Most B2B organisations need a website for lead gen, and they need a company who understand lead gen and what it takes to get a website that creates leads more than they need. A company who can use WordPress, Joomla, HubSpot, Craft, or anything else. And if they come along and say, we can only work with you if you know how to use craft, well, fine, but you're not going to get the best people to solve the real problem. The lead gen problem, all you're going to get is somebody that knows how to use craft, and that can be somebody who doesn't know anything about business.
What you really want is a good website. And like you say, some people who are fundamentally very well equipped to help you make that website make money. Everything else is secondary.
Companies have said to us, oh, you know, we're having a conversation with this other company and they've said that we have to rebuild the website in WordPress because it's currently built in Perch or Joomla or something. And that's no good for SEO. People get told such horseshit in our trade. So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. We've had a hiatus again on this podcast. We're going to make it a regular thing again. Promise. Um, it's just basically our half assed attempt at telling you what it's like working in digital marketing or digital, you know, at the coalface. Uh, it's actually real people as well. It's not AI, it's not an AI, AI, ai, AI, it's not an AI generated podcast. It is to, um, real people, although probably AI would do a better job than a couple of buffoons like us.
Yeah, definitely come up with more ideas. Probably.
Yeah. Yeah. So as you might remember from the last podcast, we've kind of gone down the route of, um, well, we were never scripted, but we used to have notes and we used to kind of have a subject, if you like, which we were going to discuss. But, you know, true to the, um, the, the name of the podcast, Digital Marketing From The Coalface, um, last year we kind of pivoted and made it more just a conversation where Alex and I will just, um, chew the fat about what's been going on in our world. Alex actually made a guest appearance in the office today, hence recording this. I haven't seen him for about a month for whatever reason, he seems to have been, you know, working on top of Everest, working in Timbuktu and various other places. But he's actually, you know, deigned to come into the office, which is lovely and nice to see.
The irony being that my car's about to go in for a smoke, so he won't be seeing me for long.
Oh.
That car.
MM. Uh, word to the wise, buying an old Freelander is risky.
It is very risky. It's good though. I love that car.
I think there's a lot to be said for that. Yeah, just like you put up with a lot of shit with cars. Oh, I can get a Segway out of this. You can put up with a lot of. You can put up with a lot of shit with a car, right? If you just fundamentally like the car.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think car people get that, don't they? If you love your car, you don't give a f*ck that it breaks down every.
five.
Years.
But don't you think. Don't you think that there's. There's two functions of a car, isn't it? It might be a thing you like even, you know, weirdly love of get attached to. But if you suddenly need to make a six hundred mile journey, you actually want the thing to be bloody reliable, get you there comfortably and everything else. So how do you get that sort of, you know, situation where you've got a nice, reliable car, which you also love and maybe isn't sort of losing money?
I don't know if you do. I think that's why people have like six cars on their drive, isn't it? My next door neighbors like that, he has four cars because some of them are the cars that he likes don't really work properly, and some of them are his like daily drivers.
Anyway, the segue, which literally has just come to me is, um, the idea of the car, which you just like, so you tolerate some of the bad bits about it. I wonder if sometimes like client agency relationships are a bit like that, you know, it can't be all shiny.
We do tolerate a lot of crap from clients just because we like them.
That isn't really what I meant. I meant it the other way around.
I know.
You did. Um, but yeah, I know. I mean, I think, I mean, something happened with us recently where, um, a long standing client, um, decided to go out to. Oh, he's going out to tender just to, as a sort of self check to see if like, you know, is what the guys at Red evil are doing right for me now. And, you know, and I actually, I suggested that actually, that's not a bad thing to do because, you know, a fresh pair of eyes, a different perspective, um, I think makes, uh, makes sense. I think the mechanism for doing it, uh, was questionable. Um, but, you know, I mean, I'm, um, I'm pretty relaxed about it. I think there is a danger sometimes that the client, um, client agency relationships kind of go on too long. I mean, they can go on for years and that's absolutely fine. And we've got plenty of clients, um, who we've had for a long, long time.
Well, we're right. Yeah. Because we're right at the sticky end of this. And I think this is probably true, um, that we often have sort of five, six, seven year relationships with our clients. And that is fantastic from the point of view of like, they're obviously very happy. But I think also you do sort of end up part of the woodwork a little bit can do. Um, which yeah, I think it has its pros and cons, but I think sometimes it is quite nice just to sort of reset those relationships isn't it.
Well, so what I was driving at was um, I think in, in from the agency side and from the client side, you know, if you, if you get into a relationship with an old car, you accept that it's going to be a lot of fun and you're going to have, but you're going to have times when it's, when it's a pain in the ass. Sure. You know, it just is. But on balance, it's the right relationship. It's the right car, it's the right situation. And I think surely with agencies that's the same as well. There will be times when you kind of think, God, this agency, I'm paying him all his money every month to help me with this. And they haven't done this or they haven't done that or, you know, just you just feel a bit rankled. You just feel a bit kind of like, uh, but on balance, you know, you, you, you can then as people do when the card becomes a real pain in the ass is they can go out and buy either a shiny new one. Yeah. Um, which they quickly realise isn't as much fun as the old one. Or they can buy something which is more, more or less the same as what they've got expecting it to be somehow, for whatever reason, reliable and none of the bad things that the old one was.
