Why Engineering Websites Fail, Schema Myths Debunked & Navigating Zero-Click – Episode 175

Nobody is going to sign a six figure engineering contract based on an AI overview. No, they want to speak to somebody. They want to kind of have a conversation and figure stuff out and get in touch with

What is a bulb Thingamajiggy. What's it? You know, if you're at that stage, you're not at the stage when you're ready to buy anything.

Yeah. If you need a heat exchanger built. The AI Overview is not not going to build it for you. It's not going to solve your problem. I mean I'm I'm being silly. But you know, the bottom line is there's still queries that are coming out there which are high intent.

Yeah. People actually need somebody to help them to do something rather than need somebody to help them answer a question.

Yeah. So, you know, basically figuring out the kind of content which you need to produce, which is generally around, you know, case studies, stuff with technical depth is what's going to potentially get the click through ultimately, because it's going in depth into an answer that the AI overview is not going to do. Okay. Welcome to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And, um, we've had a bit of a break because Julie waltzed off to be part of the Tartan Army in Boston.

Well, not official Tartan Army just to hang her on her in Boston, which was still a lot of fun.

I'm sure it was a huge amount of fun. Yeah. And, um, went to a tea party while you were there, did you?

No tea was consumed, just Tennents.

You're just ruining the podcast, you're talking louder and it's going ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Just I told you you'd get more animated.

Just Tennents. I'm talking about the beer.

Yeah. There is a real danger because of jet lag that um, Julie might fall asleep during this and it will not be a reflection of what I'm talking about or my voice or anything else remotely.

No, no, entirely. The jet lag.

Just the jet lag.

Yeah. Not the content matter.

Yeah. And how was it traveling with a toddler? Um, well.

It wasn't as.

Bad as I test your husband.

My husband who. Yeah. Is, um, is always hard work, but. No, no, he behaved quite well. And his suitcase got left and he threw. And we were in Boston.

And he never mentioned that. When I played golf with him on Friday.

He took it very.

Well, did he?

Yeah. And we were tired. I mean, it was like, you know, like three in the morning in our brains. And he got to Boston with no suitcase. But, um, customer service lesson basically British Airways clocked it before we did and they were really proactive about it. They announced his name. So we kind of knew that there was something going on with the suitcase. Either it was broken or lost. So we were sort of aware and prepared. And then this guy was amazing and he was so lovely. And he explained what to do and was really apologetic and told us, give us all the information. So he couldn't really have a meltdown because they handled it really, really well.

But you know, you think in business in general, it's a really good point you make. It's it's everybody cox things up, everybody screws up. But it's the way that you take ownership of something is the difference one hundred percent.

And um, it was fine. And what I mean they explained to him, they said, look, you'll have to go shopping. If you need clothes, go buy clothes, send the receipts in. British Airways will pay for it. Yeah, well, the only thing was that like the first morning on holiday, we had to go to a great big shopping mall instead of doing something fun.

Yeah. Did the case arrive?

It came. It came the following day. Yeah. So we only need, like.

By which time he'd bought three pure wool Armani suits, which he would need for the football. Yeah.

No. He was he was pretty restrained, but he did have to go and buy some stuff.

Yeah.

But apart from that, no, everything was fine. My suitcase got, um, bashed on the way back again.

You weren't with British Airways, were you?

American.

American Airlines.

American to Heathrow and British Airways to Aberdeen. So we don't know.

Who.

Dropped it on the on its.

Own American Airlines.

So anyway somebody hopefully is going to replace my suitcase. So apart from the suitcase struggles, um, everything else was great. The the trains in America were really good. All the hotels were The bars were great, apart from the fact that they kept running out of beer.

Yeah, I did see things on the news that the Army had drunk the pubs.

three o'clock in the afternoon in our hotel bar the day of the match. Um, we asked for a Corona and they were like, oh, sorry, we've run out of Corona. We're like, what else have you got? We've got one of this like really horrible local beer. That's what we've got left. And this is the last one and you can have it. And after that, there is no beer left in the bar at three o'clock in the afternoon. Wow. But yeah, apart from that.

Drunk the place dry.

I was drinking lemonade at that point. I was like pacing myself.

And got a lemonade, actually, before we started recording, I think.

Yeah. It's that sort of day, isn't it?

Yeah. It is really.

But yes.

