the waters to a degree. And if we get some conversions, meaning some people clicked on some ads and then bought the product from us, we need to zero in really fast on who those people were. We need to figure out what were their demographics? Where were they? Did we ask the question “What made you decide to buy from us?” That kind of thing so we can see what their values were and that’ll help us quickly learn and gather that data around who our customer is.

Then once we know that, we’re going to be much better suited to start producing content to talk to that audience. If they primarily were in Texas and it turns out that a lot of manufactures that tend to use these semiconductors, or a couple of plants in Texas that really buy that product a lot and that’s who you’re talking to and that’s why a lot of those orders came through. Now you have a really narrow focus on like, “Wow, alright, we need to talk about semiconductors in Texas” or for this specific type of plant, something along those lines.

How Much Should You Spend on a Google Ad Campaign?

Paul: Let’s unpack this a little bit. If there’s somebody out there that has a business like this or similar, I’d like them to be able to walk away with some to-dos. Alright, so they are small companies, small, medium sized business, you know, twenty, fifty employees. Something like that. So what budget would you put together for Google Ads. What is it, Ad Words now?

Jeremiah: Yeah it was Ad Words. They changed it to Google Ads recently to make it simpler.

Paul: So, what’s the budget? Are they going to spend a million dollars, a thousand dollars, five hundred?

Jeremiah: What I like to do is get enough statistically relevant data that I can make conclusions fairly easily. So, what I’m usually looking for is typically at least a thousand clicks. If your site has a one percent conversion rate, and we know that it has a one percent conversion rate, then a thousand clicks ought to yield us ten conversions. If we have those ten conversions, then we can quickly determine a couple things about those conversions. Whatever the cost is in your industry, to get those one thousand clicks, I think will just help you a lot. It could be one hundred clicks but then you’re really extrapolating things. If you could do ten thousand clicks, then you are just more confident in your data because you’ve got a larger data set to work with. So, the larger the data set, the more intelligent you’re going to be.

I would typically recommend a thousand clicks though, which in most industries is going to range from a thousand to twenty-five hundred dollars and that should be done in typically a month. I think that you can get a lot of traction quickly with that. Hopefully, if you get a good conversion rate, you’re going to get some of the sales from it so you’re going to recoup some of the cost of this experiment but the whole idea there is to gain intelligence.

Paul: And how many ad words would you target in that?

Jeremiah: It really depends on the industry and the product.

Paul: But is it the more the better or is it no you should really focus?

Jeremiah: I would try to stay focused to relevance. I would let relevance determine that. I’d make the decision entirely based on how relevant the search seems to be. So, you could easily target hundreds or even thousands of keywords but you may start loosing relevance as you get a broader list and everything. Search a keyword in Google really quick, if it makes sense the results that come up, if they look like competitors and stuff like that, target that keyword. If you don’t see competition, it doesn’t seem like that keyword generates what you do then I would avoid that keyword.

Making Sense of SEO & Google Search

Paul: Again, people are listening to this, they’re driving, they’re thinking about this. Maybe this is something they come back to. We’ve got this business that makes these packages, I go out and do some Googling and find out when I can find my competitors, how I can find my competitors. Is that fair?

Jeremiah: Yeah, I’d say that’s fair.

Paul: Okay, so I compile that list of queries and I look at that and then I go out and buy some Ad Words, Google Ads, I chose the keywords and I measure that. I think it’s important to say that there are two things that are occurring here. They click on something and that may be valuable, but do they actually then engage with your website?

You mentioned the word conversion and I want you to speak to the different types of conversions. Because clicking is one thing, and they get there and they say, “Well there’s nothing about hamsters on this semiconductor website.” Well, it was obviously targeting the wrong keywords but they get there and they may engage but they still may not buy anything because it may be a million dollar purchase. It might take a year to get through that. So, what are your thoughts there?

Jeremiah: So, we are talking about probably one touch in the multi touch phase of marketing. There are so many different ways that people are going to interact with your brand and site and stuff like that. We’ve got to keep in mind that you getting one interaction through a paid search ad or another interaction through an SEO result, may just be one step towards them doing business with you. Just because you’ve got a business from a keyword but didn’t get a conversion, doesn’t mean you didn’t get the interest and the mindshare. This person may come back and continue their relationship with you. And that goes into Seth Godin’s book about permission marketing. With these SEO results, you may actually be, over time, building relationships over time and answering enough questions to where, “Wow! I’ve Googled this problem I’m trying to solve, five different ways and every time they seem to be the one company that answers my questions.” Guess what, when they’re ready to purchase, they’re probably going to come to you.

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: So that’s one way to think about it.

Advice For Businesses Who Want To Start Doing SEO

Paul: So, we were talking about SEO and sort of the logistics of SEO that we had covered to give an idea for somebody who’s coming at this. We all have different levels of knowledge. We all have different levels of experience and SEO is somewhat… it feels like alchemy. I’d love you to capsulize what your advice would be to a fellow small, medium sized business owner, for what their approach to SEO should be. It’s sort of like peeling an onion I think, and we’ll talk about that.

So, for example, lets pick a company. I’ve got a small company that we’re working with. Twenty-seven people. We deal with their IT. They are in the semiconductor manufacturing space. I think I might have used them as an example previously. And they sell these esoteric things to a subset of engineers that are out there. So, is that good? Or is that bad?

Jeremiah: That’s a fantastic angle. I can totally attack that. What I can’t work with is generics.

Paul: So, if I were a pizza parlor it would be harder?

Jeremiah: It depends actually.

When Would SEO Not Apply?

Jeremiah: It’s funny. There are very few instances where SEO does not apply because in almost any business model there is something about your business model that people are searching for. I would say an example of a potentially difficult angle would be a head hunter that does high level sea sweep corporate head hunting because their entire audience may be more based on relationships.

Paul: Okay:

Jeremiah: So that could be one of those examples. I’ve had one client in the past where I looked at it and I just did not see a good opportunity for an SEO perspective where they were concerned.

Why Does Your Business Exist?

