A Cosy Chat With Geoff Kennedy From Sitebulb - Episode 12

How would you explain to a chief marketing officer the benefit and what Sitebulb does in a kind of, you know, jargon free way?

I suppose Sitebulb. It's it's an order SEO auditing tool. Um, I mean, we did refer to it more as a crawler in the past. The way we differ from being just a crawler is we collect the data, but what we do beyond that is we try to make sense of it to a degree, um, and point SEOs in the direction of solving problems with the website. How I usually refer to is, um, issues and opportunities. So issues that are holding you back in the search results and, um, getting traffic to your site, um, or opportunities to help improve them. So pretty much everything we do come back to them. The issues and opportunities.

Digital marketing coalface podcast, I'm here with Geoff Kennedy from Sitebulb, Geoff's head of marketing at Sitebulb. Um, really interested to hear where the farming fits in. Geoff. And, uh, just the journey to, uh, journey to head of marketing at bulb.

Yeah, a bit of a mixed, um, sort of career for humans. Um, my original background, I suppose, grew up on the farm and I've kind of always been involved and I've kind of been able to do a bit more since I've been a bit more flexible. Um, these days, I think Covid threw me back into it a little bit as well. And I spend a bit of time here with remote working. It makes it all a little bit easier, thankfully.

Yeah. So are you on the farm just now?

I am actually, yeah. Um, we've got top sales on the next few days. So, um, I'm down doing my internet bit at the minute, going to the top sales tomorrow and um, bit of a mix. I hope it's a bit drier though.

I obviously did a looking around at your background and, um, I kind of know the answer to this, but, you know, in your words, you know, before Sitebulb, I think you were involved in SEO. So what about the, your, your search marketing journey, if you like, just to, to, to get you to where you are right now.

Yeah. So my shift site has been quite a change for me in terms of being an overall marketer now. But, um, before that, I was mainly focused on SEO. I started off many years ago, kind of self-taught SEO, a bit of affiliate marketing. Like a lot of people get into it, um, building a few websites that I really wasn't very good at.

I've been there in e-commerce specifically.

Yeah, yeah. So, um, as in Newcastle working for um, uh, catering equipment supplier brought in to basically just look after all of their e-commerce or set it up rather very fresh then, um, so kind of just learned the ropes as I went along. Um, and then I sort of moved agency side up in Edinburgh with agency called Amber green.

Oh yeah. I've heard of Amber green. Yeah.

They kind of upskilled me a bit and yeah, so I think they've um, merged the last few years. Um, so I was there for a few years, um, kind of focused on the technical side of SEO. Then I went to visit Scotland, did a couple of years in-house and then back agency side with a yard, um, a bit of secondment actually with Sainsbury's bank. So I spent a fair bit of time um work with them. The more corporate environment, which I think we're going to touch upon a little bit more today. And then um, I shifted around different roles within there sort of looking after the team and then um, account account director in the vague sense, and then a bit of freelancing and a year doing a master's in foodstuff before I started, um, Sitebulb. Okay, so a little bit varied there, but um, I suppose my focus before now is usually kept coming back to SEO. So that's my background.

Mhm. So you've definitely been, uh, at the coalface, haven't you? You've, you've definitely, you know, been rolling your sleeves up, getting your hands dirty, doing SEO. So you've come at this marketing piece as, as somebody with a solid, uh, search marketing pedigree.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's something I think works really well for us because both Patrick and Gareth, the founders Sitebulb, um, they're kind of the same as well in that they've done a bit of it all. Um, they are, I mean, Patrick certainly is an SEO by background. Patrick a little bit more developer, but he's also had an agency that's done SEO for in a large part there. So we've all come from sort of cool face backgrounds and developing the tool in that way.