Um. All right. So, um, there's the preamble done, which was good. Um, I've just been out in Magnus's car. He took me out in his nineteen sixty seven MGB roadster.

Same age as me.

Well, yeah, there you go. I was there, I suppose, when it was built, when it when it came into being, it was good fun. Smelt like a car, you know. You could smell a vague smell of petrol. You get with old cars. It was nice and he let me drive it back as well. We drove it down to dinner and then I drove it back. It was lovely. There's a speed camera down there, by the way.

Was that okay? That's my way home. So. Yeah. I will be careful. Yeah.

Um. Okay. You said you've got some things, and I've got some things which are mildly interesting.

I think mine are probably not interesting, but.

Well, if they're not, I'll just veto them.

GDPR not interesting, but also important, I know.

Much misunderstood.

Yeah I know.

Are you gonna tell us how people misunderstand it? Or are you.

Gonna.

Tell us just how they've now changed it again?

They've changed it again.

Okay. Um, does it mean now.

There's new rules about complaint handling? So we need to all update our privacy policies as of last week, technically. Um, you need a complaint handling procedure in case somebody complains about their data being held by you. Okay. And you need a specific explanation of how they can complain. You're in the privacy policy. You already have a you know how to, um, get more information or how to get your, you know, talk about your data, but you need a specific, if you have a complaint, you have to email this person. So we're all going to have to add a complaint detail to our privacy policy.

And as with most things in life, these rules, these additional rules are brought in, uh, because, um, I was just looking at something because we were moving different sockets. I was thinking, oh my God, are we not recording this? But we are. Um, these rules are brought in because of bad actors. Primarily people do something bad and so everybody else has to get penalised or has to spend time not earning, earning their money and running their business. But dealing with this bureaucracy.

I don't know what the background to it is, but obviously somebody tried to complain and hasn't been able to complain. And now everybody has to make it easy to complain.

Yeah.

I do wonder how many people actually complain about their data. I mean, it's I had people get in touch saying, please remove me from your database and stuff. That's fine. No problem. But actually complaining, I don't know.

People with too much time on their hands. Yeah. People who've got jobs where they've sat bored think I know what I'll do? I'll complain about something. Yeah, probably. I don't know.

Yeah. Um, a very angry people who are angry about something else but want to find a way of venting their anger on someone.

Yes, that's usually the case when people are angry, isn't it? It's usually it's usually something else that's causing it. Like a bad game of golf or something.

Probably. Yeah. Um, also the legitimate interest, you know, when you, you know, you have to put in your reasons for being able to email this person legitimate interest, direct marketing is now a legitimate interest if it's B2B, which it kind of was before, but it's kind of more explicit.

As in this person would potentially use my product or service so I can legitimately contact them.

Yeah. If it's B to B, which you kind of thought you always could, because if it's B to B and it's not a personal email address, you could you don't need consent. But it's kind of been it's kind of explicitly said that direct marketing doesn't need prior consent because it was slightly confusing before.

Because hasn't one of the biggest pain in the asses of, of, of GDPR has been the way it's been misinterpreted? Yeah, it's been used as, oh, I can't possibly do that.

GDPR and it's nothing to do with it.

It's got nothing to do with GDPR. I mean, let me let me give an idiot eye view of GDPR means if you collect somebody's data, you can't just do what the hell you like with it and sell it to other people and spam them and do bad things with it. You've got to you've got to look after it. You've got to make sure it's safe. You've got to have a mechanism for them to be removed if they want to be removed. And you've got to not use it for what it wasn't intended to be used for when.

It was given. Yeah. You've got to be clear about why why you're collecting it. You've got to be up front that the fact that you're storing it actually the the emailing things is actually the p e c r it's the. I can't remember what that stands for. It's a slightly. It's a part of it. It's related. But the, um, the sort of who you can and can't email isn't.

Um.

Directly GDPR, but the two kind of got mushed together. Um, so the, the rules are slightly different, but GDPR is all about holding and processing people's data and being upfront about it.

Like most things, it was rolled out under a fanfare of so-called consultants telling everybody, you need to get this right or you're going to be fined millions of pounds. You know what I mean? Oh, the fines.

Have.

Gone up just slightly less than a million pounds. I can I can help you figure it all out and be compliant.

The fines have got bigger.

Yeah.

Or the amount you can be fined has gone up considerably. Um, but again.