Um, if you cross your fingers harder.
Yeah. That's right. Um, so yeah, I mean, we have great relationships with, with clients and robust relationships. We can have difficult conversations with them when it's required if we want them to do something and they don't agree with what we're suggesting. For example, um, we won't just roll over, we'll, we'll kind of, you know, try and try and make sure at least that we've given a good account of the reasons that we wanted to do whatever it is we want you to do. But on balance, I think having that robust relationship where, you know, you accept the rough with the smooth. To coin a phrase, um, I think in the long run, those are the best relationships.
Yeah. I want to make this, I want to sort of I don't know how to articulate this properly, but I want to make this about investment as well, because I think one of the things that's really key is if you have a car that you really love, it might annoy you sometimes, and it might not always do what you want it to do. But like you always, you know, you know quite a lot about it. You get to know it, you learn about it, you learn to really enjoy it. And I think I'd say the same thing about like agency client relationships. You know, if you treat this as very transactional, like you would like, you go out and get a car on finance, you never bother with it. It breaks down. You take it back to the dealership. It's not your problem. You really give a shit. If you treat agencies like that, you never really get to love them. You never really get to know them. It's not really part of your life. They're just sort of like an adjunct thing floating around in the background. And that is how some people treat their cars. To be fair, it's just like it gets me from A to B, I don't really care about it. But when you actually sort of invest in, I guess, getting to know the people that you're working with and how they work. And that was very impressive, by the way. Caron silently put down a cup of tea. Thank you very much. Um, you get a lot more out of the relationship, I think is my point. You know, you get something that you wouldn't get if you just treated it as like a higher car relationship or whatever.
My car's in the repair shop at the moment because coming back from Cumbria at Christmas, um, completely empty road, fantastic journey home and half an hour before I got home. It's a six hour drive. Um, a deer ran out, like literally bang right in front of me. Hit it. They are terrified.
When they do that. Yeah.
So the car's gone in and it's a car. I own a golf GTI, which I quite like. I like it a lot, in fact. But I've been thinking about going back to a more transactional situation where I just sell the golf, put the money in the bank and get a lease car for two years. Just give somebody two hundred and fifty quid a month to drive, you know, a new or nearly new lease car and just have that unattached. And the thing is, you know, if you're going to continue with that analogy, um, and I don't know why we are, but um, it's the, the, I was thinking of like a Toyota Corolla or some sort of very, very boring hybrid slug, very efficient, very economical, etc.. Um, I don't know. I mean, it'll, it'll, it'll serve its purpose fantastically well. So, so it's not necessarily a bad thing is it.
Well where the well, where the analogy falls down completely is unfortunately you can't there is no agency equivalent of a Toyota Corolla that you can fling two hundred and fifty quid out a month, and they'll just do the job and not require any input from you because you are ultimately doing business with humans. Right. And I think that's part of the problem is that people who try to treat agencies as very sort of transactional things, that you can just pay to sit and do your SEO or whatever, and you don't have to interact with them. That's never productive. That's never profitable, I don't think. Mhm. Okay, maybe I'm wrong.
As quickly as turned into a whinge about clients, isn't.
It?
No, it's our usual drivel. I mean, it's like we've never been away. All right. Um, HubSpot, we finally have got our HubSpot website very own.
Yeah. Now we practice what we preach.
Yeah.
Doesn't it feel good?
We've been using HubSpot now for a long time since twenty fifteen, but we always kept our website separate. Um, the, we kind of didn't like the CMS and then we realised the CMS had become quite an amazingly good tool. And so last July, I think it was, we persuaded ourselves that we would go all in with HubSpot. So not only use it for our CRM and everything else, but we'll use it for our website as well. And it's taken us, what, six months? Because obviously we've got to fit it in between project work and working for working for clients, but it's finally gone live. Yeah. Um, and we've kind of, yeah, changed the look and feel of our website. As you, as you might imagine, it was a good, good opportunity to sort of, um, evolve the website into something else. And we've also, um, kind of recognised who we predominantly work with and we've leaned into that. You know, we've kind of leaned into the idea that we work well with tech and engineering companies who need a website that generates inquiries, helps them grow. And so that's exactly what it says on the tin now.
It does. Yeah. It does. Hasn't stopped us getting inquiries from Italian fashion houses but. No that's right. We've had, we still had.
Yeah. I mean, you know, the thing is and it's an interesting thing and we often have this conversation with customers, um that people often think that like they have to get, they have to get their website. Absolutely right. Because everybody that comes to their website looks at the homepage, sorry, they have to get the homepage of their website. Absolutely right. Because everybody now we this week have fielded a number of inquiries. And I think I'm right in saying that none of those people, because we can see exactly what they did. None of those people actually looked at our home page. They were only interested in the page that described the solution to the problem they've got. And without wanting to just sound like we're just keep banging that drum. That conversation happens time and time again with customers where they do not get that the web is used by people trying to solve problems and they're not interested in anything. They're not interested in you, full stop. And the only bit that might grab their attention is the bit where they say, if you've got this problem, we can solve it.
Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's probably testament to the amount of work we've done on our web pages that they tell the whole story. I mean, I think one of the things I would say is that if you sometimes see client websites where people do forty, fifty percent of the time go to the About Us page, and it's almost always because they don't tell a very convincing story on the page, right? It's like you've landed on a page that professes to solve the problem you have, and you haven't actually found enough information on there to think, oh, actually, these are the guys. So you have to go digging around on the website. And I don't know, like, I think it's just one of those fundamental things, isn't it? It's like, if you can just give people all the information they need to make their mind up right there on the page, they will because people are pressed for time. They want to do other things with their day. They don't want to click about your website trying to prove that you are who you say you are or that you're good enough or whatever.
So which is, which takes us back to this idea, um, which we've spoken about many times that, that every page on your website is a home page. You know, what I say to people often is, is think about every web page, think about who is it for, what problem have they got? How are they going to find it? And what do you want them to do when they're on it? I mean, there's other things as well. But if you think about pages and you think about them that way, there's a good chance that you'll find that somebody came to your website, website, website, website, something going on there. They come to your website, they spend five, six, seven, eight minutes, whatever, ten minutes looking at one page, which is about, say, for example, website management. That's one of one of our pages that generates lots of nice leads for us. So they look at the website management page, they only look at the website management page, and then they either ringer's or fill in a form and ask for ask for a meeting conversation. Um, so that we know that page is doing what it says. It's, it's helping them. And what we're doing with all our pages is we're saying, this is what we, this is the problem we're solving. This is what this service that we provide, this is the problem it solves. If this is you, we can help you. We talk about who we've done it for. So we give them confidence and we. And we show them what some of the people we've worked for say about us. So we've got this social proof. So on that page, there's a really complete story. If you've got a website that's causing you, you know, sleepless nights and you need somebody to manage it for you, that page speaks to you and encourages you to get in touch with us.
Yeah, I think you see it as well in like, because, because recently we've been doing some work for a client who do sort of asset integrity management. And I was, you know, looking around the internet for, you know, for how various other people pitch this service. And it's one of the things I noticed is that like the sort of airbuses and the halliburtons and all the really big, massive, you know, the big corporations that spend a lot of money on this stuff. That is the approach they take. Every website page is a self-contained story, and it gives you everything you need to convert. And I think because they recognise that, you know, their customers really probably only have the patience to look at one page or whatever. But it is, I think I mean, it's why landing pages work too for PPC. I mean, you know, they do if you put a landing page up that literally doesn't have any links to the rest of your website, people will convert on it. If you get the pitch and the offer and everything. Right. Yeah. You don't need all of that other stuff. And you know, we're not saying get rid of your about us page. Um, you shouldn't need it though. Really.
Yeah. I think when people look at the about page, um, they are often convinced from the solution page that you're a good option you're worth speaking to.
And they just.
Yeah, they kind of think, well, who are these guys? Where did they come from? How long have they been around? Who's behind them? You know, you know, that kind of thing. And so that's why, you know, when we speak to people about about pages, it's sometimes they think, uh, oh yeah, yeah, we just need one paragraph. You know, we build widgets. That's it. You know, not about where did you come from? Why do you do what you do? Who does it? You know, what was the origin of the business? Who are you interested in that? Yeah.
And you back to that whole human element there, right? You it's like trying to put a name to the face because the about us pages are not convincing are like, if you've ever been on like Spotify's about Us page and it's just a load of corporate waffle and you're like, who the f*ck you know who are Spotify? Who are these people? And you have to be able to put sort of faces and names on there. And yeah.
I think so. When you're, when you're a, you know, a tiny little company like us that nobody's ever heard of, um, you know, and, and they just out of the blue, suddenly they're looking at this, you know, red evolution web page about some.
Apparently these people make websites. Yeah.
Um, you know, you have to then, um, you know, be able to sort of back that up and give them a bit more information, but it doesn't always happen. I mean, I think the inquiries this week and again, I'm just guessing at the moment from, uh, a very quick look through analytics yesterday or the day before, but I'm pretty sure they only looked at a solution page and then got in touch so that, you know, it's great. Um, obviously we're at an early stage with the new website and, you know, given the flexibility of HubSpot CMS, um, you know, we're going to be iterating split testing, doing a whole range of things, but it's encouraging that, um, you know, we've had a few inquiries this week that have come in from the new, the new site, which is, yeah, quite a, quite a departure from the old site in terms of look and feel. Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure they haven't looked at the about page. They've just kind of thought, yeah, these guys look like they know what they're doing because you know, on every page we've got some visual clues like, you know, logos of household names that we've worked with, which makes people feel safe because ultimately you're trying to make people feel like they can do what I need them to do. They've done it before. They've done it. For some people I've heard of, I feel safe. Some of the customers have said some nice things about them, you know, although they're probably thinking, assuming they're real testimonials. I saw an interesting one this week because we had an inquiry in from a dairy down in Ayrshire, um, smashing company. I mean, I'm hoping that we um get to help them out and work with them. Um and on their testimonials page they've got actual photographs, very well done, laid out of the paper slips that they give to people that people can scribble on like, oh yeah, this, this, you know, your service, your milk, whatever is fantastic. And why we like it. It's organic milk that's pasteurised in a, in a, in a way that only they do. It's, it's a, a patented method that they use. And their milk is hugely popular from Ayrshire. They're serving like huge swathes of Scotland. Yeah. Good going business, he said. We said he explained it as well, like the Um, uh, not microbrewery like um craft craft brewers of, of.