Yeah. Got you. Um, I mean, it would be fair to say that the main customer base for cyborg, which, you know, we've been subscribers to the system for a couple of years at least, maybe more than that. And we love it. Um, the main customer base are agencies, I would say. But who, how would you, how would you explain to a chief marketing officer the benefit and what Sitebulb does in a kind of, you know, jargon free way? I'm not going to be cruelty. I'm not going to pick you up like I do. Alex, one of my colleagues, every time we're in a podcast and Alex uses jargon, I'm on him like a ton of bricks. I'm not going to do that, but just kind of like explaining it in a way that isn't, isn't to a sort of audience who get all the acronyms and everything else.

Yeah. Um, well, I'm terrible with acronyms. Um, because I can never remember them anyway. So, um, I don't use that many.

Um, but.

I suppose cyborg it's, it's an audit SEO auditing tool. Um, I mean, we did refer to it more as a crawler in the past. So before I start and we've changed that slightly, and I suppose the difference is, is um, I suppose the level of understanding there, but um, the way we differ from being just a crawler is we collect the data, but what we do beyond that is we try to make sense of it to a degree, um, and point SEOs in the direction of solving problems with the website. Yeah. So how I usually refer to is, um, issues and opportunities. So issues that are holding you back in, um, the SERPs, they have already said a one in the search results and um, getting traffic to your site, um, or opportunities to help improve them. So pretty much everything we do come back to them, the issues and opportunities.

Okay.

Um, I suppose one of the things we do is try to go a little bit further as well of drilling down into why the things are important. So like a straight crawler would just give you the data and it would maybe say, this is an issue that you're missing a page title or something. Um, but what we try to do, we've got, um, what we call hints, which basically web pages that support a lot of things we flag up and that tries to explain, well, why is this important? How is it actually going to impact your search results and traffic? And I suppose at the end, the money you're making.

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that that we love about it is that you're not just sort of saying to people, here's a bunch of data, here's a bunch of information about your website, you know, good luck with it. Off you go. You know, you're kind of saying, look, this here's some stuff. You're almost saying like, I know this sounds a bit geeky, but this is what it really means. And this is how it might have a, a negative impact. I mean, you know, an obvious one that I picked up on yesterday when I was using it was, um, it said, look, these pages, um, have got only one link. You know, all sixty pages on this website only had one link going into them, and that's going to make it difficult for those pages to and, and, you know, I'm not going to go into the detail of it, but the way that the tool pointed it out and then explained it was, was fantastic. And I think, does that mean that your target audience for the tool isn't necessarily the geeks? It's, it's, it's actually more, you know, marketers who are in charge of websites and that kind of thing. I mean, you know, where is it pitched?

It's, I mean, we did a bit of work on our position in a while ago. And what we drilled it down to was, like you were saying before the agencies and freelancers, but specifically SEOs. Um, I mean, we do have quite a lot of users that are slightly more general marketers and in-house and things like that. But, um, primarily it's for doing audits for clients. I mean, and the reason why we had four clients in there is because a lot of what we do is the reporting side of it, which isn't quite as big a thing when you're in-house necessarily. Um, but we also one of the key bits we pulled out, um, we went back and forward on this. Just what you asked there about is this for technical people or are we trying to provide something to explain for non-technical? Mhm. And we've been a little bit on the fence with it, to be honest, because, I mean, we, we do say this as a tool for professional SEOs because you need to understand the context behind a lot of these things, like what you were saying before there about a technical issue. It's and we try to explain the reason why it's an issue behind it. But unless you understand the fundamentals of SEO and how it could impact the website and things like that, it's very easy to Go away and, um, I don't know, prioritise wrong or focus on things that aren't really going to be the best thing. And as a tool, you can only only automate that so much. Um, so I think that's something we've been very clear on. We're not trying to make out that we can give all the answers. Yeah. I mean, always going to be a degree of responsibility from the CEOs, of course.

