Really the the sort of sum total of it. Yes. Google have lied a little bit about how they track and measure things, but really what they want is for you to create really engaging content that people like. And although they can't measure that exactly, everything they do measure is sort of like built around the assumption that people writing good content will be able to get users to do things like spend extra time on the page, or that their content will be linked to frequently. And therefore, really the advice is just do the right thing.
Main takeaways and some of the stuff that Google's been saying was not true. There are things that it told you not to do that if you do, they will possibly help you appear more in search. But the biggest takeaway is if you are working towards building a genuinely great resource online, then nothing to worry about.
Yeah, absolutely.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing from the office. Um, there's a few things been happening on the coalface of digital marketing and, um, we're going to cover them in our usual, um, plain English, jovial.
Sweary.
Somewhat sweary at times kind of way. Um, you're gonna kick things off, aren't you? We're going to talk about this big story. It's not really a big story. I mean, it hasn't been on the BBC news or anything like that. It's a big story in geekdom.
When was the last time you saw a marketing related BBC news story? Nobody cares about this stuff. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It's a little niche.
So a thing has happened where some documentation about how Google works has been leaked to, um, the community, if you like, has been leaked to a particular person in the community, Rand Fishkin, and he has then shared relevant parts of the information to the wider community. Alex.
Yeah.
Keep it plain English and high level.
Very brief and very high level.
Well, you have to be too brief. Brief ish. But it's of interest because in theory this is like, um, we're finding out how Google really works.
Yeah. Well, that's exactly it. And how did you describe it? Geekdom, uh, has been going a bit nuts for it. It's been sort of all over SEO, roundtable and search engine land and all the usual sort of like SEO news sites. Um, yeah, it's an interesting one. So basically, like you say, what happened is a contractor leaked a big document with, I think two thousand five hundred different, um, Google call modules, which are things they look at when they're analysing a website and working out where it should rank and information about all the different attributes that contribute to that. So basically, like you say, how it works. And he leaked them to Rand Fishkin, who set up Moz. And then Rand Fishkin took a look at them and said that because they were so different set up.
Moz, you've already lost people.
Moz is a very famous or it used to be very famous. Um, they were an agency to start with, and then they got into building SEO tools.
Mosmols dot com.
Yeah. It's where a lot of people in SEO sort of start out, I think, don't they? There's that really famous Moz guide, their sort of introduction to SEO.
If you want to learn about SEO, then go and look at the Moz guide. It's superb.
Yeah. Um, and they obviously built lots of things like Open Site Explorer that people use to analyse websites and all of that good stuff. So he, he ran Fishkin doesn't really work for Moz anymore. But, you know, irrespective of that, he took a look at it and he said, you know, this is so wildly different from what Google say. They look at when they look at websites that it's his sort of duty, if you like to publish it and let everybody see for themselves what's really going on behind the scenes. And some people have been going a little bit overboard and calling it like the most significant moment in SEO history since, you know, twenty ten and, you know, all this sort of garbage. Um, I actually, on reflection, when I first read it, I was like, wow, this is huge. This is like, you know, Google have lied about everything. On reflection, I don't think it actually changes an awful lot, but I still think it's really interesting to know how, you know, what sort of things Google are really looking at when they look at a website and say, where should this rank?
So this is obviously all and this isn't me doing some sort of corporate, um, legal disclaimer or anything. We, I think it's worth making the point that we have no way of verifying whether the document was real, whether the whole story is real. We're assuming it is. We think in good faith it is all real. So when we say like, you know what we're saying just now, it's based on the assumption that this is this isn't just some kind of weird, massive thing. Yeah, yeah.
Rand Fishkin decided to.
I don't imagine for one minute he would.
Yeah. Um, I mean, I think Google have sort of already confirmed that it's real. They've said this document lacks context. And if you look at it, you may draw the wrong conclusion, which is as good as.
Confirming.
That it.