Of the milk.
The milk world. Yeah. That's right. I mean, I drink gallons of milk, I love milk. So I said to you, I'm keen to try the product, but um, yeah, so, so when I looked at that, I didn't for one minute think somebody had sat and tried to write, you know, fifty testimonials in different handwriting. It just one hundred percent convinced me that these were genuine testimonials. Yeah, that was nice. I thought it was a right kind of cute way of doing it. Okay. Come on. I've been coming up with subjects to, to rub it on about and you basically just sort of like sat there going, yeah, surely you've got something to say. We haven't had done a podcast for months.
Um, I have something to say about, well, just on the element of building trust as well. I think the other thing is case studies because we've come across this quite a lot recently, haven't we like people? Well, we've got, we've, we are currently working with one client who have really good case studies that they've sort of tucked away out of sight on their website.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
And engineering company.
Yeah. And I think just on the subject of, you know, things that you're trying to convey to somebody, there is nothing that says we can do this and we do actually do it as well as actually just writing a case and a decent case study. I'm not talking about a paragraph that says A once upon a time we went here and did this, you know, detail quotes from the customer, a proper breakdown, slow down.
Relax.
Relax. Um, but I think stop talking.
See? He did.
He can go right off some people. Assuming I ever liked you in the first place.
I know you didn't.
Um, but I think that's one of those, like, really sort of unsung gems. And it is also something that our new website does a lot more is push those case studies to the sort of front and center on some pages. And I think it's, if you're going to spend time improving any one thing on your website to sort of increase conversions, that would probably be where I would start. My voice is really quite flaky.
You've got to drink your tea. I found recently, I, as you know, play in a band and play the drums and sing. And I there's a lot of bugs going around. And this, this gig was early February and I had this bug that seemed to last forever. And Caron made me some honey and lemon. So I'm drinking this actually, at the gigs. I'm drinking this in a flask, this honey and lemon, which was working. But then my voice started kind of like really cracking. So I had some ice cold water. So I found that the, the, the, you know, ice cold water and the honey and lemon combo.
Like hot and cold.
Yeah. And suddenly it was all fine.
Again, interesting.
Because it is annoying when you when you start losing your voice. Sorry, what were we saying? Because I had a point. Case point to make. Yeah. So I remember somebody quite famous and I don't know if it was somebody from WPP or somebody from Ogilvy or one of the, you know, the big ones. It wasn't Rory Sutherland or somebody like that. Who's who's if you're not following Rory Sutherland on Tick Tock, he should be. The pearls of wisdom are fantastic. Um, I wonder if he'd come on our podcast. Maybe you might ask him if he's listening. We'd love to have you on.
We have a really good track record of asking random people and saying, yes.
We've had some quite well-known people come on the podcast, haven't we? Um, but somebody quite well, quite famous was kind of like, it's all very well saying we've done this, we've done that. Like all people are really interested in is can they do it for me? Yeah. So a case study, I suppose, can help to persuade and should help to persuade. I think it probably does help to persuade that that thing you need doing, you know, this company can do it for you because they've done it for them. But ultimately in the creative world, which we flirt with, I suppose, um, in the creative world, we yeah. You know, because we've helped company A, can we definitely help company B it's a conversation we often have, which is why we do discovery and really try and get under the skin of a business and more importantly, the people in that business to figure out whether we're the right guys for them. Because, you know, it's a team effort, obviously, between you and the client. And, um, yeah, although a case study hopefully can get your foot in the door.
Um, well, you.
Do need to dig a bit deeper, obviously to, uh, to figure out unless it's a very transactional thing, you know, if you, if you.
Sell widgets.
If you sell blue widgets, then, you know, if you need blue widgets and we sell blue widgets and just buy some.
Widgets, whether or not a case study is really useful in that, in that scenario, I don't know. But yeah, maybe I think I think a lot of the time with the website, all you can really hope for is that it gets your foot in the door and it leads to a conversation. I think a lot of the time that's what we're trying to do, isn't it? Is your website should be a conversation starter. It should sort of make somebody want to get in touch with you, but it can't sort of do the whole thing. And I think that's somewhere people do fall down sometimes, you know, they want their website to do, you know, I don't ever want to talk to them. I want them to buy the thing without ever contacting me. Yeah.