I mean, a very simple example is, is, um, like page title elements, for example, you know, the, to, to the uninitiated, the bit that appears in a search result. Now your tool can say it looks like on these twenty pages, the title elements not long enough, but there isn't any sort of necessarily any opportunity to do a qualitative assessment of that, is there? There isn't an opportunity to say it's not long enough and it's a bit rubbish. Yeah, kind of thing, you know, I suppose is that is that the kind of thing you're talking about where, you know, you do need that expertise. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

I think there's that. But then there's also the element of, um, it depends what pages they are the likes of that. We, it, if it's across a thousand pages, um they even that they're way too short, way too long. But if you as an SEO look at that page and think, well, we're not bothered about them. They're all pages that aren't of any value to us really. It's me when to make them judgement calls and um, that level of things. But then I suppose we, we often find ourselves contradicted a little bit because we get a lot of feedback that, um, beginners find it really useful to have the hints and they're using it as a way to learn a lot of this stuff.

Yeah. I can see.

That you're not ruling out it being, uh, a bit more accessible to people as well.

Well, I think that's one of the strengths of the tool is that you, You clearly go to great lengths to say, look, this is the problem, and here's an explanation of the problem. And I've even seen. Correct me if I'm wrong, but sometimes you'll, you know, rather than write a hint yourselves, you'll actually link out to something on the web that explains it in real detail that, you know, content that you're, that you're actually saying, look, these guys have nailed this. Go and read this. If you're not sure about this particular issue. Is that is that fair to say?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I mean, there's two different sides to that. There's partially that we decide early on, like before I started, that we really don't want to be precious about linking out to people. And there's other people that know us better. Yeah. And also, we're a small team. I mean, there's especially some of the technical issues. If we were to try and write that out ourselves. Um, but it's already been done. Um, it seems like a bit of a no brainer to us. Yeah. And um, there's no reason for us not to link out to that stuff. And so it works well for us. And I think.

Maybe.

Sorry, I was just going to say.

I just couldn't be arsed Pyle. Yeah.

There is the occasional one of that. I'm not sure that to Patrick. Um but yeah I mean there's people writing about this stuff every day.

It's Patrick the guy that writes the release notes.

He is.

Yeah exactly.

Yeah.

He's very sorry I talked to you. Yeah yeah. We love them. We love. If anybody doesn't, uh, subscribe to Sitebulb, then it's worth subscribing just for the, just for the release notes on their own because they are like proper, clever, funny developer release notes.

Yeah, we get a lot of feedback on them.

Um, so I mean, in a nutshell, to if in a, in a nutshell, um, if, if I, I'm not a subscriber, whether I'm in-house or an agency, like what's the, the absolute elevator pitch? What's the like? This is why you should buy Sitebulb. It's the one. I mean, I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but I just wondered if, like, you've got that kind of like, killer kind of paragraph or whatever.

There is a one. We wrote it down last year and I've spent all Covid not speaking to anyone, so I don't remember it properly. Um, off the top of my head SEO auditing tool for professional SEOs. So that was sort of the element that I was talking about before. And I suppose what it comes down to, we pull the data, we try to make sense of the data, and we flag up areas for you to investigate further. We try to make it easy for you to investigate the issues and opportunities. So that's, that's how we differentiate between trying to just give you the answers versus signposting you to where you need to look and find out whether these are issues or false positives or whatever.

Yeah, I.

I need to polish that a lot more.

Oh yeah. No, I like it. I think the shorter, shorter and sweeter the better with those things. Um, I mean, I do think that it's a tool that agencies shouldn't be without, but I also think that their in-house teams, um, because there's been a big move to in-house. And I think if in-house teams are not using it, they're also missing a trick because I think the way the tools presented, the beautiful interface, that the way that it's got the hints and the tips and the way it prioritises things. I mean, it's just, it's just really useful. You know, I mean, it's not like you really need to be buried and immersed in in search to get something from it. That's my take on it. And I'm not just blowing smoke. I mean, that's, that's what struck us straight away when we started using it.