Is one of our documents that you've got your hands on. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, but important caveat as well to make is that a thing a lot of people have been missing out on is that this is a document that lists all the things Google looks at when they're working out how to rank a website, but it doesn't say how they're weighted or how important they are. So you can sort of read it and think, oh, there's loads of stuff in here about like, um, link juice. And it never says link juice, but you know what I mean? Like the power of links and how important link is, but because there's no weightings, you know, just the number of times that something is mentioned in the document doesn't really mean anything. So yeah, big caveats, but it is really interesting. And it's really interesting because a lot of the things that we talk about on here, you know, we've said before several times, you know, how can Google possibly know, um, how authoritative and trustworthy your website is or how accurate your content is? They claim they can, can they actually do it? And this document sort of shows that no, they can't really do it. Um, and a lot of the things that, well, I guess I'll just sort of run through a little list of the, the things that we know are not true. So the first one is that Google does actually track your site or domain authority. So they've always said that they don't. So there's a. John Mueller. Mueller I don't know. Yeah. However you want to pronounce his name there. Sort of um chief sort of correspondent with the SEO community has always said. And has gone on record several times to say, look, we don't care about things like domain authority. We don't look at your overall site authority and how often it's linked to. We look at things on a page by page basis. Yeah, that's not true. So there's a site authority metric in there.
Yeah. And that never felt true. It never it never felt like that was the case. It always felt like if you've got a site that is big and lots of other people reference it and it's got tons of information in it, the chances are it's going to be easier to help that site appear in a search result for a particular search term. Yeah. Than a site that's brand new and has got, you know, no kind of credibility if you like. In plain English. We're talking about credibility, aren't we?
We are. Yeah. In an abstracted way. I guess what we're really talking about is how often, like you say, do people reference or link to your site. And, you know, for a long time, that's been a really contentious issue because some people in SEO will say, oh, if you want your site to rank first in Google, all you have to do is go out and build a load of links and improve your domain authority. And Google have turned around and said, well, we don't track domain authority. We don't look at things in a simplistic way like that. Um, and so, you know, a lot of SEO people very virtuously have then gone forward and said to people, well, you know, don't, don't just build links, you know, concentrate on lots of different things. And at the end of the day, I think the sort of main takeaway is links do matter. Um, I think one of the really important caveats to that though, is there's also a lot of stuff in there about where the links come from, how relevant the linking site is, whether it's in the same sort of.
Just clarify for people who are kind of wondering what you're talking about. I mean, links, links.
Yeah. Well, literally just when somebody puts a hyperlink in there, the copy of their website that says, you know, click here and it directs you to your website. Okay. Um, so yeah, in, in, in the SEO game for a long time, People have just been building lots of backlinks from lots of different websites.
Because it was understood that if you had a website that lots of other people linked to, it made your website appear to the search engines more a more credible way, it made it look like it was important and therefore had authority and credibility.
And I think that is still, broadly speaking, true. But like I say, there's a lot of stuff in there about how Google analysed the relevance of links and stuff like that. So again, the advice that we've been giving and a lot of other SEO people have been giving, which is that only build backlinks if it really makes sense for that site to be linking to yours. If it's in the same industry, if it's, you know, at least a relevant publication and you're not building links to your sort of, I don't know, like your engineering website from, you know, bicycles dot com then. Fantastic. Um, but yeah, I mean, links are still really important and there is a sort of site authority metric, I guess is the key takeaway. Um, the Google also always say that they don't care how old your domain is, they don't really give a monkeys. Um, again, you know, they've gone on record to say that several times they do have a domain age attribute. They are definitely tracking it. They do care. Yeah. And all that really means, I think, in context, is that if you've been at this for a long time and you have an old website, you have an advantage. Yeah, that's it really.
Which has always felt again, it's always felt like that's the case.
Well, a lot of the times I think you can see that, you know, if you if you go and Google something, you know, that's quite sort of niche and specialist, occasionally you will see a website that doesn't look very SEO friendly. You know, it's not a nice website. It's not very well laid out. It probably doesn't have many other websites pointing links to it, and it's still magically ranking at the top. And for the longest time, the only real explanation for that has been, oh, these guys have been around since, you know, God was in short pants. And, and that is probably true. You know, there's still sort of a waiting for that because.
There's been a whole industry built around buying up old websites that have got domain names that were registered back in nineteen hundred and Oatcake and using those in order to like use that credibility. Similarly, people.
Just straight redirect.
And redirect them. Well, redirect to them is not going to do much, much good if you actually have some content on them that links to your content, then that might be a better, better outcome.
Yeah, again, a valid tactic. But I think the main takeaway is, you know, if you've been around for a while, you have an old website, you have a slight advantage, but it doesn't necessarily mean if you launch a brand new website, you can't rank. No, it just means, you know, you've got a slightly bigger uphill battle than you might have thought. Mhm. Um, so yeah, I don't really think it changes that.