Jeremiah: But attacking kind of the semiconductor manufacturer and who is appealing to a set of engineers with very specific needs and concerns. We’re going to talk about a couple different things from an SEO perspective right away. The first thing I’m interested in are the use cases or the application of whatever it is that your product or service offering does. And this can apply pretty generally to a lot of different business models but really, how are people applying or using your product or your service offering? And in this case, the semiconductors are probably built with an application specific focus. They may be built for medical grade machinery or components for hospitals or something along those lines. Then again it could be something specifically built for satellites or cell phone towers. So, if we have a specific application or angle like that, let’s start there and dig into your buyer.

I always like to start first and foremost, with “Why”. Why do you exist? Why does your company exist? That comes from Simon Sinek’s, “Start with Why.” Once we know why the company exists, then that can help us make decisions about everything underneath that.

Who Does Your Business Exist For?

Jeremiah: Once we know why we exist, the next most important thing is “Who.” Who do we exist for? And under that realm, we know that this semiconductor business is serving up – let’s just say their, “Why” is they exist to build the highest quality, maybe most reliable semiconductors for this industry that they have built them for. Do you have an industry in mind that these are applicable for or are these very general and can apply to a lot of different things?

Paul: They’re general. I think they are pretty general, unfortunately. It would be nice if they did it for medical equipment. But no, it’s fairly general and broad.

Jeremiah: Okay, cool. That’s fine. I can work with that. So, what I would do is, I would look at why the business exists first. So, we generate these because we want to be the most reliable. Let’s think of our manufacturers being the Toyota of the manufacturing industry as far as semiconductors are concerned. Reliability is key. Toyota is the most reliable so we’re just going to pick on that for this angle of the semiconductors. That said, now who are we talking to? So, we’re talking to engineers at different companies who are purchasing these semiconductors to use in the application of producing their products or even building their own internal tools or something along those lines.

These engineers, if I analyze your books, if I looked at your business and it’s an established business, and I looked at your books, I could quickly determine that, let’s say you have one hundred customers that you’ve sold to over the course of doing business. So, over all time. If I analyze those one hundred customers and I said, let’s start with the most profitable. Who are the most profitable customers? Its very rare that you’re going to say “Well everyone is equally profitable.” But that’s more of a B to C mindset. But in a B to B mindset, you’re probably going to have a very profitable few types of clients.

Beginning SEO: Creating Personas

Jeremiah: Well, let’s take those profitable ones, and just speaking from a profitability stand point let’s look at patterns that kind of unify them. I’m interested now, in establishing what marketing we call “Persona.” And this is where we get into the who we’re talking to. So, WHO is the most profitable customer of your company? They may be predominantly the healthcare industry. They may be CTOs making the purchasing decision of these semiconductors at healthcare organizations that manufacture these pieces of hardware that are used for hospitals. So that may be a persona. CTO at a healthcare medical device company. So that’s one persona and that’s our most profitable persona.

Maybe our second one is telecommunications and that cell tower kind of example from earlier. Maybe there is a cell phone tower manufacture that AT&T contracts predominantly and their CTO is going to be the customer you want to work with there. It may not be the CTO. It may be some engineer or someone from within the organization. So that will be persona number two.

So, after we’ve gone through these one hundred customers, we’ve defined probably a handful of personas. Now, you could keep going because towards the bottom of that list. Once you get all the way down, you’re probably going to find 15, 20 different people that don’t have anything in common. There’s no pattern to them and they only make up a tiny portion of your list. So, let’s ignore them because the ones that are really going to dominate your sales are the ones that do fall into a pattern. The healthcare industry. The telecom industry.

Appealing To Your Clients: What Are You Going to Do About It?

Jeremiah: So now that we know who we’re talking to, now let’s try to appeal to them with what we’re going to say. So, we know why we exist. We know who we exist for. Now WHAT are we going to do about it? We are going to talk to them. What are we going to say? So, the content now, needs to get into targeting some keywords that these people are going to say. So, the healthcare industry folks are going to be searching for semiconductors for medical devices and they probably have like internet of things terminology that they’re going to use. Where the medical devices need to talk to each other through the hospital. So IOT related keywords might be one category. And maybe location aware devices might be important as well. So, semiconductors for location aware devices. Now we have allocation awares category of keywords. So, these all appeal to that healthcare side of things.

Now the next one, the next persona is this AT&T procurement company or contractor. They might be looking for something that complies to FCC regulations and that’s their number one driver is that they are building stuff for the communications grid and they have to be very strictly, rigorously tested to make sure that they are absolutely FCC compliant and that they’re secure because they are sitting out there in the wilderness all day. We don’t want people being able to break in and get to them. They have to deal with high heat or very extreme cold, rain, wind, stuff like that. So, those kinds of things come into play for that persona.

Producing Content To Match Client Personas

Jeremiah: So now we need to produce content for that persona. All of this content kind of falls under keywords sets that talk to each one of those target personas but what we’ve done so far is we’ve used the 80/20 principle to tease out the most profitable set of clients that you have and categorized them into an audience that we can then talk to with a strategic focus on content that meets them where their concerns are. And when I say meets them where their concerns are, if you have a concern or you want to find out about something or you want to learn more about something, or you need help with something. Odds are you’re going to Google it at some point. So, you’re putting your concern into a search engine. And what you’re hoping to find is the solution.

So, we’re going to deliver that solution in the form of content and educate you and provide the answer that you’re looking for. And within that answer, within that piece of content, ultimately is a solution may aim to doing business with us and just coming to us, getting on a call with us, downloading this report about how our semiconductors work for the medical device industry better than anyone else’s. And that may be the tipping point that causes you to decide to turn into a sales lead and actually talk to me and have me pitch to you about why you should work with us. So that’s ultimately how I see an SEO project for a client like that going.

Bad SEO, Good Content

Paul: So, let me ask a follow on question to that. I had someone come to me and say, “Gee, I want to buy some good headphones.” And I said, “Oh you should look at Bose or if you really want to pay a lot of money look at Sennheiser and well, but, “How do I know? What should I buy? I want a gaming headset.”