Yeah, I mean, it, it's quite a different use case and it's the one we've been trying to explore a bit more. Um, in terms of the day to day, because like we've designed a lot of the stuff around delivering audits. So in the, the sort of the traditional freelance or agency SEO sense, you have a big piece of work to do. You package it all up into an audit and you deliver that to a client. But there's a lot of people, I mean, myself included, just using a day to day, like what you were saying there before about just going in and finding issues, fixing them, rechecking. And we have introduced a few things late of the the scheduled auditing and things like that and the comparison, which we are working on, um, building out a little bit more as well. And I think that brings us a bit closer to what the, the cloud based tools are. Um, so rather than it just being, yeah, you run a crawl, you get your information back. This is something that goes out periodically so you can start monitoring things and tracking changes and things like that. Um, and I think that relates not just useful for the agency side, but also for the in-house, uh, the, the person that's just dealing with a website, but looking really granular. That's right. Um, so yeah, there's a lot of different use cases speaking about, um, it's easy to get distracted by.

Yeah, I agree and, and speaking about the use cases, um, do you think one of the real values is the way that it will root out the showstoppers, you know, the stuff that is genuinely hurting you, the real kind of critical look, you know, you've got, for example, four different versions of your website. You've got three dubs, non three dubs, you've got HTTPs, you've got HTTP, you've got, you know, just kind of like the headline stuff. Do you think it's, it's, that's one of the real values of it.

I think so yeah. I mean, that's one thing that we've put a lot of time into trying to get the, the prioritisation and things like the kind of the traffic light system. But going beyond that, because there's there's a few things going on in the background with that. We've got sort of the, the different hints are categorised themselves. So the likes of security stuff or things that can damage your sight in a big way is always going to be an issue. But then we try to prioritise based on how widely it's affecting the site and things. So how many URLs it's affecting and things like that. And I think that's something we'll just we'll be tweaking on an ongoing basis trying to improve that. But I think it's the, one of the most important things for SEOs because you could spend time trying to fix everything. But really focusing on the important bits is the biggest part. Like you were speaking before about the likes of the, what the, the CMO cares about all the business soon or something. And really, they're only bothered about what shifts the needle, which what makes more sales or that side of things. So really, I mean, a lot of the time, tweaking a few alt tags or page titles, are they that important? Sometimes they're not depending on what page they're on. Maybe they are, but, um, it's working out what is and what isn't important or what, where you best spend your resources.

Right? Yeah. So I mean, do you think that broadly speaking, most websites, technical SEO is a bit rubbish?

Yes. Um, it's a tricky, it kind of is. But at the same time, there's a lot of this stuff and I'm sure a lot of CEOs would admit this. A lot of stuff we do probably don't have a massive impact either. We're always aiming to have a perfect, technically perfect website. But once you start testing that sort of thing, there's there's probably a few things that have the biggest impact and a lot of stuff that together has a bit of an impact, but individually doesn't make a lot of difference.

Yeah.

I mean, the biggest areas that I see is the, the, the canonicalisation and URL structure and internal linking and things. I mean, that's the most common side of issues that I see on pretty much every website. So it's something that's just changing all the time as well on any given website, because it's not something you necessarily fix because it'll be changed again tomorrow with a lot of it, especially the internal link.

I mean, I'm really interested in what you just said there. I mean, do you think that Google almost gives great content, a bit of a free pass when it comes to the technical side of things? I mean, you know, you can have a site which is technically pretty awful, but if it's got great popular content, it'll kind of get through. What do you think?

Yeah, I think you can get away with a lot, to be honest. I mean, Google's got really good at getting around problems these days. It figures out a lot of stuff. I think where a lot of the problems come now though, is where they figure it out wrong. And that's something that seems to be cropping up a little more now, even when you have got everything right in place, because Google's trying to be very clever, it sometimes thinks it knows better than you. So it's it's creating more challenges for SEO. A lot of the time, um, it keeps us in work though, I suppose, which is always a good thing.

Absolutely.

Um.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. What if you, if there's, is there anything that the tool doesn't do yet that you being involved in the front end, you know, marketing, speaking to people like me about the tool. Is there anything it doesn't do yet that you wish it did?

Um, there's one of the things that we're looking at at the minute about how you break up audits.

Okay.