How can we put this into context for, you know, CMOs, chief marketing officers, business owners, that kind of thing? I mean, let's, you know, because, you know, this, this isn't a podcast for, for SEO specialist or anything else. What, how can we sort of frame this, um, in a way, uh, are we, are we saying that, um, if, for example, you are getting advice and people are saying Google have said X, Y, and z, take it with a pinch of salt. Don't assume if Google says we don't measure X, that they don't measure x, which broadly speaking, you could translate as make a website that, all things being equal, deserves to appear in a search result when somebody types a certain search term in. And if you do that, then again, all things being equal, yeah, you should get some traction and get those people on your website that you want to be on your website and generate leads.
I think so roughly. Yeah. I mean, I think you yeah, I think we'll get there. There's a couple more things in that vein to sort of cover off. But yes, by and large, and I think certainly with the domain age thing, what that does for me is it says that, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, you know, your website's crap, your brand's wrong, you know, scrap it all and start again. Maybe that's, maybe that's a less desirable tactic than it was a few weeks ago. You know, maybe there's a slightly bigger sort of consideration around, well, actually, this domain has been around for quite a long time, and this brand has existed for quite a while, so we may well find it much harder to rank our brand new brand than than we did before.
Although you should be able to pass all of the authority and age related goodness from one domain to another in theory.
In theory to do that in theory.
Google even gives you tools to do it. Are you moving your website to a new domain? Tell us about it, and then we'll make sure that we do everything in the background to mean that you don't lose all your, um, all your search traffic.
Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, it just means, like I say, it's probably like a slightly more difficult decision than it was a while ago. Yeah. But yeah, the other things really are in the vein of what you were talking about, which is they've Google again has always said it doesn't doesn't track user signals like dwell time, time on page, all of that stuff they do. And there's stuff in there to help them track that. And people think they're doing that through Chrome, which is obviously their browser. Um, and again, this is one of those things where everybody in the SEO community is sort of like, oh, you know, they've lied to us. It's all been a scam, but all it really means, if you think about it, is you actually have to create content that keeps people on your website. That's that's it really. If you create good content that people want to read, then you know, your dwell time and your time on page and stuff will increase and Google will rank you higher. I mean, it's.
This argument has resurrected itself because like talking about bounce rates and talking about the amount of time somebody who's been on Google and gets and clicks a link to your website, stays on your website is something that Google is measuring in order to figure out whether that is they should send people to your website. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. It was hard to see, hard to, to, to contemplate how that wouldn't be useful as part of the ranking algorithm. If, um, if indeed Google could accurately measure it.
Well, especially when we know, like for PPC, for example, they track all of this stuff because Google will regularly exclude what are called bad clicks from PPC and that if somebody comes to your website and.
We know they.
Don't, but.
To our expense.
It's hit and miss with everything that we will do, and it's hit and miss. But they do exclude people who come to your website and only spend half a second on there, or do something that looks unnatural. And, and that means that they're already tracking all of that information. And if you were tracking all of that information, why on earth wouldn't you use it to make sure that, you know, good experiences end up at the top of search results? It's relatively simple stuff.
Kind of makes.
Sense. And the last one really is just around the whole e e t thing, e e a t e eat as we refer to it. It's like expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and whatever the new one is, experience or something like that. You know, for the longest time, every time Google have said something about how to rank better or how to recover from an algorithm update or something like that, it's been like, oh, pay attention to this because this is what we care about. And there isn't really a mechanism in the leaked ranking factors to show how they would possibly measure that. The only thing there is, is a sort of like authors as an entity, and how often and whether they're related to the content and how often they talk about similar things is considered. Um, so again, that's probably like if you have a blog, make sure that your name is attached to it. And if you do any sort of guest blogging, make sure that it's all in your name and that sort of like try and build your brand online, I guess is the, the key takeaway there. But no, I mean, really the sort of sum total of it for me, I guess if you were sort of talking to a CMO about it would just be that really, you know, I guess Google have lied a little bit about how they track and measure things, but really what they want is for you to create really engaging content that people like. And although they can't measure that exactly, everything they do measure is sort of like built around the assumption that people writing good content will be able to get users to do things like spend extra time on the page, or that their content will be linked to frequently. And therefore, really the advice is just do the right thing, create good content online and okay, maybe Google won't measure it in exactly the way that they're claiming to, but they still do have a rough idea of whether or not that's all working as it should.