What would you have to do to get fined a huge amount of money? You would what would you be, what would you have to do with somebody contact.

You'd have to be like throwing them out to the public willy nilly.

I don't know. Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

You'd have to be gathering them without telling people you were gathering them and then sharing them with the Russian mafia or something. I really don't know. It's.

Yeah. Yeah. All part of the way marketers have misused email marketers. Speaking about misusing email, you know, we're a B Corp. I might have mentioned that before.

No, no, never.

We, um, we got, I got an email this morning from another B Corp offering some sort of B Corp consultation about something B Corp.

Mhm. Sounds about.

Right. So B cops, you know, better, better corporations. It's, you know, better do business better and.

Ethical.

Ethical planet people. All the rest of it. Dear square brackets. First name close square brackets.

That's not unethical. It's just a little.

Stupid.

Bit. It's stupid. Messy.

And why wouldn't you test? Why wouldn't you look at that? I mean, the thing is, it was like saying, you know, your last chance to get a ten percent discount on our consultancy, blah, blah, blah. And it was sent to Deer square brackets first.

It's not that hard. It really isn't right.

That's right. Everyone's made mistakes sending out mailers. We've all done it. Yeah. You know, hence we now like. Right. Send a test. Check it. Oh, yeah. Do you get the preview text which you've forgotten about. All right. So the preview text. Oh look, it says dear first name.

It says last month's date. It says I've done on a regular.

Basis on it. Yeah. Quite often if you clone a newsletter, it's easy to easy to mess up.

You can do it in like in the body, but you forget it's in the like in the preview or something. Yeah, it's really easy to miss things like that, which is why you send a test and preferably send a test to someone else as well, because you can be kind of completely blind to it because you've been doing it. Our newsletter, I always send to Caron because she picks up and stuff and I'm like, I've seen it too much, I can't, I can't, I can't see it properly anymore.

I mean, I do, I've done it, I've done it with WhatsApp messages like it, you know? So we've got like WhatsApp messages for the fixed bridge action group and stuff like that. So some of it's not just like, look at this cat falling off a tree. It's like it's actually serious stuff. And I've done the message. It was like for one of them was for the next meeting. Yeah. So I went through, I went through it, went through it, went through it, sent it off. And they were like, hey, the seventeenth a Tuesday night on Monday. You know what I mean? It's like, it's so annoying when you're easily done, it's easily done. It's so annoying. It's, it's, and it's a bit dumb, but it's not quite as dumb as dear first name.

No it's not.

That's, that's just like they're all going in the bin. And she's like, I wonder why not? Nobody's responding. I responded to say like, we're good. Thank you. Don't need this service by the way. Yeah. Please check your email template. Wouldn't wouldn't have I had a thank you. No, not very ethical that is it. Not very be copy that.

No, no. If somebody did that you'd be like oh my God. Thank you so much for pointing that out.

That's right. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's not good. Um, back to the thrills of GDPR. Um, minor change to the cookie rules.

Oh go on.

Um, yeah. Talking of cooking. Now.

You've had an ice cream already?

Okay. I can't have a cookie. No, um, not till I eat my broccoli, I know. Um, if if you're just if the only data you're collecting is for analytics and it's not tracking any individual data, you don't need a cookie pop up bar. But if you're doing ads or attribution or any sort of targeting, you still need a cookie pop up bar.

All right. Okay. That makes sense.

Yeah. So they've they've downgraded the cookie bar slightly. Um, information Commissioner's office, the ICO has the sort of full blurb on that. It's like when you do and don't.

Need your data officer aren't you.

Data controller I think is what I called. But um, yeah, if you're, if you're only using analytics data just to count how many people have been on your website, basically, and there's no way of identifying people and it's nothing to do with ads, Ards. Then you don't need a cookie bar. I would say most people probably still should have one. Yeah. And if you're using ads, you have to have one because Google gets upset if you don't.

Mhm. Okay.

And so does, um, Microsoft and all the others.

Mhm. I do see, you know, sometimes I look at screen grabs of, um, visitors to our website and occasionally you'll see people clicking the no to the cookie thing, but most people just go, yeah, fine. Yeah. They click the, click the, the green button and it's all good.