I mean, e-commerce, the whole purpose of that site is to sell shit. So you know that that website needs to be persuasive. And, um, you know, in order to, in order for the transactions to take place. But you're right. I mean, we're now majoring on this idea that we, that we build and grow lead generation websites for tech and engineering companies. It is that it's lead generation. It still then needs a conversation. It still needs a conversion process, a sales process, um, to go, to go successfully in order for that lead to turn into revenue.
I don't think there's a single client that we have where you could sell what they do without a conversation. I think in B2B, it's a complete fiction that that ever happens. You know, at some point somebody's going to want to ring you up and say, can you actually do this farce? You know, here are the specifics. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So broadly speaking, um, we are delighted that we now run our website on the HubSpot platform. Um, and what's been really interesting is over the years, we've probably had opportunities to sell HubSpot CMS, the content management system, the thing you use for building websites. We've had an opportunity to sell that to people, but because we didn't actually use it, we maybe we were maybe hesitant, like, you know, you could use HubSpot. Um, it certainly looks like a great system. And we built websites for other people using it and they like it. Um, we don't actually use it. And it's not just a case of like not being able to sell it because we don't use it. It's not, it's not that that simple. No, it's not that.
It's just you don't fully understand the benefits. I think until you, I mean, the, the ease with which, you know, you can sort of like modify or set up a new page or whatever, like as much you can.
Do with WordPress.
Of course you can, but you know, it's all right there. It's beautifully simple. It's all the things like having, you know, like pre-populated CTAs and stuff like that. Like it is, you know, it's a real time saver. But you're right. I mean, I've become annoyingly evangelical about it just because I use it all the time now and I see opportunities for other people to do the same. Yeah.
Use it with clients and now use it with our own.
Yeah. And I'm sure that, you know, it would be exactly the same if we were all in on craft or any other CMS. You know, you just you just love the tool that you're using, otherwise you wouldn't be using it.
But it's interesting, isn't it? This I'm trying to think we could definitely go down the car analogy route with this as well. But like we've had an inquiry came in yesterday. It's an engineering company, a really good fit for us. Exactly the right kind of company. Um, and the, their new um, head of marketing, uh, approached us, um, because we've worked with them before. Yep. And that's great. That's lovely. And that that's happened. Um, you know, we've worked with them when they're in a different company. Um.
And right.
Yeah. And so, you know, they've, they've approached us and like one of the first questions was, oh, can you work with craft CMS and craft CMS is a very, very good content management system. We can work with craft, but we don't know craft intimately the way we know WordPress, Joomla, HubSpot, Um, but being geeks, you know. Well, having geeks in the team, we can certainly figure it out. But I just wonder sometimes if businesses lose out because they, they put the technology before the actual reason for being of the website. Yeah. I probably didn't word that very well. So, you know, most B2B organisations need a website for lead gen and they need a company who understand lead gen and what it takes to get a website that creates leads more than they need a company who can use WordPress, Joomla, HubSpot, Kraft or anything else. And if they, if they come along and say, for example, um, we can only work with you if you know how to use craft, well, fine, but you're not going to get the best people to solve the real problem, the lead gen problem, all you're going to get is somebody that knows how to use craft, and that can be somebody you know, who You know, frankly doesn't know anything about business, but they know how to use craft.
Yeah. I think it's like for some reason, the analogy I went to was shoes though, you know, it's like you turn up to.
Nurse the screens.
Yeah, yeah. Or like costumes or clothing, isn't it? It's like people work with a given material or whatever. And you go to them and you say, look, I must have this fantastic thing and it must be made of this calf leather. And the guy's like, well, I don't work in leather. I work in suede. Yeah. You know, it's like, do you want a really good pair of shoes or do you want me to try and do something I'm not really that good at? And it's odd as well, because I think you're right. People really fall in love with the idea of a specific system or technology. Like your customer doesn't care fundamentally whether your website's made in HubSpot or they'll never know.
They'll never know unless they install Whopper. And they're a.
Geek. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you know.
Look it up.
Um, the point is, what you really want is a good website. And like you say, some people who are fundamentally very well equipped to help you make that website make money, Everything else is secondary. You know, it's at best a sort of short conversation during discovery about which is most cost effective or most efficient or.
Yeah. Because quite often businesses are in this position because they invested in the wrong team of people, the wrong agency or the wrong in-house team, when what they needed was a website that generated leads.
Yes.
It just so happened that that team used craft or WordPress. And so potentially you've then got this other team that can actually make a difference. They can make sure that that website delivers real revenue into the business, but because they don't know how to use WordPress or craft, you're not going to hire them. Yeah, it's just absolute bullshit.
Doesn't make any real sense, does it?
No, but the flip side of that is why should a company spend twenty or thirty thousand quid plus on a website built with, let's say, craft, they find a team of people like, say, Red evolution who are like clearly a good team of people who can make a difference to their bottom line by helping them make that website generate leads. But the first thing Red evolution say, and we would never do this. But the first thing revolution said, well, that's fine, but and a lot of agencies do get to the point, Dave. Um, a lot of agencies do this. They say, well, the first thing we need to do is rebuild your website in a system that we understand and that I.