I mean, if you go right back to basics, um, what Google want is, and I find it almost a bit distasteful sometimes talking about what Google wants and pleasing Google, you know, Google is a multibillion dollar business. Um, but it was built on the back of making, making people's individual websites, their pages that are just on a web server somewhere accessible, findable by anybody, anywhere, so that, you know, they set out with this noble, uh, cause to pursue this noble cause. And obviously I've found many ways, excuse me in many ways to monetise it, which is great. Um, so I think going back to first principles, so in, you know, what Google want to do is give people who use its service a good experience. And that good experience is I have this problem typed into Google. Google says these people appear to have the solution. If you kept clicking links as as does happen in search results and you go, well, that wasn't helpful. Well, that wasn't helpful. Well, that wasn't helpful. People will stop using Google, and if they stop using Google, then Google doesn't make revenue, doesn't make money from the paid search results, and doesn't get the exposure so that people like us buy Google workspace for our, you know, for our shared drives and our, and our office software and everything.
Else doesn't get however many billions of dollars it makes a day in ad traffic.
Well, that's right, that's what I mean. I mean, you know, the, the, the space that they own that they put in front of people because people readily come to it is, is valuable. And so the reason that they're doing all of this stuff is they don't want the search results to effectively become garbage. Just like, as I've said already, you know, you'll go and do some searches and the results genuinely are garbage. They're totally not helpful. They're not what you were looking for. Google got it completely wrong or it was the best it could do. And that was that fell short of your expectations. So, you know, I just think bearing that in mind. So, you know, I've often said if you keep if you create a site that genuinely is a fantastic resource for whatever niche you're in and is useful, the chances are on balance that eventually it will, you know, it will appear in search results. You will get traffic, you will generate leads. You will help your business to grow.
Yeah. And you know, you rightly point out that this isn't a podcast for SEO specialists. If there were SEO specialists listening to this, I think one of the key things they'd say is, oh, but you know, you're talking about eventually you're talking about doing this very virtuous white hat thing and it's not going to pay off for ages. And, you know, you could just take all of these shortcuts. But, but I think ultimately the key here is as well in all of these ranking factors that have been linked is that Google are looking at long term, what you're doing. They're looking at the history of your domain. They're looking at what you've talked about, what you're sort of, um, experience and expertise in a certain field are based on how often you write about certain subjects and you can't really afford, if you're in it for the long haul, to not just do the right thing. And it may take time and it may not work, and you may find that you're outranked for a few months by somebody who is just like spinning three hundred words of AI generated copy and then pointing a load of cheap backlinks at it. And that will happen. But, you know, long term, you actually can't can't sort of get down on that level and do those things because it will hurt you.
Tedious, isn't it?
Yeah. Well, it's frustrating, but I think that's, that's something that most.
The other thing I bear in mind when it comes to your website, I mean an ideal. In an ideal world, people find you in an organic search result that didn't cost you anything, although it did cost you money to create the content, create the website, and be in a position to rank for a certain search.
Yeah, we can do a whole different podcast about how stupid.
But that's not the point I'm making is if. If organic search doesn't work, you'd still want people finding your website via TikTok, via YouTube, via paid search, via LinkedIn ads, via LinkedIn post, you'd still want them to land on a site that's like, oh, these guys look like they could solve this problem. I've got. Therefore, I'm going to make contact with them.
Yeah. And again, in a weird way, this just ties back into the fact that, you know, in these ranking factors, they talk about brand a lot. As you know, as an entity. How is your brand perceived and how frequently is it talked about elsewhere on the internet? And I think, again, this just goes back to this idea that actually your Google search rankings will probably improve if you invest time in doing other things, you know, elsewhere on the internet. And, you know, that is really what you want to do is sort of spread, you know, sort of hedge your bets and be on like, say TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all those places have a presence, be doing things and generating interest because it does all sort of feed in and. Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. So yeah, main takeaways and some of the stuff that Google's been saying was not true. Um, there are things that it told you not to do that you, if you do, they will possibly help you appear more in search. Um, and there are things that they've been measuring that they said they weren't measuring. So yeah, for all, all the stuff we've, we've covered now, but but you know, the biggest takeaway is if you are working towards building a genuinely great resource online, then nothing to worry about.
Yeah, absolutely.