Thing is that, um, make sure your cookie bar is actually blocking cookies until someone presses. Yes. Because some of them are there, but the cookies fire anyway. Yeah. Because they're not working properly or they're not very good. Um, there are um, potential like there's basically scammers out there, not scammers, but kind of scammers doing that thing. Like when you use a photo and people send you a thing saying you've used this photo and you shouldn't have, and you don't have a license and you have to prove it's license and you can't, then they can genuinely get a lot of money out of you. There's people doing that with cookie bars now saying your cookies are firing before, um, before the consent bar comes up and they're not getting blocked until after I click no. So the cookies are firing before you get the option to click yes or no. And people are sending letters saying, you know, your cookie bar's doing this and it's not working and your cookies are firing and they can get people can get a lot of money out of you.

Yeah.

So be careful.

People with too much time on their hands again. Yeah. Like you say, scammers really. It's like the, uh, we get occasional emails from the bounty hunters saying, I found this, this vulnerability on your website and I, you know, and, uh, and they actually tell you what it is. And then they say, you know, um, I expect a bounty of one Bitcoin or whatever, Whatever it needs to be. You know what I mean? It's, uh, I don't know. I don't know how successful that little ruse is, but yeah, it's an interesting one.

Yeah. It's just, uh, something to be careful.

Anyway, enough about that GDPR bullshit. Yes. Um. Zero. Click search.

Oh, yeah. I've got that on my list as well.

What have you got? Because I'm just really referring to, um, a blog post, uh, one of our more recent blog posts talking about zero click search and some stats. Sixty eight percent of Google searches ended without a click in the in early twenty twenty six, according to Sparktoro.

Oh yeah. So zero twenty three percent end in a click through. So that's the same.

Yeah, zero click rose from fifty six to sixty nine in roughly a year after AI overviews launched. That's according to SimilarWeb. And when an AI overview appears, organic clicks roughly half from fifteen percent to eight percent, which is pure research. And that's all in that blog post worth checking the blog post out.

Yeah, I think it must be the same research because I've got like it was a spark Toro thing. Twenty three percent of Google searches, only twenty three percent actually clicked through to our website. That isn't Google related.

Well, the thing is, I mean, what you know, what the blog post goes on to talk about is that, you know, the zero click search isn't necessarily a lost customer because I'm suggesting that most of the sixty eight percent is, is, is the fluff type searches. What is, you know, that kind of thing.

Overviews answering.

Yeah, the AI overview is answering it. Ultimately, you know, nobody is going to sign a six figure engineering contract contract based on an AI overview. No, they want to speak to somebody. They want they want to kind of have a conversation and figure stuff out and, and get in touch with.

Valve Thingamajiggy what's it, you know, you're not if you're, if you're at that stage, you're not at the stage when you're ready to buy anyway.

Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, what you've got to be careful of is you want to make sure that you are the source in AI quotes and that's, you know, a big thing. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in another subject later on in this in this podcast. Um, so getting cited by the AI engines is, is going to be, um, is definitely something which is on the rise. Keep chasing the high intent keywords, the ones that actually get clicked when they're actually looking for somebody to, I don't know, um, create some content for them or build them a website or build them a web app. You know, you're not going to be able to do that from an AI overview. You're going to have to actually have a conversation with somebody if you need a, um, you know, a heat exchanger built, the AI overview is not going to build it for you. It's not going to solve your problem. You know, I mean, I'm, I'm being silly, but, you know, the, the bottom line is there's still queries that are coming out that are in, out there, which are high intent.

Yeah. People actually need somebody to help them to do something rather than need somebody to help them answer a question.

Yeah. So, you know, basically figuring out the, the kind of content which you need to produce, which is generally around, you know, case studies, stuff with technical depth is what's going to potentially get the click through ultimately, because it's going in depth into an answer that the AI overview is not going to do. Yeah.

And also having a sort of recognisable brand and having being consistent everywhere on the web. So if you do get cited, you know, and the AI goes, yeah, these, these people, um, say that such and such, such and such, then somebody googles that name. It has to show you up, you know, it has to be consistent and it has to be recognisable. And people go, yeah, that is the one that, that they mentioned. And I'll now have a look.

Mhm. That's right. Yeah. What were you what were you going to say more or less the same? Was it just.

Percent of Google searches actually end up in a click through to a website. Um, two thirds of searches are zero click, which is the same, same data as you. Um, paid search, six percent of all searches end up in a paid click, apparently six percent.

Okay.