So, I Googled “Does Bose make a gaming headset?” which they don’t which I was surprised. Okay that’s fine. The response to my searching for headsets or headphones was all over the place and I don’t know why but I clicked on a link and got to some tech site that wasn’t just a chat for reviews but was actually some conversations back and forth, a forum post. And one guy said “Well, I use this site.” And it was a google.com address that was basically somebody had put it in their Google file storage. I was expecting it to be something out of the 1960s or something, like when html just came out. And it was this incredible website which just went into all the detail, very plain spoken. I was like “Wow!” And it was absolutely up to date and it wasn’t a url like “Bob’s Headphone Site.” It was this generic google drive url. And I was struck by that, both by the experience of getting this relatively homogenous information initially. And then finding this several layers deep. And my gosh this is really incredible. I never knew there was so much information about headphones and so well put together.

So, what do you say to this? Because I mean, obviously they haven’t’ done SEO well at all but their content was really good?

Defining SEO

Jeremiah: Really, when you say they haven’t necessarily done SEO well, I’m always curious about that because SEO kind of carries this nebulous connotation. A lot of people think that SEO means…. SEO means a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people. Heck, SEO means a bunch of different things to me and that’s what I do full time!

But really when we’re talking about the core of SEO, we have to keep in mind the definitions. Let’s go back to the basics here. So, the definition of SEO or search engine optimization is to optimize something for search so that it’s easier to find. I mean, I guess depending on that definition of SEO, that could apply to how you organize things in your herb cabinet or when you’re cooking, so that you could quickly and easily find Basil.

Paul: Good point!

Jeremiah: So, you just did search engine optimization for your own internal search engine. Right? So, to a degree you’re organizing something so that that information can be quickly and easily found.

Amazon: The New Dominant Product Search Space

Jeremiah: Now, we think about it in regards to Google, just because Google owns seventy percent search market share and has for twenty years. But we have another dominate player in the search space out here, specifically if you’re a product company like the ones you just referred to, like Sennheiser or Bose. And that’s Amazon. Amazon is now a dominant search engine. Most products’ search traffic is now started on Amazon versus Google which is insane to think about.

Paul: Who’d have thunk it? You know?

Jeremiah: Yeah. Like a year or two ago most product searches began in Google and that just made sense because that’s how it’s been for the longest time. But Amazon is now such a dominant player in the retail product space that that’s where most products searches just begin. That said, if you are a product manufacturer or a retailer, Amazon is actually a strong part of your strategy and if you’re talking SEO you can’t avoid talking about Amazon, if you’re in ecommerce. That’s scary for a lot of people because you could go to Google, and you could play around in Google and optimize your site well from an ecommerce perspective, in Google, and that will generate a lot of value and a lot of results and probably even a majority of it.

But if you put some effort into optimizing what is required within Amazon, you could get a dramatic amount of results out of that too because guess what? Amazon has an algorithm, a ranking algorithm, just like Google does. When you search for Sennheiser headset in Amazon, there may be twelve different retailers that all sell them on Amazon. But you’ve got one that shows up at the top. How did that happen? That happened through search engine optimization or SEO. But just for Amazon.

So, with Amazon, you’re not optimizing your site anymore, you’re optimizing your product listing and your Amazon store listing. So, it’s a different thing. That can even apply to the iTunes store for your iPhone apps. You can do search engine optimization for the app store so that you can have the best time tracking tool, for example, in the app store.

Paul: Interesting

Jeremiah: So, the search engine optimization can apply to a lot of things. I’ll take everyone back to that. Now let’s say for a moment that we’re just talking about Google, and I swear I’m coming back to answering your question here.

Paul: No problem.

Jeremiah: So, let’s say we’re focusing on just Google. Then we have to look at Google’s purpose just as we have to look at Amazon’s purpose. For a pizza parlor, Amazon does not apply. Right?

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: Unless we’re talking about their new local listing service and using Alexia to find the best pizza around me, then it does apply. But, if we’re not talking to that angle, we’re talking about just Google and just this semiconductor business, then I need to look back at why Google exists. Google exists, and this is their kind of stated mission statement, to organize the world’s information and make it freely accessible. If that is their mission statement, then they are trying to get all the world’s information in one place and then make it freely accessible. So, every word in that mission statement is important.

When you think accessible, you think easy to get to because it’s in Google. But it goes deeper than that. They mean accessible as in like when I do a search in Google, the first result has to be the best and then the second result has to be the second best and the third has to be the third best. That’s what they’re really trying to do is trying to make it further accessible. Accessible is a big term for Google. They want it to be really good content that they bring back to you. So that said, we have to keep that in mind when we’re looking at optimizing.

If I’m a manufacture and I’m developing products like headsets for gaming and stuff like that, I need to produce content on my site that is the kind of content that you stumbled across that really did a good job of selling you on something. I need to be producing that on my side, as my responsibility in order to do SEO properly for my specific application of what I need out of it.

Producing Good Content To Help Your SEO

Jeremiah: And so, for that, you need content and right now you still need links and you need really good user engagement on that page or on that piece of content. And user engagement is really looked at as when people click on the listing in Google and they come on to your site.

First of all, they can’t bounce. You don’t want them just disappearing right away because they didn’t find what they were looking for. You want them to scroll. You want them to click. You want them to read and kind of dwell on the site. That means that they’re actively engaging with the site and if they click around on a couple different pages, they are getting more and more engaged in the site. So, Google is watching all that they’re doing and that data is being fed back in via artificial intelligence, to a machine that then decides that that result is exactly related to the keyword search that came up so that the next time someone searches that keyword in Google, that result is going to be more likely to rank better. And that’s just an automatic process that’s consistently happening.

So really it comes down to – if we’re talking about doing SEO – that they weren’t doing SEO for Amazon or for iTunes but in regards to Google. It sounds like they were.

Closing

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger. He’s an SEO expert, and they’re an SEO agency. As you can tell, there’s a lot of value here in what he said. As you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the Show Notes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah.

Well I want to thank you, thank you for spending the time with us and who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome! I’d be happy to come back! Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you!

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith. Stay tuned for Part 4, coming soon! We’ll be talking about if SEO is really worth it or not!

If you missed Part 1, an “Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith,” you can listen to it here! And you can listen to Part 2, “SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence” by listening here!

Show Notes:

Our Website Review of Granite Properties

August 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we sit down and critique a website together.