You might get usurped by people who are playing games and gaming the system and everything else. That's always going to be the case. Don't worry about it. Just do what you're doing and, you know, don't do what you're doing if it's not bringing in results. But like we were talking about this before we started recording, I mean, we, we've kind of followed that this is what we should be doing mantra. The stuff we do for customers, we do for ourselves and not every day, but nearly every day we get an enquiry, you know, so we generate the majority of our business from like people finding us in Google referrals and some, you know, occasional networking stuff.
I think we, we honestly generate all of our business like that. And, you know, we're not the biggest.
It's not quite all we do get some stuff from networking and referrals.
We do. Yeah. But, but you know, by and large, we're not the biggest agency in the world, but we sustain the entirety of this agency on the back of sort of our organic or paid search rankings. So yeah, it does absolutely work. You just have to be persistent. Okay.
Good. Well, that was, um, mildly interesting to, uh, one or two people, um, one or two of the ten people who actually listened to the podcast. What about, um, anything else you want to discuss? Um, particularly not related to that. Have you got any, any other subjects that you wanted to chat about?
Um, well, the only, uh, there's that thing I was talking to you about before in the office about.
Well, I've written, if it's what I'm thinking about, what I wrote down is like why it's important to help your agency to become invested in your business. And I think it is, and I don't mean you have to pander to your agency.
Which is sort of how it sounds. We did, you know, you know, this isn't a sort of like, oh, pick, pick us and make us feel included or we'll get you, we'll get unhappy and go elsewhere.
There's two ways of looking at agencies. You can look at agencies as a bunch of people who, in Leslie's case, can shoot video and do post-production and produce great videos, or in my case, uh, God knows.
What can you do?
Nothing. Not really much. Or in your case, write some good content or Indiana's case design something and you can think of it as a transactional relationship where I need something designing, I need something writing. I've got a technical challenge and you can do that. And that's, that's I say that's fine because it might be fine. But if you, if you actually find the right agency, you will find that they are genuinely invested in your business, or rather, they genuinely want to become invested in your business to help you grow your brand, to help you tell great stories. Because if your business prospers, then the agency prospers because they're helping you. So, but it's not just about the fact that helping you as an as a business prosper helps the agency prosper financially. The work itself becomes way more rewarding when you're working closely with people. Business owners, chief marketing officers, you know, so so I guess what we're trying to say is, and we can just have a little chat around it is think of an agency as a partner. We've said this before, not as a vendor. Yeah. Some organisations are vendors. The person, the company that makes sure the coffee machine works. You know, the vending machine? Uh, they're vendors.
Oh, you don't know if you ask them for their strategic advice. They might do. Yeah, you could do.
But basically, you know, make sure that hop is full of beans. Make sure that the water is connected. Make sure my staff can get a nice cup of coffee whenever they want one. It's a transactional relationship, you know, but it's not the same with agencies. And you'll get way more out of an agency if you recognise.
Well, that's that's the thing, isn't it? So I guess just to get a bit specific, this all came about because we were having an internal discussion and we were sort of comparing two clients.
In your head.
In my head? Yeah, absolutely. The voices and I, um, the voice, the voices and I, um, we were having this discussion about two, two different clients, and one of them has historically treated us. They're an engineering company. Um, all engineering companies are like this in my eyes. I know you like what? I'm allowed to say these things. No, it's it's it's not really a, um, a sector thing. It's just that this client in particular, they see it as quite a transactional relationship. They come to us with a strategy and they ask us to do the work. And the work is relatively fulfilling. It's rewarding, but it's not. It's not like we don't get to do our best work for them. We just do what they ask us to do, and that's fine. But there is another client who recently decided to split their brand into two, and they came to us and they said, we're thinking of doing this thing. What's your input on it? And because they came to us with that question, we managed to, you know, go away, look at some data, look at what the sort of feasibility of doing that was, look at what that would look like in terms of if they split their brand in two. Is there a big enough market for the second brand? Can we sort of get them ranking for relevant search terms? Can we make it work? And we said yes, and this is how we'd advise doing it. And then what came off the back of that was a load of really interesting, really engaging work for everybody. That made the whole project better, both for us and the client. And it really is just about that slight difference in approach. It's like if you go to your, your agency and you treat them as somebody who can help you solve problems, they will.
Yeah.
And if you go to them with, you know, you've already put the effort into solving the problem and now you're going to ask them to do the grunt work. They will do that, but it might not be as good as if you'd ask them to help you solve the problem in the first place, I guess.