So it's, I think it's something you do already. I know I do personally. Um, whether it's segmenting, especially with bigger sites or whether you segment or you're looking at page templates and that sort of thing. And sometimes looking at a site as a whole doesn't tell you a lot because you're mashing up all the issues across lots of different types of pages. An area of the site and sometimes different teams working on different parts. Yep. And I mean, from the CEO's point of view, that can sometimes be misleading and sort of it can either dilute issues or it can mean you're looking at big areas of the site where really it's just focused on a small area, but then on the other side of it. So from reporting point of view, it can make it difficult to get things implemented. So if you're saying there's a thousand, you have got this particular problem on. Um, often it can just be a page template. So it's one fix as opposed to a thousand. Um, and being able to break things up by, you know, I don't know. Um, there's a team on a e-commerce website, there's one team looks after all the product pages versus another team looking after the, the media side of it. So it would make sense to structure your audit by who's going to implement them changes or technical versus content. And I think a lot of people are taking that into account already. Not everyone, which I think it should be done more. But what we want to try and do more of is facilitate that. So rather than you having to audit a site, take the information and split it up into your different segments or templates or whatever. Yeah, we want to be able to try and facilitate that.

Um, yeah, I can see how that seems quite simple. For example. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for example, you might send the, you know, the problems with title elements and meta and all that stuff. You might end the h1's. You might send all that to the content team. Right, guys, go and deal with this. You know what I mean? And then you then you've got your oops, just drag my headphones off my head. Then you send in the sysops, the stuff around cross site scripting or, or, you know, other other server related code related stuff is, I guess broadly that's what you're talking about.

Yeah. Um, I mean, yeah, there's a, there's a few different elements to it. There's doing it like that. Um, and then there's sort of splitting it up into different areas. So more of just the segmentation likes of this is an issue with the blog. This is an issue with your e-commerce site and things like that. So there's all sorts of different ways you can split it up. And it's not consistent between different clients or sites. Sometimes one way works for one client, another way might work for the other, and sometimes it's a mix of them both even within a single audit. Um, and the more we look at that, the more complex it starts getting, um, because of the more ways there are to do it. There's a few tools already doing it, um, to a degree out there. Um, and it's something you can do within Sitebulb yourself a little bit if you start splitting things up by full destruction. But we, we want to take it further. We want to be able to really let people split it up by, well, I mean, templates is the obvious one. So working out what template issues and what is page level issues. So that's a really big thing for us from speaking to developers as well. Um, because that's something we try to do a bit of is not just focusing on the CEOs that are using it, but working on not working, speaking to the end clients of the CEOs and working out what they want to see in audit.

Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a really good point. And I had a, I had a question scribbled down like, you know, did the end consumers of the reports, do they do they really have a Scooby what they're being told, you know, uh, you know, are they interested and do they have a real, any sort of handle at all on. Well, I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head. But, you know, there's, there's certainly elements of, of the work that we do that you just know they're not interested in it. And maybe there's a way for you guys to present that information, you know, distill it even further down to a kind of CMO consumable level, maybe.

Yeah. I mean, it's something we definitely looked at it. It's I mean, it's been kicking around as a concept for a long time. And I think it's another thing people are doing already to in a manual level. I always remember years ago, um, Johno Anderson is doing a talk show and he was talking about deliverables for SEO audits for clients. And it maybe it wasn't ten, but it was some ridiculous number. He would say we should be producing ten different versions of any audit for all of the different stakeholders within it. So you should have like a top level summary for the CMO and you should have the other end, the data for the developers and something a bit in between for the marketing manager and all these different levels. And I think that was completely over the top, but the concept behind it made a lot of sense. It's something when I'm doing the occasional audits myself freelance, I'll try and make that point of I make sure I've got the data for the developers. So what they need to actually implement the changes. I've got like the story in the middle. So the document so people can read through, they get enough detail to understand why their issues. But then at the other end, just a summary email like this is where the big problems are on your site. This is where you need to focus your resource. And, um, I mean, just building on that idea is something we've been talking about, like, how do we facilitate that? And the tool, how do we just flag up? Like, these are the big problem areas on your site. This is where you need to focus on. Um, we haven't got a perfect solution for it yet. Um, it's, it feels like there should be something there. There's always going to be a, a requirement for the SEO to pull that last bit together, but the easier we can make it, the better, even if it's just from a degree of producing graphics to summarise the issues or things like that. Um, so yeah, we are putting a lot of focus on the reporting end of it, the communication side of things.