Show Notes

Granite Properties
Emails From A CEO Who Just Has A Few Changes To The Website

Transcript

Sections

Optimizing Space for Clarity
A Defunct Camera Feed
You and I
Held Back
Too Many Pictures
Latest?
Too Much Effort, Too Many Words
Video
Social Media
Mobile
Ideas for Improvement

Introduction

 

Jacob: Today, it is Paul, myself, Jacob, and Steve here in the recording studio to look at websites today. We’re going to be reviewing websites and talking about what’s good and what can be improved with them, and not only doing the front end look at them, but also the technical backend of the website. So, Paul, would you introduce us to the website we’re looking at today?

Paul: Well, sure. First of all, the other day, I had this thought, where we would be able to sort of deconstruct a website live before millions of our studio audience. And so, we’re recording this on video and if you’re driving, you should be watching the video at the same time. But if you, if you don’t have the video now, you can look at that in our show notes. But basically, we’re going to take different websites and deconstruct them and say what’s good, what’s bad, and what we would do differently. And we encourage you guys to send in websites for us to look at.

Our first one is www.graniteprop.com. And it’s a real estate investment, property management, and leasing advisory services website. So… As Jacob said, we have Jacob as our host today, myself, Paul Parisi, and Steve Miller who is of… He, he was on our Pokemon team, Pokemon Go team, but that has since dwindled in popularity.

Steve: The hype has died.

Paul: The hype has died, and so he moved out of that system and…

Jacob: The reality is his data plan got maxed out.

Paul: That’s right. Exactly.

Jacob: So, Paul, could you kind of give us a rundown of just kind of like the basics of this website? And then I think Steve is going to give us a few of the technical ideas of what’s going on here.

Optimizing Space for Clarity

Paul: Sure. First of all, one of the things you want to look at when you’re looking at any website is how much vertical space you use before you get to interesting content. I’m looking at a fairly high resolution screen, in the recording you’ll see. But you’ll see, really, the upper third is dedicated to a changing black and white picture with a tagline on the side, “Granite Properties, inspiring people to flourish through the places we create,” which I think we found was their… Is it their vision or mission statement?

Jacob: I believe that’s their purpose statement. And we kind of had to dig around in the “About Us” section. We’ll get there.

Paul: Right. And, you know, there’s a lot of words on here. And there’s some rotating graphics and things like that. And up at the top left, we’re going to jump right into this. There’s a really cool thing that says, “View our live construction camera feeds!” So, you know, you could, you could click on that and imagine that they’re a construction company, or read that. But they’re really not. They look like… I mean, they say real estate investment property management and leasing advisory services. But yet, when you start to dig into the site, it looks like they have a bunch of properties that they lease. So they are a company that holds, you know, a big office building and will lease that to people. I’m just guessing based on what it says on their website.

Jacob: Right. So, it’s not clear whether they refurb or do construction or do leasing. It’s probably the latter.

Paul: Well, but yeah. But they’ve got a construction. So, I think they’re doing… You know, like we’re in New England, so there’s a lot of different sites that have been old mill buildings and things that have been redone and reborn as beautiful apartments or condos or office buildings. And so, maybe they’re doing something like that.

A Defunct Camera Feed

But I’m just going to click on this to show you, our viewers at home, that when I go to camera one, I see a wall, a corner of a wall. It looks like an outlet in the wall and some sort of flashing light, alien…signaling aliens or something like that. It’s sort of scary. And I can choose camera two and all of the other ones… camera two through however many, camera 64 are all, say, stealth monitoring.

And, you know, this is to me, is not a great testimony here.

Steve: This feels like, you know, like CSI. Like someone stumbles on a website and they catch a murder on accident on this camera. That’s what I was thinking of when I first saw it. Then I realized the purpose of it. But…

You and I

Paul: So, well, I’m not really sure what the purpose of it is, because, you know, it doesn’t show any construction cranes or people putting up walls or putting in carpet or something like that. And it’s taking up what might be the most valuable real estate on the website, the top left corner. You know, English speaker right from left to right. And then we’ve got Granite over on the right hand side and down a bit, you know. And then they’ve got a 2015 award for best, small, and medium workplaces, which is great, but one of the things, a good friend of mine who’s a serial entrepreneur, started 26 companies, says, “When you write an email or a letter, you want to count the number of “I’s” and the number of “You’s” and the number of “You’s”  should be at least twice the number of theirs.

Jacob: Right.

Steve: That’s good.

Paul: And this doesn’t say that. It says, you know, “View our live construction camera feed.” “We’re the best place to work.” You know, so it’s like, “Well, what’s in it for me?” That’s what I really look at, you know. And so, if we, if we click “About Us” as we sort of dive into this…

Jacob: Yeah. I did a website review for somebody one time, and I counted up the number of “our” pronouns on it, and there was, on every page within the footer and header, 16 “ours.” And I was like, “Guys, nobody cares about you as much as you do.”

Paul: They do. That’s correct. So, you know, jumping into “About Us,” it is, again, reiterating this, I don’t know , they’re creating exceptional work environments. And so, does that mean that they come in a design a building for a company? You know, like GE is moving into Boston from Connecticut. Would this be a company you would call that would be, you know, the architectural firm to do that? I don’t, I don’t think it is. But I’m saying that wording would evoke that to me. So we can dig through all of these, but I’d like to take sort of a pause and talk about some of the technical aspects that are hidden to the ordinary eye. We’ve run a bunch of our tools on this from…in Google site speed. What is it?

Held Back

Steve: Google PageSpeed Insights.

Paul: Yeah, really very interesting things that are going on. So, Steve, why don’t you summarize some of those?

Steve: Yeah, so, unfortunately, the website ranks rather low on PageSpeed currently.

Paul: What is it?

Steve: It’s 40 out of 100. And just for context for our viewers, it’s tough to fight PageSpeed. They’re really, they’re really hard on you. But you’re…95 is super well respected, and 80 is kind of necessary at this point to get a good rank.

Paul: It’s sort of like a grade in high school. I mean, an 80 would be a B.

Steve: That’s a good point.

Paul: You know, and an A+, A, would be in the 90s. What is it again? A 40?

Steve: It’s a 40. Yeah.

Jacob: So, they would be repeating the grade.