Mhm. Is there a danger that there are people who set themselves up as consultants and the consultants put. The consultant's job is to work with you closely to figure out what you need to do, and then hire an agency to do it. Transactional relationship with an agency to do it. Is there a danger that agencies like us and plenty of other agencies like us, not. We're not unique in this respect. Um, will provide their best work if they are also the consultants. If you go to them and say, this is the problem, the example you just gave, this is the problem that we're trying to solve. And is this something that you can help us with? And you're not going to do that. If you think of your agency as a web design team, you're only going to use them in a transactional way, like design this new page, add this piece of technical functionality to the website, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah. I think there is a certain type of person that assumes that because people like us in the agency space don't have sort of domain knowledge about the industry that we're creating the website for that. Therefore, sorry, that therefore we don't have useful sort of experience to bring to the table. I think the thing to remember is that your agency work day in, day out, working out how to, you know, sort of cut through the noise in a, in a busy online space, how to position things in a way that resonates with people. And, you know, you sort of ignore all of that expertise at your own risk, I think. And that's not to sort of say like agencies are magical, agencies know everything. But it's just that, you know, if you, like you say, if you go to your agency and you say, oh, these are people that design web pages. So just design a web page that looks a bit like this and has these things. And I've already made all of these key decisions. You just completely sort of ignoring all of that experience, which will change your plan. It will be difficult maybe to, to hear somebody say, well, I don't think that'll actually work in an online space or that's not going to resonate with your audience. But I think those are the conversations that you should have really.
But if we, for example, analyse a market for a particular customer, we analyse the market, we devour the content that's available that they provide about their product services, expertise. You know, if we, we do all that, I mean, by osmosis, we are learning lots. So, you know, for example, right now, if a, if a company in Aberdeen came along and they were, um, specialist with downhole tools specialist, for example, they might think, well, you know, I'll get a web company into design as a nice web page. They won't have a clue about what we do because what we do is, like, really clever. Yeah. Whereas like in actual fact, you know, we've done it plenty of times with other businesses. We understand exactly what your business does. We might not be able to sit down with, with AutoCAD and, and design the tool for you because that's your area of expertise. But we know exactly what it is that you do. We understand it. We work with other companies who do the same. And we've worked with companies who don't do what you do, but have a similar problem to the one you need to solve. And we know how we solved it for them. And the, the nice thing about agency life is the variety. Yeah. You know, and you're tapping into that if you work with an agency as a partner as opposed to an agency as a vendor.
Yeah. And it's exactly like you say as well, like with the downhole tools example, you know, you can go and look on Google and we would have to, as part of the research part of that project, everybody else ranking for those search terms, everyone else who's, who's putting themselves out there and how they're positioning themselves and what they're saying. And by the time you've done that exercise, you may not know everything about downhole tools, but you do know everything about how they're pitched online and how you sell them to people and what things people care about and what you know, what the features and, you know, so by the end of that exercise, you sort of are a subject. I think that's sort of our job is to become subject matter experts quite quickly in a variety of different fields. And I think a lot of people maybe think, oh, you know, my agency is full of idiots. I'll have to explain everything to. And the reality is that they, you know, they may not know everything you know about the tool, but they do know everything about how to sort of sell it and get it over the line.
That's right. In an ideal world, all businesses, no matter what size, would have a chief communications or chief marketing officer who knew the business inside out, knew the products and services inside out, knew the market inside out and lived and breathed that business and how to get the message out there and find new business, find new customers. And that is what agencies do. Yeah. You know, agencies actually do that for, um, for the businesses. Yeah.
However many retainers.
They.
Work with, they're looking after you.
Yeah, that's exactly what they do. And it's, you know, it's a very cost effective way of having somebody genuinely invested in your business and looking out for you and trying to do what's right for the business. And if, again, if you go back to this partnership relationship, um, you know, you get way more value and you will also better understand where, where, you know, the retainer money or the fees, the project fees, you know, where they're going, I suppose.
Absolutely. I think what you don't want is an agency that's just turning the handle and producing what you tell them to, because you've told them to do it, you know, push back questioning decisions. Being involved in the planning is, is sort of how you get value out of a retainer. I don't really think you're getting much value out of a retainer. If you're just saying, write me six pages of copy about these subjects, you know, off you go. I think that sort of the top level strategy and the why of it is where you get the real value.