That.
Is absolute horseshit.
Is absolute.
Horseshit. But neither should you stick with the system where adapting it to actually create this lead generation tool and the moving it into another platform element is so trivial that like, well, why wouldn't you do it if there's a compelling reason? I mean, the compelling reason with HubSpot is it's not just a website building tool, right? It's an entire revenue generation tool.
Yeah. And it automates your marketing for you. It works as a CRM for your sales team. It does everything.
It helps clever people automate marketing. HubSpot in itself is f*cking useless. It doesn't do anything, does it? It's just a software tool.
I mean, the only thing I really have to say about this, and I might you might shout at me for saying this, I don't know.
I'm getting ready to shout. I've had a mouthful of tea.
Is. Well, I think you turned down some work earlier this month. Earlier this week, I think, um, because we weren't the right fit. And what you said to me afterwards was we probably could have learnt as on the go with these guys. Um, but I didn't really think it was right to do that. But I think that's really the key to the whole thing. If somebody came along that we really, really wanted to work with and they worked with the system we'd never seen before, we would probably just very transparently say to them, we don't we're not familiar with this system. We're willing to learn to help you. Let's sort of take the hit together, you know, appreciate that we're learning and we'll try. And I think that's the grown up way of approaching it. I think whenever you're talking.
You're doing it again.
To an agency and they're saying to you, well, you have to rebuild. This isn't a system we know, or this is a bad system, which people say all the time, and I think is a ludicrous position to operate from, um, or, you know, oh, Or this system, this other system that we really like will solve all of your problems. So just be very suspicious because there is no real reason for a competent agency not to just say, well, if this is what you've, you're wed to and you spent all this money on it, we'll learn to make it work for you. That's not outside the the sort of realms of possibility. I just think those sort of conversations don't happen a lot, because a lot of agencies don't like being shoved out of their comfort zone.
Um, yeah, we've heard that a lot. And I know I'm repeating myself here. If you're familiar with any of our other podcasts, I've certainly heard it a lot, um, where companies are said to us, oh, you know, we're having a conversation with this other company and they've said that we have to rebuild the website in WordPress because it's currently built in Perch or Joomla or something. And that's no good for SEO. I mean.
It's all rubbish.
People get told such horseshit in our trade, in our industry.
I was reading a great one on Reddit the other day where some SEO guy and he was like, I've been told that, um, no, sorry. It was a site owner on the SEO subreddit. And he was saying, my SEO guys told me I have to rebuild my website and squarespace for SEO purposes, should I? And everyone was just like, what? The platform doesn't matter. It's completely.
Rebuild it in squarespace because you no longer have to worry about the server because it's a lovely system to use. It'll encourage you to make more changes and regular updates to your website because it's lovely to use, etc., etc., but not because it's better in inverted commas for SEO for sure.
And Google certainly doesn't prefer any one CMS to any other, which is the other sort of lie that people propagate, isn't it?
Yeah. That's right. Um, be careful not to mention names. Did you see that report that a client shared with us this week? We had a report shared with us. Um, this.
I don't actually think I have yet.
I'll let you see it. It's quite funny. Um, so I'm going to be very careful not to go into any detail, but this, this report, which no doubt has got some legitimate stuff in there. It's a report, um, that a client of ours has had done by another organisation, um who desperately want, you know, to win the business of our client and may well be successful in that endeavor. Good luck to them. Um, it's reading it is. It's like a masterclass in horse shit. It really is. Yeah. I mean, some of the things it says I just plain wrong. And in making these fundamentally flawed statements to anybody who understands anything about our industry, all it does is demonstrate incompetence.
Yeah.
And I, and I'm being I am being vague. I mean, if certain people are listening to this podcast, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about and I don't. So I don't want to be any more specific than I've already been. But I guess what I'm trying to say is a conversation came up in the mastermind group yesterday with the guys in America, at the various agencies in America, and a tactic which apparently is very effective, um, in, in, uh, in, in our industry is to do provide an unsolicited audit of somebody's website in order to point out all the issues with it in order to try and win some business. And it's a perfectly legitimate way of trying to win business. No, I get that. Well, yeah, it is and it isn't. I mean, it's underhand. You're in you're in possession of basically two percent of the facts when you when you undertake these unsolicited audits because you have no idea what the, what the company and their agency are currently working on from a strategic point of view. But yeah, what do you think about, about this approach, which I'm sure I mean, I know for a fact that, you know, our clients and indeed ourselves get constantly bombarded with these unsolicited audits of, of like, you know, the sky's about to fall in because your website's so bad and we can fix it for you kind of thing.
I mean, to say something relatively controversial here, I don't think it's any different to a scam call pretending to be a bank or a phishing email. I think.
Yeah, I can see where you're coming from.