Mhm. They said that that's higher, but then they caveated that with the fact that the data from that they looked, they compared it with was a bit iffy. So they think it's gone up, but not entirely sure how much. But six percent seems quite a lot.

You think, okay.

I don't know.

You know, when you look at the way that, um, Google's quite happy to take the piss and show your advert for all the wrong people in order to get clicks and waste your budget like it did with us over the last couple of days. And, you know, I gave it sort of free rein, but fairly fairly decent, um, broad match keywords and the absolute garbage that it sent us is unbelievable. So, you know, like, okay, fine, straight back to phrase match and it's tightened it right up and suddenly the traffic stopped. But we were just right. We've spent maybe a hundred quid or something on clicks that we're never going to result in anything for us.

Keeps telling you, use broad match because we'll be able to match it to people who are the right people. You don't need to pin it right down. You know, you say what you want. We'll look at your landing page. We'll work out who you need, and we'll send you the right people. No it doesn't.

Yeah. That's right.

It's very annoying.

Okay. Um. Okay. I've done the subject. You did a subject. I've done a subject. Go on. I've got. I've got more, but.

Okay, I have one more.

All right. Well, go.

On. HubSpot gold, partner.

Oh, yeah. Which we're not going to be very soon.

Yeah. But I just, you know, do people out there, if you see like somebody who's a HubSpot partner and somebody who's HubSpot gold partner, you'd kind of think HubSpot gold partner, they must be better at HubSpot. Mhm. Wrong. Yeah. It's nothing to do with.

Aren't we just saying that because we're not going to be gold partners for much longer because we don't sell it enough.

It's because we don't sell it enough. HubSpot gold or platinum or anything else is purely to do with how many you sell. There's absolutely nothing to do with how long you've been a HubSpot partner, how many bits of HubSpot you can operate with.

How good retention.

Yeah, retention Reviews how good you are at it. It's absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It's purely to do with how much you sell. Yeah, and a little bit to do with how much a bit of retention. But you can't just retain clients. You've got to sell more as well. And you've got to be selling a fair amount to get gold. Now they've changed the rules. So you've got to sell a decent amount of HubSpot. And if you sell a lot of HubSpot, you're like platinum or elite or whatever, but you don't have to be any good at it necessarily.

You could be selling it, you could be good at it, you could be.

Good at it, but it doesn't mean you're good at the work you do.

So you're saying from a consumer's point of view, from a business purchaser's point of view, procurement point of view, be careful because it's not a badge of competence. It's a badge of ability to sell HubSpot.

One hundred percent. It isn't anything to do with.

What we would say that because we haven't been able to sell it well, we haven't been able to sell it. It's the wrong way of putting it. We will. We'll never sell it if it's not the right tool. And that's, and that's, that's why we're going to become we'll still be HubSpot partners, you know, as long as we you pay a certain amount for products, which we do.

Because we like the.

Product and we use it ourselves. And you pass the exams.

Which we just renewed, we've just redone, which.

Is fine. Then you'll be a HubSpot certified partner solutions partner, which I'm perfectly comfortable with.

And we've been.

I have no issue.

With.

Not being gold, bronze or platinum or whatever the hell it is. I mean, it'd be nice to be getting those commission checks. Yeah. But so what? I mean, you know, I'm quite happy. I don't know, I just I wonder if because at first I saw when I saw that email come through about the changes, I thought, oh, great, you're going to be like, if you're using it, selling it somewhat capable of implementing everything else, you'll be a HubSpot partner and that'll be it. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? But it's not. I mean, they're basically rewarding people who, who sell a lot of it. And as you rightly said, some of them will be fantastic at implementing it. There's no question about it. I'm not saying.

There's some equally you.

Could be a platinum partner, but actually you outsource it to I can't remember what they call that big HubSpot agency based in Brazil or somewhere. You know, the one. You know, there's like an agency, you can outsource all your HubSpot stuff to them if you want to. And you don't have to have, you don't have to have any of the skills in-house if that's important, I don't know.

Yeah. So it's, um, yeah, it's an interesting one. Yeah. But it's, um, it's possibly slightly misleading.

But you can, I think the danger and the reason maybe again, but you know, I would say that wouldn't I, the reason that we are slipping down the HubSpot tier system is that, you know, they'll, they'll even like today, I had an email from them more or less saying, oh, you know, you really need to go out and sell it or you're not going to be a gold partner anymore. It's like, what, you want me to go and just literally try and flog something at any, at any cost. Yeah. Just like to get yeah.