Just got a fiver. That's all you.
Want. Yeah. I'll just employ somebody internally. Just employ like somebody fresh out of uni to, to, you know, that you can mold and turn into a copywriter. It's not it's not that difficult to do. It's just sort of a bit pointless, really. Good.
Okay. Um, okay. Main takeaway from that. Like if you're going to work with an agency, go into the relationship thinking these guys will be able to provide strategic input and help me grow my business. Um, as opposed to their, uh, they are capable of designing web pages, writing copy writing computer code.
Yeah. It's not about the tactics, is it? I think that's the that's the key thing really. Agencies don't provide. They do provide. Yeah.
They do. They do the tactical stuff. That's right.
That's not what you want them for.
Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Okay. Uh, there was one last sort of mini mini subject, uh, to talk about. It's come up a little bit, uh, in the last week or so with us. Um, we are currently onboarding quite a large client, uh, into the HubSpot ecosystem. Now HubSpot is a platform or group of platforms hubs like the content Hub and the and the CRM, the content and customer relationship management system, etc. but you can use bits of it. For example, you can use just the bit to build your website, for example.
It is very confusing. Listening to you explain that makes me realise that they've done a terrible job of well, yeah.
The what, you know, for example, up until what, February of this year, our website was on one platform, yet we used a customer relationship management system system and a marketing automation system, which was in HubSpot, another platform. Now our website is also on the HubSpot platform. Um, but platforms like HubSpot and, you know, Webflow and Wix and Squarespace and all that. They are, they are SaaS platform software as a service platforms where your website lives and is backed up and the software you use to write new pages, etc. it's all. You log into a website and just do it all. It's that kind of environment. And we talked about this quite recently. Um, and on the face of it, stuff looks quite expensive. Yeah. I mean, for example, if you just want to build a website in HubSpot, there are some cheap options, which I think are a couple of hundred quid a year. If you just want a sort of twenty five thirty page website. It's fine for two hundred quid a year. You've got a SaaS platform. That makes absolute sense. Yes. From a cost perspective and every other perspective, if you want a small website, you don't have to worry about software updates, servers, backups, having somebody there. If the website goes down, you don't do any of that because it's all included in the trivial price that you pay two hundred odd quid a year. The next stage up, the sort of more advanced version of that is like three hundred and fifty quid a month. So suddenly you've gone from two hundred quid a year to three hundred and fifty quid a month. It's really just a loss lead project, um product. And in Hubspot's case. So once you get to sort of paying, let's just say three hundred pounds a month for somewhere for your website to live, well, that sounds expensive compared to WordPress, for example, which is free. You need a server, which you can get for thirty quid a month or something, or less.
Less or more.
But you know, let's just say thirty quid a month gets you a server. Nothing a month gets you WordPress. Yeah. Uh, well, that's way cheaper than three hundred quid a month. But if you start thinking about like making sure the websites are always there, having support, if you wanted to pay somebody to make sure that your, if your website was important, it's not just one of those little twenty thirty page brochure sites. It's actually important that it's there. If it goes down, your phone will immediately start ringing saying, hey, your website's gone down. This is we need your website to not go down sort of thing. Then things become massively more expensive because even just paying somebody fresh out of uni to sit there is going to cost a lot of money. So I guess like the thing about these SaaS platforms and we're fans, we're happy using any platform. And we certainly.
And we.
Do plenty of customers.
Who are.
Not in a SaaS.
Platform.
But trying to compare the cost of a HubSpot website, for example, with the cost of a WordPress website, just when you're talking just about the tech and doesn't seem to add up, but it does. If you think like twenty four over seven, somebody is making sure your website is there. And if something happens and you happen to like be up at three o'clock in the morning, you go, oh, my website's not there. Someone will say, yeah, we're on it. Don't worry about it. That's not going to happen. Um, nine times out of ten anyway, if you've got like a self-hosted website. So I think these platforms are going to become more prevalent. I think they are worth considering if you're currently looking at redeveloping your website, I think looking at looking at these SaaS platforms where you don't have to worry about hosting and backups and support and everything else is something that you should do.