Paul: You’d have the repeat the grade, yeah.

Steve: This website has been stuck in 9th grade for a while.

Paul: Right. Okay. So, that’s now, what that’s measuring is how quickly that site will display on an average connection. So, all of the different things that are required to render that site before it shows up and be usable, it’s getting a 40 out of 100, which isn’t good. It needs to be improved.

Steve: What do they look for? Isn’t it like 200 milliseconds before the server responds?

Paul: Yeah.

Steve: Like, when you say, “Hey, server, I’m coming to your website. Start sending me stuff.” It expects a 200 millisecond turnaround. Unfortunately, this site, so before it even starts loading, it says the server responded in 2.5 seconds. So, that’s like a year or two in internet time.

Paul: Sure. It absolutely is, because people, at about three seconds, are going to shut you down. Two seconds is really for the… The page has to be fully loaded, fully rendered in less than two seconds. So, now, if we were to look at that, technically, what’s the problem here? They are on a slow server, basically, or the server is badly misconfigured. So, go ahead. You had some other statistics.

Steve: Navigating back to the PageSpeed Insights here. Now, I don’t know…I do know who’s hosting them. It’s a smaller host, but I’m guessing that they’re missing some basic things they could do. I believe that they’re running a WordPress site, from what I can tell. And they don’t have most of their files are not compressed, basically, on their server. And also, their scripts are not minified. So, with script, you can take out spaces, unnecessary spaces and returns to be able to save space on the load. And it doesn’t look like any of that has been done with this website, which is unfortunate. That hurts page load time and credibility in Google’s eyes.

Too Many Pictures

Paul: When I loaded the page for the first time, I noticed that there was a picture on one of the pages, I think the “About Us.” And that picture sort of loaded and unrolled like a window shade, slowly. I could see it sort of draw. What that indicates, is that you’re using a very large picture, but telling it to render in a small space. So, instead of, you’re taking an enlargement, if you will, from the old days, and putting it into a snapshot or a wallet size. And so a lot more pixels and bits have to be transferred for it to display. So, just simply sizing the images to the appropriate size would improve the performance and feel of the site greatly.

So, go ahead now. What else?

Steve: Absolutely. It looks like some… For images and for scripts, there is also browser caching is not specified. So, there’s nothing communicating to the browser saying, “Hey, store this file for a certain amount of time to be able to load it faster if a client or an employee comes back to the site.” Caching can be used, basically, to store things locally on the machine, and that way, it can load certain things faster and have a better experience once you come back to the site.

Latest?

Paul: Right. So, it doesn’t have to load them, because it already has it. It’s cached it. One of the other things we’d like to do in looking at sites , we’ll get into more technical things here , is there is a news area. And if you look at the news area, the last news item… Right now, it is August…no, almost August. July 2016. And the latest news item is July 2015. So, it’s a year old. So, that doesn’t speak well of what’s going on. I mean…

Jacob: Not the mention that the one before that is almost another year behind that. So, the last two news items are from the last two years.

Paul: Right. Yeah. And if you look at it, so they had one in January 2014, two in January, one in February, one in August, one in September, and then we jump to 07/2015. So there may or may not be news, but that doesn’t give a consumer or a buyer a feeling that this… You might ask, “Are they still in business?”

Steve: Yeah. I was actually just about to search that, whether they are still in business, because the site has been so little updated. The latest update I can find is that news. I looked at archive.org to see any site changes. Maybe a couple of pictures have been moved around. No code has been modified in a while. It’s, it’s a really… It’s been dead in the water for over the last year.

Paul: Right. So, now one of the other things that, when you put your site out there, you want people to find it. You want them to comment on it. You want to engage with that. You want people to be able to say, “Hey. I found something interesting on here.” And we use Twitter and Facebook and maybe even YouTube for that to socialize things. They do have Twitter and Facebook, but it’s at the bottom right, as you scroll down as far as you can get. And so, you know, I would really want to sit down with this organization and say, “What’s your goal of the website? What’s the purpose of it? Is it to sort of cement a brand identity so that people can feel good that you’re in business and you’re here to stay?” Well, this really doesn’t do it with the news issues that we’ve talked about. It doesn’t do it with the speed.

You know, and so there’s some concerns there. The “Contact Us” page, on the other hand, is pretty good. It’s very clear. I might make the text a little bigger. It’s a little bit hard to read. You know, a little friendlier, especially the phone number. But that’s nice. You know, I can get all of their major offices, all of that. I might also go in here and have a contact form, you know. That’s not there now. So what you’re forcing me to do is pick up the phone or email somebody. And if I email Greg in Plano, I might… It might have to go to somebody in California. Now, they can forward it and all that, but I would expect a form to deal with all of that.

Too Much Effort, Too Many Words

Jacob: Yeah. You want to reduce the amount of effort that you’re requiring of your user. And by requiring them to open up their email, type out an email, do something outside of the window that you already have them in is bad user design. And it potentially loses your business, because it requires them to do extra work.

Paul: Right. Yeah. Every click that somebody has to decide to do reduces the effectiveness 50% approximately. And so, as you, as you look at this site, you know, the “About Us” page has — and I’m clicking on it — and you can see the delay in it. It has six sub categories. So it looks like there’s a lot of, a lot of depth to it. But it’s slow, you know. It’s slow to get in here. I click on “Expertise.” I’ve got another six subcategories. “Properties”, when I go into properties, I have a nice, you know, extruded map and I can click on Atlanta, and I can load this. It’s very slow. And it shows me a nice robin’s egg blue area, which happens to be the middle of the ocean. If I drag this over, you find out that you’re… Well, let’s zoom out actually. Yeah, so here we are. We’re right in the middle of the open, super zoomed in, which, you know, I think it would be better to, you know, really be looking at the Atlanta area with all of the different icons just around there. That would be certainly more effective than what it is.

So, what’s interesting to me is they’ve obviously put some money and effort into building this and launched it at some point. I don’t know what the copyright date at the bottom was.

Jacob: I didn’t see a copyright on the bottom.

Steve: It’s been about the same. I was digging through archives. It’s been about the same for a year or two at this point. They’ve been on the web for a while actually, which is interesting. They go back to ’99.