We don't have a sales team. We're not, we're not actively out there selling. We don't have like people on the road out there selling stuff. We do. So I mean, any selling of HubSpot that isn't kind of in line with what we want to do anyway is just time that we're not doing our our proper jobs. Really? Yeah. I mean, when our guys have been doing some amazing stuff with HubSpot recently.

Absolutely.

Amy was sitting there yesterday and she was like turning a form field in a form into a different kind of field and then making it a custom object so it could then feed into the website as a review. And I was like, that's really smart. You know, that's not like basic stuff. And then the website we've just been building for a company in Edinburgh. I mean, the, the template, we haven't even built the website. We're building a template so they can build it themselves. And the options, you know, you just press a button and it, and the whole like theme of the page will change from purple to green or blue, and you just have to press it. And it, it does everything in line with the branding. You can add bits and pieces or take them off. And I mean, it's really, really smart what our guys are doing. And you know, if it was, if it was rewards for, um, how smart you are with that. You know, we'd be doing all right. I mean, I can say that because it's nothing I do. I have no idea how they do it, but it's I think it's really, you know, not just basic building websites. It's really clever stuff.

Yeah. So the bottom line for me is I'm pretty relaxed about being HubSpot solutions partner, as in more than capable of doing stuff with HubSpot.

We've been doing it for ten years. We know what we're doing.

More than, yeah, yeah, it's more than ten now.

So yeah.

No issue with that at all. But anyway, speaking about websites, I'm referring now to another blog post from red evolution dot com slash blog. Why engineering websites don't generate leads. Obviously, we work with engineering and tech companies quite a bit, and we get asked to review websites and try and look at what's going on with websites. And I think in that space with, with some notable exceptions, um, you know, certainly some of our clients. Yeah. Um, the reasons the websites are not generating leads kind of comes down to a few things. Brochure style is still quite common with the engineering companies.

A lot of history and who we are and how we got there. Just not a lot about how they.

Product a product B, service A, service B, and, you know, maybe an odd case study buried somewhere, that kind of thing. Um, so brochure style websites and, and importantly, alongside the brochure style website, the messaging on it is about them and not about the customer. Yeah. And if you know, that's like the two key things, which in, in tech and engineering people are still getting wrong.

Or do you also the thing where it's like, it's not so much, it's about them. It's like you read the whole website and you still have no idea what they do.

Well, yeah, trying, you know, trying to be clever, clever, speak, clever, clever copyright, which isn't.

Global solutions for, um, yeah, worldwide teams or something like good. But what do you do.

Yeah. That's right. And I think this stuff is it's not difficult to fix. Um, and another one that's, that comes up and again, it's in the blog post, as I mentioned, is missing or buried trust signals. Yeah. I think, you know, if you think about it, when somebody's rocking up at your website, they want to know that you understand their world, their problem, and you can fix it. Um, they want you to have plenty of things like case studies to show you've already fixed it for other people. And, um, they want to know that you've got the various, you know, um, badges and shirts and things that are required. If you are what you say you are.

So a lot, a lot of the customers are going to get there through referrals. So they're, they're kind of going to have a vague idea that, you know, I've heard of these guys, I know they're in my field. Are they the real deal? You know, how good are they? They want to the reassurance because they've come. They're they're kind of like wanting to trust you, but they need to be sort of tipped over the edge in terms of, oh, God, yeah, these guys really do know what they're doing.

Yeah. Okay. Um, you know, the kind of, um, the kind of problems that we see over and over, uh, you know what we've just mentioned, um, you know, the brochure style, the messaging about you, not them missing or buried trust signals. And, you know, obviously if you're getting all that wrong, then by default, you're probably not showing up in search either. Yeah. You're not showing up in search. You're not showing up in search. You're not showing up in eye overviews. Um, and, you know, the upshot of that is, you know, you're missing out on opportunities. You're missing business opportunities.

Yeah. If you get a referral, you're not going to convince them enough to actually trust you to get enough to get in touch. And, um, if it's not a referral, they're never going to find you. Yeah. Because you're not, you're not going to show up because you're not, um, you've not got the right information that people are looking for. You're not answering the questions. But there's a there's a lot of that, you know, a lot of history and you know, how we got here.