It's really interesting because I was actually weirdly this morning, um, watching an argument unfold on one of the marketing subreddits, uh, which, you know, I love to sort of hover about on Reddit and laugh at people, but they were talking about exactly this and they weren't talking about it in the sense of like, um, SaaS versus normal hosting. They were talking about it in terms of like managed hosting versus just like paying something like fasthosts or whatever, you know, eight pounds a month. And it was a really interesting conversation in there where somebody was just saying, like, I've been doing all this research, I'm setting up an e-commerce website. Like, why on earth would I pay more than like two pounds a month? Because that's what I can get it for on Fasthosts. And, you know, there was all the usual stuff in the comments where people were like, yeah, it's just a rip off. Like, yeah, you don't want to touch any of that. And then somebody just commented to say, like, have you ever actually tried running a business on like free or cheap hosting? Like it's an absolutely terrible experience and you will lose thousands of pounds when your website goes down for the first time and you can't get it back up. And it's just like really interesting those discussions because yeah, I think if you go on the internet and you look for like, how much should hosting cost? Everyone will tell you like it should cost fifty p a day or fifty p a month or whatever, you know, it should be really cheap. It's nothing. You just buying space on a server. But the bit they miss is that not having support can cost you an absolute fortune.
It really it's not a problem until it is.
And that's the thing. The worst thing that could happen is you wake up one morning, your website has gone down and you don't know why. And like fast hosts, online chat, like they're not gonna care. You know, it's that whole thing, isn't it? It's like car insurance or like breakdown cover. It's like you don't care about it until you really need it. And then you wish you'd, you'd got the best you could buy. So yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of those things where you just have to do the, the sensible thing and sort of insure yourself by getting decent. And I think SaaS, the brilliance of something like HubSpot is that their reputation hinges on their ability to be able to deliver and keep your website up and fix problems quickly so they will move heaven and earth. If something goes down, they will fix it for you just because otherwise they sort of lose business in the long run.
So yeah, I mean, they're not infallible. They've got a situation with HubSpot just now where a client has bought HubSpot marketing marketing's hub. Mhm. And for some reason they can't log into it. And because we're the associated partner, HubSpot said, get your partner to log in and reactivate your account. And then when we log in, it's telling us we're not admins, so we can't do it. And I told them this, I told HubSpot this, and they said, oh, you need to get the client to log in and make you an admin. It's like, Jesus Christ, you know, it's like, we can't make them an admin and they can't get in at all. Could you please read the message that we've sent to you and understand it before you give us some stock nonsense answer. Um, and so, you know, they're all like, yeah, they'll all annoy you at some point. Uh, and yeah, some people might say, well, what happens if for some reason HubSpot went bust and their infrastructure got turned off because their infrastructure will be costing millions. Squillions. Yeah.
Well, it's like Google building data farms.
It's going to be it's going to be so expensive. And so if something happened to HubSpot, you know, the auditors would go, oh, right click, better turn that off because that's, that's costing us a million quid a day or something. So we need to get rid of that right now. Sort of thing. And you and your and your website disappears. Chances are, you know.
Everything has.
A vanishingly small chance that that's going to happen. Um, and, you know, there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with, with a self-hosted solution, but I think if I had to really sum it up, um, like having a SaaS solution means you can just get on with the important stuff like producing great content, making sure your website is working hard for you. And you don't have to think even for a nanosecond about, does our hosting need to be updated? Is the website getting backed up and all the rest of it? Even if you are paying, you know someone like us to do all that for you. I mean, we're not here twenty four over seven.
No. So no. Yeah. Stress free. And ultimately, I think that's the thing when you're trying to actually make money online, isn't it? You want to be focused on that rather than.
So for us, I mean, the ones to look at would be HubSpot, web flow, squarespace, Wix. And I think there are loads of others, but they're like, they're kind of the the bigger ones that I can think of. Yeah. Um, and they're, you know, sometimes you need to do something very specific and you need, you need to be able to be, you know, at a, at a server level, you need access to your website at a server level to do things. You know, if that's the case, stick that fancy bit on a subdomain and do it with it with a piece of with a server that you've got access to, you know, you can do stuff at the command line and you can write lines of code and everything else. But if it's just, you know, an informational website that's there to generate leads for you, then line of least resistance, use a tool where you don't have to worry about any of that stuff anyway. All right. Well, that was pretty much dull as dishwater. Did you enjoy any of it? Yeah, I did. Did you enjoy any of it? No you didn't. She has to say that she's happy because she's going on holiday.
Contractually obliged. Contractually obliged.
Okay. You've been listening to Dave Robinson and Alex Bussey on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. We promised to make the next one more interesting.