Yeah. I mean, one of the challenges, I guess with, with, with SEO, especially some of the tech stuff is that you can use Sitebulb. Um, you can find a bunch of issues and you can say to the client, look, these are the issues. You can explain it in really simple terms to them. And you know, they're, if they're just like business heads, they're going to say, right, great. So when we fix that, what's going to happen? And and even then, you know, honest CEOs are going to be like, well, things might improve. Yeah.

I hate that. It's it's the horrible question you always get asked. Um, I mean, when I was the agency say, we used to do quite a bit of forecasting and things, and I mean, it would spend weeks on pulling together some of the forecast models, um, knowing full well that they were a bit finger in the air. And then the next year we tried not to look surprised when they were kind of accurate. Um, but there's just so many different variables. Um, there are a few people working on some really good tools for forecasting and things like that. But it's, I mean, you're trying to predict what Google's going to do and we don't know a definitive answer to like how they're gauging a lot of this stuff because it varies so much. Um, and I mean, I probably shouldn't say it to be honest, but I'm inclined to go a bit more from the, the testing and forecasting and just focus resource on doing things.

Yeah.

Um, because I think you can spend a lot of time on that area and. Whether it doesn't actually make a difference in itself beyond the prioritisation. Yeah. There's a lot of people would say that that's a bad approach because it can result in you spending more resource in the areas that aren't going to have impact.

Mhm.

Um, I suppose the middle ground is doing things and testing them retrospectively and learning in that way.

Yeah. Yeah. My, my view on this is that we, um, we have control over the stuff that Sitebulb reports to us. We have control over it. And so much with respect to search marketing, you don't have control over, you don't have any control over whether you get credible inbound links unless you go out buying them and stuff like that. Um, and I think it just makes sense to know where the problems are and fix them. I mean, like on page SEO, it's an obvious thing to get right because you can control it. And you know, that's one of the things that Sitebulb reports amongst lots of other things. So, you know, the answer may be, uh, is it's, it's not going to hurt. It should improve things. It, we're fairly confident it will improve things because at the moment it's bloody awful. But yeah, so far as a guarantee is concerned and you know, we can't go that far.

Yeah I think definitely. I mean that's I would say personally that's the best approach we are they in the digital industry? We've made a bit of a rod for our own backs. Many years ago, by saying that everything's measurable and you, like you put money in one end, you get, you know what, you're getting out the other. And it's not true at all. Um. And it's come back to bite us these days. I think that was all said when we were competing against the likes of the Yellow Pages and TV advertising things. Um, and compared to them, I think we are still very measurable.

Yeah for sure. I mean, my view on it.

Difficult to tell the impact.

My, my view on it, Geoff, is that as an agency, as a credible agency, and I'm not just talking about us, I'm talking about credible agencies. You should be able to look at a client's website, digital footprint, call it whatever you like, and make a really good at whether or not you can move the dial. You know, you could run an audit through Sitebulb, you could look at the search console data, and you should be able to say, look, we can improve things. And when people ask us about guarantees, because obviously they do still. And I'll, you know, I'll say we won't take a gig on unless we can guarantee to move the dial in, you know, move the dial in the right direction. I'm not going to go granular. I'm not going to say you're going to be number one for the search car insurance in three weeks time. But I'm gonna, you know, do you think that's a good approach?