And yeah, I think.

This is a picture of our office and here's a picture of our vans.

I notice on our own traffic that people, if they land on, say, website management or web development or HubSpot services or whatever, they'll quite often then hire, but quite often then they'll, they'll go on to, um, go to the about page.

But yeah.

You know, I've never heard of these guys, you know, where did they come from? Are they credible? All that sort of thing. I mean, we had that email in today from a company which was clearly a scam, wanting us to manage their PPC, yada yada. It was, it was, it was, it was a scam. It was almost word for word, like something else that came through from a different company. I don't know quite how the scam works, but it was, it looked like very much like a scam. So go to the website. There's no about there's no background, there's no history. There's nothing. Got a company's house. Can't find them on companies House. Yeah. Something's not right here. You know, something just doesn't gel. Yeah. Um.

And, but we're all quite suspicious now because there's so many of these things about that. Your first reaction is sort of like, is this a real company? And, and if anything just doesn't feel quite right, you're just going to back off.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Which again, you know, something that when you're thinking about engineering company websites again, you know, quite often the, some of the companies we work with have been somewhat reticent to put on team pages and talk about themselves.

Pictures of.

Other people in the background and the backstory and everything else, which which again, I think is I think it's more important than we realise.

I mean, there's ones that like it's all about the backstory.

Yeah.

Or there's ones that it's like, you know, about us page is basically a copy of the product page and the About us page really just like lists what products they do. And there's no pictures of anybody anywhere. Or maybe there's a picture of like the, the person that founded it standing in front of a building or something. But it doesn't make like that doesn't tell you like what size of a company is or if it's particularly, you know, capable.

Yeah. Okay. I think both of us this week stumbled across a story which was about schema.

Yes. And ducks. Yeah. The duck one. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So we brought I wrote a blog post, which really was a blog post about that blog post about the, I think it was search Engine Land. If you find the blog post on our website, it links to the original article. And the original research might have been. Yeah, yeah. Search engine journal. I think you might be right. Um, so basically like we've come, we've been around for a long time and, you know, we've been sort of at the sharp end of the, the whole SEO revolution, um, snake oil salesman cycle, if you like link building, yada, yada. So, uh, with SEO, there was always somebody that had figured out how to trick Google or do this. You know, I only built this website a week ago and it already ranks number one for car insurance and all that kind of bullshit. Um, so Seo's been through it and the latest thing obviously is E or, um, answer engine optimisation or GE or generative engine optimisation. So basically trying to create content or optimise your content. So it shows up when people carry out searches in perplexity or Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude essentially. And so some bright spark has decided or decided that the AI engines were very much using schema in order to, um, show search results.

Now schema just explains what. Let's come back to the entity thing. Everything has an entity and explains what things are.

Well, yeah, I.

Mean labels things.

Schema is effectively invisible cord that labels things on a page for machines so that machines can understand it. So a computer doesn't have to guess whether Apple is the fruit or the firm. That's a very simple way of looking at it. It's genuinely useful. Google uses it. Google Google's rich results and knowledge graph. The argument isn't about that. It's about whether schema is your route into, um, AI chatbots, and the experiment effectively debunks the idea that schema is the reason is worth doing purely to improve the way that your website, your website pages appear and perform in, in generative.

Search said that schema isn't the answer. But, but kind of labeling things kind of helps, but it doesn't have to be, you know.

Well, being.

Clear about things.

Schema done properly according to the schema rules is is good because it helps machines understand your content, which is great.

But the experiment, they did it still, it's still.

They use non-standard schema.

Still labeled it, but it wasn't standard schema.

It wasn't. And I think long story short, once, long story short, all that the engines were doing was reading it as text. Yeah. Because it wasn't, none of them turned around and said, wait a minute, this is this is invalid schema. They just read it and used the text.

It was clear what it was, but it wasn't labeled according to the rules of schema.

That's right. So, you know, for example, schema, we've been working on something today, like for a podcast, you know, you've got the entity type is podcast and then you've got attributes, which are, you know, the title, the file location, the duration, and various other things which help the machine understand. Ah, right. This is a page, this is a podcast page. It's got a transcription on it. It's got the, you know, a player, it's got the duration, I know the duration of the podcast and all the rest of it, and you're giving it.

Loads of.

Useful information.