Paul: Okay. So they see some value in a website. But yet they’ve got all these broken things. Or, you know, things that aren’t really thought through. And one of the things that we notice, as consultants in this area, is people are just too close to it. And they overlook it. They filter it. It’s like, you know, you don’t see the things in your own house that you out of place, because you’re just used to that. And so, having somebody come in that’s detached from it, and you could say, “What do you mean here? What do you hope to get?”

And also, you know, to be, to be frank, I think there’s a lot… There’s too many words.

Jacob: Yeah. I think they do. It’s poor space management on the website, because, I mean, you come to the website, and the first thing you’re drawn to is the top section. And what you see in the top section is this video camera icon that is not really… It’s not clear what it’s helping to bring you into and what story it’s telling you. And then you have these kind of randomized pictures. I’m not sure. Are these the owners, the board members, the employees? Are these customers? What’s the relationship between these people and what you’re actually trying to bring me into. And then, it’s poor space utilization with the purpose statement, because if that’s your purpose statement, you want everybody to get that nice, big, and bold, right up front. And it’s a bit kind of subdued.

Paul: Yeah. I’d say it’s very passive.

Jacob: And the colors reinforce the passiveness. I mean, in terms of website design and psychology, blue engenders trust, which is good for somebody that’s doing property management. You want that to be a subliminal message. But the blue is almost a bit too understated to where it’s a bit passive.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s also contrasted with this red over on the right, the “It’s a Great Place to Work.” So, it’s sort of like, am I…? Is trust the most important? But then I’m distracted by “It’s a Great Place to Work,” as opposed to what do I want as a business owner. That’s great that it’s a great place to work, and that’s a good thing. And that means that the people that are going to do services for me and deliver the product are going to be happy about it. But what are you guys actually doing for me?

Jacob: Right. It probably communicates company stability for the long haul. But in terms of the immediate, first 30 seconds of the website, or first 10 seconds of the website, you’re trying to pitch somebody that you can do investment and leasing property management and leasing best, rather than a company that has good services for their employees.

Video

Paul: Right. And it’s striking me here that there’s no video either. Now, video is a leading, a leading idea. So, if they did this a year ago, they might not have thought about this. But I’ve got to think that some of the principles in this company can be compelling in why you should use them. And I think that’s a critical thing to get them to do in a small, short 15 second video. Or a video of some of their clients, you know, to say, “We were struggling with this, this, and this, and Granite came in and fixed it, you know, and gave us this solution.” I just think that would be overwhelmingly positive. And those things get socialized, as well.

Steve: You know, what’s interesting is, so this is a small to medium business. I’m just… As I look through things, I can’t predict everything that’s going on with them, but they’re… If you look at their, the Fortune Review that talks about them being a good small-to-medium business, their employee to revenue ration, I mean, they’re making a lot of money. And it looks like, as I look through news articles, they’re pretty reputable in the industry. They’re building important things on a regular basis.

What strikes me is it’s possible that they think, “Okay, well we’re making good business. Why would I improve my website?” But, you know, it’s funny. I was talking to one of our clients the other day, and I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but he looked at me and he said, “You know, if someone comes to your company and asks you guys, ‘Do you want more business?’ Are you going to say no? Are you full up? Or do you have room make more money?”

I’m like, “Well, we would say yes. All the time. We’re there to make money. We’d hire more people if more people came.”

And so, I think that it’s possible that in the web area, they’re sitting contentedly on what they have. They say, “We make a lot of money. We’re well-known in the industry. Why would we need a better website?”

It’s like, “Well, you don’t know who you’re missing by investing in the website.” And the web is an easy, outward marketing tool, honestly. They could be making more money. I don’t, I don’t know enough about the industry to say what it could enhance. But they might be sitting on an easy resource here.

Jacob: And their website could utilize them to be a more established expert in the arena. From the look of their website at face value, to me it does not strike me that they would be an expert that, are example, I would want to invite to be a keynote speaker at a conference or something about this sort of issue.

Paul: Well, certainly not by the website. It would have to be some relationship you had external to this website.

Jacob: And the unfortunate thing is that, are example, if I were in the audience of somebody that were speaking from this company, and I went to their website, I would… There would be a very severe disconnect, because I’m sure that their employees and their leaders in the company are highly competent, highly established and highly knowledgeable in their area of expertise. Their website does not back up what I’m sure is the truth about them.

Social Media

Paul: So now, I’ve sort of transitioned just to their Twitter page. They’ve got 1800 followers, which is phenomenal.

Jacob: Yeah. I saw that.

Paul: They’ve got 629 likes and they’ve got tweets as late as July 18th. So, somebody is tweeting. July 18th, July 13th…

Jacob: Yeah. I find that interesting, that somehow there’s a disconnect between their news feature on their website and their news feature, or their Twitter feed.

Paul: Sure. I mean, they should be co-mingled at worst, you know. So, I mean, at least put the tweets in the newsfeed. So let’s go back to the, to the site, to some of the more, you had said, Steve, and you did some analysis. It’s an older version of WordPress that should upgraded or…?

Steve: Yeah. We had a little discussion beforehand. We were like, should we discuss this? You know, it’s an old enough version that there are security liabilities. But then we said, you know, it took me 30 seconds to… I didn’t know off the top of head how to see the version of WordPress, and it took me 30 seconds to Google how do I see this. Okay, I found it. Okay, I found the security liability. So, I’m not worried about throwing it out there, just generally.

And that’s, that’s a concerning thing for your business. I don’t know what important information they might have stored on this. There’s, you know…

Paul: Or it might be defaced and reputation suffers and things like that. And you know, so we were… As we were talking about it, it was, you know, should we say this? Well, all the bots out there that go and seek to destroy websites will crawl this site whether we tell you it’s you know, WordPress 1.0 or WordPress 4.0.

Steve: Well, the bots listen to our podcast…

Paul: That’s true. I forgot about that. So the bots have already found it. And you know, there are some exploits. You’re, you know, you don’t seem to have some of the more exploitable things enabled, such as comments and things like that, which is great. But again, you know, it’s something that… You know, there’s a lot of business owners who want to buy a website and be done. And that is just not the way the world works anymore. I mean, it doesn’t.