I think the thing that really angers me about it is that it preys on one of the things that we really, fundamentally cannot change about our industry, which is that it is quite SEO is quite opaque. It looks quite technical, and it's quite difficult to understand a lot of the terminology. If you're outside of the industry, you can say a lot of things like, oh, you have a lot of four hundred four errors on your website and people will shit themselves, you know, they hear the phrase error or they or they see like a load of red lines.
Four oh four sounds geeky and credible.
Yeah. Oh, there must be all these like fundamental things wrong that my website's missing. And, and it's very much like, you know, taking advantage of somebody who is seventy years old and isn't really sure how their pension works. And they get a phone call and it says, empty your pension pot because the pension company you're investing in, they're ripping you off. And I know better. It's frustrating because a lot of the times these errors are not really errors. They're not really problems. I mean, four hundred four errors are a problem. But there are lots of things that, you know, things like site bulb and SEMrush will flag up as being really problematic. SEMrush hits us all the time because we have a toxic backlink profile. We don't we know it's fine. It's just, you know, an automated system that isn't really up to snuff. And this is the thing, it's a really low effort tactic because these people are not actually auditing your website. What they're doing is they're taking your URL and they're dropping it in a paid tool. And that paid tool spits out a load of information that looks like technical jargon and is quite frightening. And then if it's frightening enough, they'll send it to you. But you know, they haven't done any work. They don't know anything about what your the objectives of the site are, what your market's like, what you need to do to rank it. I mean, SEO really fundamentally, you know, the only people you're competing with are the people that are also trying to rank for your search terms. So sometimes websites that are technically rubbish perform really well in search. They do, you know, you just don't f*ck about with that sort of stuff if you don't need to, you don't sit there optimising every last technical flaw if it's working. But these people, the tactic that you're talking about. It just preys on the fact that site owners, business owners are relatively insecure and rightly so. It is confusing, but they are quite insecure about what is going on behind the scenes of this, this website. They don't really understand. And, you know, I just think it's fundamentally predatory behaviour.
Really it is. Yeah, I'd agree with that. It's I mean, what one of the guys in the group said was that like he said, we know, meaning the people in the call, we know that these reports are full of horseshit, but they are very effective ways of getting conversations look scary.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's right. I mean, we've shied away from that. We would never kind of, um, you know, we will if we get approached by a business and they ask us like, you know, we think we could be doing better. What do you guys think? And of course, we'll dive in and we'll audit and we'll have a look at it. And like human beings will take a look at the thing and look at it from a, from a very grown up perspective. Um, and we will report that information back to them, but even then we'll be very fair minded about it, you know, like, okay, like we ran it into this tool and this tool said this, this and this. But to be fair, the tool said exactly the same about the people who are dominating search in your.
Market, which is ninety nine percent of the ninety nine percent. Absolutely true. Like, yeah, find me a website that actually passes like a site audit without any errors. It's not gonna happen. Yeah, yeah. I think there's this whole idea that, you know, like you should be getting SEO one hundred percent right. That is just completely fictitious. And yeah, this other idea that.
Well, you should be getting SEO one hundred percent right? Because SEO is lead generation, right? So if you're getting loads of traffic and you're either you're getting some traffic and you're generating good business from that, then your SEO is right, right.
And that was, and that's fundamentally it, isn't it? You know, whether your SEO is working or not, because your website's either making you money or it's not. And you don't need a weird automated report to tell you that you know already. Yeah.
So one hundred percent. All right. Um, okay. So do we, do we swear that we're going to keep this going now? And we do get back to a weekly, um, you know, stream of consciousness.
I think so, yeah.
Okay. Okay. So what do you want to finish off with? Um, tell me an amusing anecdote. To finish off.
An amusing anecdote about what? The only thing I. Well, actually, I'm going to be really boring instead, because the only thing I didn't mention that I did want to talk about was the whole Google, um, sort of slowly shitting itself thing. Go on. Well, it's just one of those things I think it's quite interesting to know about. I mean, I wrote a blog post earlier this week about the fact that Google sort of starting to slow down the way that it crawls and indexes content. It's becoming a lot more sort of lethargic and taking a lot longer to get around to things. I've also been reading a load of really interesting stuff on the web about how many more searches now, instead of pulling in proper content, are just pulling in like Reddit threads or Quora threads and that kind of thing. And just about how Google search is becoming more and more sort of dominated by sort of lacklustre or rubbish content.
Is this because of AI?
Yeah, I think so. Well, I think it's Google trying to overcorrect because they've seen all of this AI content appear. They can't really crawl it, they can't really process it. So instead they're sort of like, okay, let's look for signals like, you know, human interaction, discussion forums, that sort of thing, because I can't, you know, dominate there. Although I'm sure it does probably people do go and type things into ChatGPT, but I think it's quite interesting because I think it fundamentally, for me at least, it marks a sort of real shift in the way that Google works and a real change in sort of how dominant it is, I think.
Because initially Google said, don't use AI content. We can tell if it's AI and if it is, we'll put we'll penalise you and then they won't show your content. And then they kind of said, well, actually, as long as you're as long as, as long as you read it and you're happy with it, and it is actually good content because you've checked it, then that's fine. Which is exactly the same as saying we actually have no way of telling whether it's AI.