Blog it can explain that it's a blog. You get author.

Breadcrumb schema, you get location. Yeah, you get local business schema. And all of this stuff is designed to use so that you can help Google et al to just understand the content. And we do it. We we've been adding schema, you know, increasingly, for example, if you add a frequently asked questions section to a blog post, you can put FAQ schema in there so that the, you know, any all of the engines can then go out. Right. This is FAQ.

There's a question.

There's an answer, and it knows exactly. And that's really helpful.

And most websites, things like author and blog and stuff that's put in automatically, you don't even have to do that. You know, HubSpot or WordPress or whoever.

That's yeah. That's right. HubSpot certainly does. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. But, um, I think, you know, without going into the detail, what I did with the blog post is I re, I wrote it in such a way that, you know, if the original article and the research was maybe slightly too geeky for you, it kind of explains it, you know, in a simpler way and gives obviously our take on it. Um, but the.

Bottom line is, do you think schema is useful or not?

It's definitely worth doing, but don't do it because you think it's going to give you a big boost in search. AI search. That's that seems to be the bottom line. However, what if one day it does, you know, and it's, it's a good idea to do it because it makes your content easier to for machines to understand it.

Yeah.

Lots of different machines in lots of different situations can understand it better. Yeah. So I'd say yes, do it. But if somebody's trying to sell you it and this is the point.

Yeah. Okay.

If somebody's saying to you, I can do your schema and that will make you appear in AI search, they.

May or may.

Not to the snake oil salesman in SEO type days.

Did they test it on like different engines or did they just do ChatGPT? I can't remember.

Um, I can't remember. I didn't think it was ChatGPT. I thought he tested it on perplexity or something like that.

Can't remember.

It certainly tested it on Google because the point he made if, if if this is being used, then the one company who would be using it extensively would be Google. Because Google's got Gemini AI, it's got the search results. It's got the local business listings. If it was all tied up and it was working beautifully, you wouldn't get, for example, a situation where the AI was pointing the guy at a. I can't remember if it was a Lexus car dealership in Dover, confidently giving the hours of opening and saying it was now open right next to a Google business listing, which clearly said, this business has closed down and no longer exists. The two things were on the same page.

Yeah, they were right under each other. And it's Google. And Google doesn't know what Google's.

And the business listing is. You know, the way that you put it in, you know, it's storing it in a, as you know, as a schema. So it understands business address and number of employees and telephone number and address and all. It's all stored properly.

And there it was.

Quite happily.

Saying picking that up.

This business is now closed, permanently closed. But the AI was quite happy to see that it that it was open because the AI isn't consuming the schema in the way that you think it.

Is clearly not. Or it's it's looking elsewhere. Maybe it sometimes does, you know, you can.

Type and it might in the future, I suppose.

When we were doing it today, we were trying to get an answer to like whether we should do with the podcast thing, whether we should do it one way or another way, and depending on which engine you asked and how you asked the question, you got completely different answers.

Yeah. That's right.

So, you know, you could do that another day and it might pick up the schema and say, you know, um, oh, this is permanently closed.

If you haven't been putting schema in, then retrospectively doing it is a pain. It's, it's time consuming. You can get Claude and others to help you with it, but it can be quite time consuming. So it's certainly worth doing it because it can just help your contents visibility. But again, just to reiterate, if somebody's trying to sell you an AI optimisation. We'll put the schema in and that's going to fix everything.

It's not.

No. Then go and read the blog post and then, you know, get a link to the other, to the other one and say, well, what about this? Then he's an actual experiment which, which, which kind of shows it's a load of nonsense. All right. Um, given that you're jet lagged, have you got anything else or.

I don't have anything else. It's not so much jet lag. The fact that it's like absolutely roasting.

Well, I mean, compared to down south, I don't think it's that one. But certainly, you know, as you might have noticed when I said a lot of somebody walking past and they might have heard cars in the background and sat with the door open because it is lovely.

That doesn't happen very often.

Doesn't happen.

Very often. And all the windows open upstairs because it's like a greenhouse upstairs.

Yeah. That's right. Okay. So, um, hopefully we're now back on a, on a sort of regular cadence and we'll be, um, back with another episode next week, depending on how hot it is, I suppose.

How hot it is. It is holiday season, but we should manage to squeeze a podcast in here and there.

Yeah. For both of you.

Bye.