Jacob: About every 18-24 months, you need to be updating your website.

Paul: Well, absolutely. I mean, that, that’s critical. But I think what’s even more important is you really have to come to terms with maintaining it, putting news in, putting things that change. I mean, if you went to the store, you know, and you think of the old stores that had window dressing, and they always had the same display there, you would eventually not see it anymore. And so a website is very much like that. You want the new model to be displayed. That’s why they come up with new cars every year, you know. Not because we need them. But because people’s interest wane. And that’s critical.

Jacob: So, that would either mean that we are trying to encourage people, by that specific point, to have somebody on staff in the company who does it? Or for example, hire us at SaviorLabs to be able to manage their website for them?

Paul: Well, I think there’s…

Steve: Promo plugin.

Paul: I think there’s a lot of different ways to think about that. The problem is, is that you need such a broad spectrum of skills. It’s rare to find them in one person. And if you are able to find them in one person, you’re probably not going to want to pay them the amount that they’re worth or enough to keep them over time. I think more so, one of the things I always, I joke about is, you know, why don’t the schools and the towns schedule for maintenance, budget for maintenance on their buildings. Because they know that in 30 years, they’re going to have to build a new school. So, why don’t they save 1/30th of the amount every year, you know. Put in an amount, and at 30 years, oh, we’ve got the money in the bank. Sounds logical. It sounds like, you know, what we should do. You know, in New England you have to replace your roof every 25 years. And if a roof is $20,000, you save 1/25th of that.

Well, that’s discipline. But in business, we actually do that. We plan for capital expenditures. We plan for budgets, things like that. And I think the website has to have a line item. It might be under the marketing department. But it has to be something you’re committing to. You know, we frequently meet with people, and we sort of ask them this question: “Are you planning to stay in business? Or are you just in this for the next six months or whatever?”

And it takes them aback. It’s like, “Well, yeah. We really are trying to stay in business.”

“Okay. So, what are you going to do about that? You know, are you going to invest in technology? Are you going to invest in websites, etc., etc.?”

So, those are the kind of things that I think are critical. So, you asked, “Do I hire somebody?” The problem with hiring somebody is that that expertise can walk out the door at any time. In the best case scenario, you know, you got somebody. They want to move. You know, there’s no animosity. They’re just moving somewhere. So that gets difficult. Well, we could hire them remotely, etc. And, and, there are a lot of people that work that way. There are lots of organizations like SaviorLabs that are out there to help you do that to hold you accountable, and also, I think, more importantly the difference is, if you hire an internal person, they’re an internal person. They view it with the mindset of your company. If you hire an outside person, they’re bringing in… It’s like, “Well, why in the world would I want to do business with you?” That’s a great question to ask, because if the website doesn’t answer that, there is much less likelihood it’s going to convert people.

And, and one of the other things that, you know, just to be very clear here, if we look at this website, there’s no call to action. You know, there is nothing saying to the user, to the visitor, “This is what we want you to do here.” And so, when you plan for no results…what is it? When you plan…

Steve: When you don’t plan, you don’t get anything?

Paul: Yeah. You know. Planning to… If you don’t plan to succeed, you’ll…

Steve: You’ll try, try again?

Paul: Yeah. Fail if you…

Steve: You’ll fail if you try?

Paul: You fail to plan, you plan to fail. You know.

Jacob: That’s what it is. If you don’t plan to quote the quote, then you’re going to mess up the quote.

Paul: If you don’t plan… If you plan to… If you don’t plan to fail, you fail to plan? I don’t know.

Mobile

Jacob: So, one of the dynamics that we were noticing on the website is the mobile accessibility, the mobile version.

Paul: Well, there’s two things with that, we noticed. One is we made the browser smaller. I don’t know if this will work with, Google Hangouts. No, it won’t. Let me take it out of zoom. And I’m going to go and make the browser smaller. And you’ll notice it’s not responsive. It doesn’t respond or change size based on the browser window. So, that’s one thing that is sort of silly.

So, if you open it up and you make it smaller, it doesn’t re— reform to look good. But if you open it up on an iPhone or an Android device, you get a completely different site with a colorful menu that says, you know, a big building, a picture that says “Granite” underneath it, and then five bands of color “About.” And I click on “About” and I go to a basically blank white page that says, “Our Purpose.” And no navigation, nothing.

So, now I have to go back. So they probably got sold a mobile version of a website by some person that came in and said, “We can do a mobile version of your website to convert a few pages.”

Jacob: Or, sometimes I’ve seen where people just have like a plugin that you put on your website that basically kind of strips it down to like the bare essentials of like 10% of the website. And it makes it a mobile version.

Paul: And that’s not great. I mean, this is not going to make somebody think… If you were to judge Granite by their mobile website, you would not have as good of an experience or judgement as the desktop website.

Jacob: Right. And not to mention that, I mean, in terms of finding a solution, this sort of thing is super easy to do. I mean, in terms of making a mobile website, it’s a big phenomenal to me that there’s “mobile” versions of websites today when it’s so easy.

Paul: Well, I don’t know that it’s easy. You have to think through how things rearrange and so, you know, if you’ve just finished a website and somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, it doesn’t work on a mobile phone.” And you’re like, “Oh, man. We just thought that was done.”

And that’s the thing I think, you know, I was hinting at earlier is the people were thinking, “This is done.” Now, okay, we know we just talked about mobile and all that, but I’d want to say, “How long is it done for, you know? Is it done for 18 months?” And if, if we want a new one in 18 months, are we willing to start 12 months into this? Or eight months into this to give somebody a chance to build it again?

And then you sort of, well, you almost reduce the time to say, “Well, just let’s continuously improve the website and, and do things and have a new website rollout over 18 months.” But, you know, somebody in charge of content, somebody in charge of all of the news, etc. Yeah, go ahead.

Steve: I was going to say, a big thing to jump back is really that getting a fresh view on your website, the internal versus external view, it’s easy to get comfortable. Because I remember working on a website that I had worked on for a while for a client and someone else sat down and reviewed it, basically, with me that had not looked at it before and just pointed out all these obvious things that I sat there…and I mean, this is a website for a client, not for a company I work with. So I’m not even directly connected to it, and I had become so… It had become so internalized how it was to me. Then when someone sat down and said, “Oh, this, this, and this could be better,” it was just like, it was…

Paul: You become blind to it.