Please be nice.
Yeah, please, please play fair. I mean, it's the same if you think about the whole, um, you know, Google's a link based algorithm. If you've got links to your content, Google thinks it's important and it ranks it higher. And so there's an entire industry out there which will guess what. Sell you loads of links to your content so that Google thinks your content is better and Google's done a reasonable job at figuring out when those are real links and when they're not real reasonable. He's done a reasonable job. Well, put it this way we rank for some really good stuff and we don't do dodgy link building. Sure. So, you know, it is possible to rank for some stuff.
I'm absolutely.
Positive that dodgy link building.
Occasionally outranked by people who.
Are doing dodgy link building. Yeah for sure. And we've certainly flirted with the idea of, you know, chucking some dodgy links at content just to see what happens.
Yeah. But I think yeah, I think it is really interesting isn't it. Because it comes off the back to of I don't know if you saw about Google's image AI bard. Okay, so the big controversy last week because, um, it was basically generating loads of AI images with basically overcorrecting for bias. So it was generating things like pictures of SS officers that were black and stuff like that, like things that were just like technically impossible because the algorithm had been adjusted in such a way that it must be sort of like, I don't know, representative of whatever. Okay. Um, so they very hastily pulled that and sort of apologised for it. And I think it just goes to show that Google is not some sort of infallible.
For.
Sure. You know, master of the industry, they don't really know what they're doing.
Well, this goes back to something you were saying in the office earlier about the certification. Yeah. I mean, and when you speak to I think it was I think it was I mentioned earlier, Rory Sutherland. Follow him on TikTok. Fantastic. He's a real sage. Um, but he was talking about when he was talking about initiative or the initiative of businesses. He talks about Facebook and Google fundamentally unbelievably good businesses with a, with an amazing ethos, do no evil. All the rest of it. So slowly billions start rolling in and that all goes out the window and they become a bit rubbish. Yeah. Still a phenomenal company, don't get me wrong. And we're huge fans of Google Workspace and we use Google Tools all the time like everybody does. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of.
You've seen that Google, um, Google graveyard page though, haven't you? Where it's like a list of all the Google projects that have been failed and shut down.
Anything to do with social media?
There's like hundreds of thousands of business ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really know where it's going with that.
You just keep throwing stuff at the wall and sometimes stuff sticks to it. And if you've got the kind of money they've got. We were talking again about this in the office this morning where if you've got a sort of, you know, a flagship product, which is which is printing money, then you can experiment and throw stuff and see what sticks over and over again. And, you know, success breeds success. And that's probably where why success breeds success because.
You just don't notice the failure gives you.
The opportunity to fail, you know? Whereas for us, if we, if we messed up and failed and we all go our separate ways, then that's it. Yeah. Kind of thing, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's got very deep and philosophical all of a sudden.
It did. Yeah. I don't really know where I was going with that really, other than to say that it's quite interesting to see Google sort of slowly losing its grasp, or at least the sort of image of it as a sort of.
Is there any information which is kind of conclusively showing that the volume of content out there is just as just exponentially.
Increased quite.
A bit as a as a consequence of AI.
I don't think there's any hard stats, there are predictions. I was reading really interesting one that was basically saying that if AI content keeps being generated at the current rate, that by twenty, thirty, eighty percent of the internet will be AI generated. And bear in mind that the internet is like trillions of gigabytes of data. So I think it's a pretty rapid sort of.
Yeah. Where does that ultimately go though? Because AI is regurgitating somebody else's content and now AI is going to be regurgitating AI content.
So it's really interesting.
Comes from.
And it's really interesting because so there's a really interesting mathematician that's basically modeled all of this out. And he says that basically AI falls over when like forty percent of its training data is AI generated, as in it just becomes shorter and shorter at that point because it's just not learning anything. Okay. So yeah, there is a sort of like break.
End of AI.
Of AI. There is a break point at which the internet will become a useless training resource for AI because it is just AI content. And then I assume we'll all just migrate to our own separate internet, I don't know. I don't know what the end game is there, but.
The darker.
Web.
Maybe you mean the dark web, like, you know, for kids now, you know, now we need to go to the darker, darker web, right? Enough of this bullshit. Let's, um, let's do it again next week. And let's just keep start keeping notes of stuff that's going on so we can give coal face information. You've been listening to Dave and Alex at Red evolution, uh, in their Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. If you would like to come on the show, don't get in touch. We don't have guests anymore. It's just us two bullshit. Well, we might start a different podcast where we have guests. Yeah, well, yeah, if you're really interested, you could try and pitch to us. We are still getting pitches.
To try and sell us stuff. We want to talk about tools.
Randy wants to come on and talk about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, nah, don't bother.
I don't think anybody wants to listen to us, but they definitely don't want to listen to that.
Well, they definitely don't want to listen to us, but they definitely double. Definitely don't want to listen to that. All right, enough of this. See you later.