I think so, yeah. I mean, as much as we can't give guarantees, if we weren't able to make an impact, then we're probably not doing a very good job. So I think that sort of approach is good. I think one of the the other sides to that as well is that it's sometimes a hard sell where there's issues with the website that could cause problems or it could create negative impact. And there are the issues that I sometimes find a bit of a hard sell because if they're not causing a problem at the minute. Um, but you know, it's something Google very easily picks up likes of, um, poor canonicalisation and things and that it sometimes find myself having them conversations of it's all right now, but next week they may decide different URLs or the canonical versions. So your site's suddenly going to plummet. Um, so we've got two sides. There's improving um the performance of sites, but also protecting them against tanking basically. Yeah, yeah. And there's definite value to both.

Um, one of the nice tools inside um Sitebulb is the um core web vitals, the site speed tester that, that tool I was, I was looking at that yesterday and it was, it was, it was, it's, it's nice to have it all within there as opposed to going off to, you know, the web based tool that Google provides or whatever. I mean, where are you guys at with this whole site speed thing? Because, you know, clearly you see sites that perform badly in a site speed check, performing really well in search and quite often, I mean, I looked at one yesterday in Sitebulb and when I saw the results and looked at the biggest culprit for slowing the site down, it was Google CDN. That was actually the main problem. I mean, it just seems to be a bit of a bugger's muddle at the moment. It seems to be all over the place. I mean, have you got any inside track on this?

In short, no. Um, I it's one of these ones that I mean Google made it made it out into a very big issue. And it was a very public sort of thing that was coming that they were introducing this. And I mean, they obviously are pulling that more into how they Them rank sites, but it also makes their life a lot easier because they've pushed a lot of people into improving their website performance, which helps them. Yeah, I mean, whether it be from a Chrome perspective or for their users. So it it's been beneficial for them to scare people and that.

Um, mhm.

But I think we need to remember that it is just one factor in a lot. Like you were saying before about, um, if you've got really amazing content, sometimes you get a pass on other things and it's, it's just one factor in many. So it probably is going to be getting more and more important, more so because people are finding it more important. But the, as the other side to it as well is the testing. There's a lot of misunderstanding around the tools and things like that and variations. And I mean, we've been talking about it today. We get quite a bit of feedback about tested this page or website one day and now it's showing different but nothing has changed. And um, yeah, people not understanding that it's dependent on the network, it's dependent on your machine and all these different things. Um, and there's all these different types of testing. There's lab data and then Google has its real world data, which some people get. Other people don't get. And so there's all these different things going on. Uh, I mean, even the likes of Archewell, we're not using lighthouse data. We are, we've recreated it. Right. Um, which means it is going to vary to a degree. Yeah. Um, I mean, we know a lot about how Google's testing. We've recreated that a lot, but it's never going to be identical. Um, so we've, and we've purposefully not used that for various reasons in the background, but it, it all makes for confusing.

You're not.

For people.

You're not suggesting for one minute that there's a lack of standards on the web, are you? I mean, the fact.

No, not at all.

But I think with that whole Cobit vitals, the site speed thing, I think it's one of my guys put it. We need to pick a tool and that's what we're going to use. You know, there's no point like testing it on this one. You know that site perform well on that one. So we'll use that this site perform well on this one. So we'll use this, you know, use the Sitebulb tool, get the Sitebulb tool, you know, work on the site until you get the scores that you're looking for in terms of performance. Um, and another thing with that stuff and you know, the actual, um, Experienced results. What you see when you go to a web page are often a million miles away from what core Web Vitals is telling you anyway. You know, Core Web Vitals is saying that there's a, you know, the pages jumping around after it loads. It's like, no, it didn't. So I honestly, you know, it just seems to be so mixed up. Okay.

Um, yeah, I mean, it's all relative as well.

Yes it is, it really is. Um, so is there anything with respect to Sitebulb, um, that we haven't covered in this chat? Anything I've missed out that you think is worth a mention before we start thinking about wrapping this up?