Steve: It was revolutionary. And it shouldn’t have been. It would have been… I might have seen the same things.

Jacob: Did I, did I hurt your feelings, Steve, when I sat down and did that? Was that me?

Steve: I don’t think that was you.

Paul: No, that was when you were talking about him.

Steve: If it was, I would give you the credit.

Jacob: For me, even with organizations that I’m involved with, even though I do web design with SaviorLabs, I actually don’t do the websites for organizations that I’m involved with because I’m too close to the heart of the issue, and I’m too blind, like you’re talking about… to the very things that I want to be prominent. And it get too familiar with it.

Steve: Yeah. There’s a great joke post on medium.com the other week. It was, it was a fake chain of emails from the CEO to the design and development team.

Paul: Yes, I saw that. Yes.

Steve: We should put that in the show notes, because it’s, it’s beautiful. And it’s just, you know, it’s the CEO emailing the whole company, basically, like, “Hi guys. I read that words on websites are bad. Take all the words off.” And then like three hours later, “Just kidding, put the words back on.” Just like, you know, by the end, he’s put everything back the exact way it was. But, it’s, you know, you get worried when people that close to it are making all of the calls for the website, because it just becomes personal preference, and you’re blind to it.

Ideas for Improvement

Jacob: So, for the website itself, for Granite, if we were to be doing work for them or we were to give them, you know, a few key ideas of how to improve the website, what would be a few takeaways? Because we mentioned that there’s a server issue, there’s compression dynamics that are off. The newsfeed is not synced between Twitter on their website, contact form itself is a bit dated. Where would you go with, Paul?

Paul: Well, I would certainly do, you know, the, the emergency response would be to fix the speed. I mean, those are easy gimmes. Make sure the images are optimized, everything is optimized, so it loads as fast and as snappy as it can be. I would probably remove the camera feeds thing immediately. I might, you know, have a discussion. I wouldn’t change the whole design, although I think it should be responsive. But that would be more of a second or third tier. I would probably try and reduce the amount of vertical space that’s lost, because, you know, that’s the most valuable space up there. I think it would look a lot different if you just took everything off of that first half inch up here at the top and almost just cut it out and pushed it right up against the browser bar. So those would be the first things.

You know, some of the making sure that somebody is adding new news. Let’s unify the Twitter feed and the news feed. I think that would be tremendously beneficial. The other thing is, you know, there’s this whole concept of inbound marketing. And in the old days, you’d have outbound marketing, where you would, you know, say… You go out to somebody and you say, “Please come to my store,” or whatever it is.

Well, inbound marketing is different. You motivate the consumer to come in and to get something. And usually it’s free. It’s sort of like in, in retail, where you say the first 500 guests will get a free steak. Or buy one get one free, or something like that.

So, what’s happened now is this inbound marketing is you write an article or an e-book or something that is of interest to your target audience, and you basically show that to them, and say, “Hey, come to our website and download this and give me your email and pay with an email.”

Jacob: Yeah, with this company, it would seem to me that, you know, if they are a leader in their field and, for example, they have, you know, best practices or one of the best places to work, it seems to me there’s at least two or three e-book ideas there for how to do best practices for, you know, the leasing services they do, the type of clientele that they reach. And then also, there might be an e-book for managers and CEOs of how to run a company that wins these sort of awards of like best practices and best…so that you are appealing across the board. And that’s just two to three basic ideas for e-books.

Paul: Absolutely. I mean, e-books, they’re incredibly effective. And I think that there’s lots of opportunities in real estate management.

Steve: We, we have worked with… It’s called a vertical, right? When someone is in like a very niche market?

Paul: Yes, yes it is.

Steve: We can cut that out so I don’t sound too dumb, right?

Paul: Okay. That’s fine.

Steve: So, obviously, they work in a vertical, like a very niche market. And I think that in some ways, they…this company or other companies like this might sit there and say, “No, you don’t understand. Our clientele are very defined and esoteric, and we don’t have a lot to gain.”

And I would kind of push back on that, and I would say, “I bet you have some low-hanging fruit that you’re just not picking right now, that you’re ignoring.” They’ve got a video linked on their front page, actually, but it’s like bottom-right. And they could make that… You know, they could imbed that on their site on the top to watch “Who is Granite?”

They could make a call to action. Maybe it isn’t the typical contact form or free thing, but it could be, “Here. Read our long description that most of our customers read about how we technically build things. It could be different for them. They probably do presentations. They could offer their presentation slide in exchange for an email. There’s a lot of stuff that we would modify somewhat for them, because, you know, they’re not going to… Average Joe on the street is not going to stumble across their site and say, “I want a residential building,” or, “I want a professional building.” But they are going to say… The business man might be more swayed by easier access.

Jacob: Yeah, and I think that pointing out the CTA, or the Call to Action, I think that would be one of the main things I would want to drive at for improving the website, is, what is the call to action you’re calling people to? What do you want them to do with the website? Because, otherwise, it’s kind of a glorified business card if you’re just kind of saying who you are.

Paul: Well, you know, I agree with that. But I was just thinking about this the other day. Glorified business card. You know, is this supposed to be a business brochure or a business book about your business? Or is it supposed to be a business card? Or is it just to be a pamphlet? And I think it has to be all of those things, because there’s different levels of engagement. And you know, one of the, the rubrics of inbound marketing is it lets people come in and grab on to whatever level they want of interest. So, you know, you can have a site.

The problem, I think, one of the problems with the site is it forces you to consume too much. You need, you need to understand way too much to get to their value proposition. And that, a lot of people aren’t going to invest that time and energy.

Jacob: Right. You have to think about who your clientele is — what do they want? — and then speak specifically to those needs.

Paul: Absolutely. Make it crystal clear.

Jacob: Laser sharp. It has to be laser sharp to what you’re messaging them with. Excellent. Thanks, guys, for talking about this website. And we’ll have another episode about understanding what’s going on with websites and the dynamics of the technical side and the customer side and how to improve that on our next episode of the Edge of Innovation.

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