Oh, no, you put it on the spot. I'm sure there must be lots of things that I should have lined up to talk about here. Um, I, I don't think there's anything to stand out particular at the moment. I mean, like I say, the, the site speed stuff we've been working on a lot and not just the actual numbers making it accessible. Yeah. Um, and looking at how people are actually using that and sampling across the whole website as opposed to just focusing on individual pages. So that's been a big thing. And the other side, I would say is watch this space for, um, more workflow type changes, like how, how you carry out audits, how you look at your website rather than just as a whole, how you break it down.

Yeah. Okay.

Um, yeah, they're the main things that I was keen to cover that we've been working on recently.

So I was just in, in closing, I was going to say, you know, where's it going? Because it is a tool, um, that you guys are, um, you know, constantly working on. And it seems to me that you listen to people, you're actually ear to the ground. What, what do you need guys? What is in it doing that you could be doing? And you're obviously just, they're sort of teasing us a little bit with some of the stuff that you're working on. So I can there's a, there's a clear roadmap for the software, obviously.

I mean, we kind of split our time quite a bit the minute between the the features coming out and some of the, I suppose the softer stuff on my side of the marketing. The one thing that I completely forgot to mention that has taken up a lot of my time recently is our climate positive auditing stuff. Um, to get the right term there. So we've been working on like, how can we improve what we're doing? And from the development side, that's meant improving a lot of efficiencies within the tool. So what you need to crawl to get the results you need, letting people switch a lot of things off when they're not needing it. But then the, the outward facing.

I saw that.

Yeah, yeah, the outward facing pieces, um, planting trees and offsetting carbon. Like we offset the auditing of all of our users now, um, every month. So we invest in projects to offset their computers usage throughout the day, and we're planting trees for trials and for anyone that signs up the newsletter. So stuff like that. Although it's not technical features or anything, that's been a big part for us as a, a business, I suppose, rather than just.

And I've certainly been reading about that. The numbers, uh, I think, I think you've got the numbers. He was either in a newsletter that came out the last couple of days, or it was on the, it's on the website where you're talking about how many trees have been planted and, and, and the big push to sort of carbon neutral, uh, use of the tool, which is fantastic.

Yeah, yeah. It's been, um, it's got really good reaction actually, because it, I mean, it started off with us just a bit of a chat and we wanted to do something and snowballed a little bit. Um, and we're really glad we've been able to get a few people involved. Quite a few agencies have been keen to help, like planting more trees and things like that, and they're doing their own schemes. So it's been nice. It's good. Um, it's good when we can do something like that, that it's not a sales piece. We're not just trying to market ourselves. We can, um, it always sounds very cheesy, but give, give something back. Um, but work with others to do it as well.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Absolutely. Um, Geoff, it's been a pleasure. If anybody listening isn't using, uh, Sitebulb, I would strongly recommend that you go and grab a trial and give it a go. And, and one of the things we didn't speak about is Sitebulb isn't expensive. I mean, some SEO tools are silly, expensive. I mean, really, really costly. And Sitebulb really isn't. It's, it's not like you have to agonise over whether or not to get a subscription. It's, it's a, it's, I don't know, it's generously priced. I think that's the right terminology, but it ain't it ain't costly. I don't know if that's, I don't know whether you've, you know, how you've arrived at the price it's at, but it's uh, it's not an expensive tool is it.

Yeah. I mean, we've tried to keep it as low as we can really. I mean, our model sort of facilitates that quite a bit. I mean, we are a small team. Um, but I suppose the biggest thing is we're not a cloud crawler. We don't have the, the overheads that a lot have. Um, but it means sort of on one side we can keep things cheap, like twenty five pounds a month, but also we don't apply any limits. So within that you can cross many websites, as many URLs as many times as you want, anytime you want. Um, it's using your own machine. So there's, there's a slight payoff there. Um, but you can scale up as much as you want.

Yeah. Perfect.

Um, Geoff, it's been an absolute pleasure. Um, if anybody's got any thoughts or questions on on Sitebulb and the things that it does and anything we haven't covered today, then then feel free to send us an email. I'm sure Geoff would be happy to answer any questions. Um, in the meantime. Brilliant.

Thank you.

Great. Thank you for having me.