Strategy Over FOMO: The Case for the Niche, Accidental AI Apps, and the Reality of Meta Descriptions – Episode 177

Well, one of the subjects I wrote down is this fear of missing out in digital marketing. I think that fear of missing out is what prompts people, not AI pun intended, to try and do things with meta descriptions and titles and content and h1's and hidden text.

My mate down the pub said that if you do this, then it'll change the world.

You know, I consume content from various platforms. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but I feel it's just getting tedious with the kind of if you're not doing this, you're dead. It just seems that our industry is so good at just kind of trying to scare people into spending money all the time.

Fear. Fear is the main emotion that sells.

Yeah. That's right. Fear and fear and greed. You know, it's what drives a lot of businesses. And so I understand why people are doing it. Okay. welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where you find an incredibly enthusiastic David and I think, a somewhat enthusiastic Julie.

I just want to check that we have a battery in the machine this week because we were dicing with battery life.

Actually we weren't. It was fine by the end, so it's okay, but we put new ones in okay, we have three dots out of a maximum three dots.

Okay, three out of three. Three out of three ain't bad.

And this, this is indicative of just how shit this, this podcast is going to be because we're actually talking about batteries. It's like.

Well, just talk about the battery life for a while because we haven't got.

Any life of our recording device.

Anything to talk about, about actual marketing.

All right. Um, yeah, just we'll give it our best shot. But I'm not, I'm not, um, I'm going to turn that level up a little bit.

I'm not sure that there's been much happening in the world of well.

It feels like there's a lot happening, but it's a lot of yeah, a lot of stuff's the same. Really? Yeah. People. Yeah. Like us just talking about the same things over and over. And I think there's a danger of that. Um, anyway, um, I can see you've got stuff written down, so um.

Yes, some of it I've decided is absolutely irrelevant, but um I was thinking.

It's funny that because I do that as well, I write stuff down and then we sit, we start recording and I look at it and I go, why did you write that down? Nobody's interested in that. It's just boring. It's not interesting. It's it's not gonna it's not gonna add any value at all to anybody's life. So I just, I just scribble through it.

Not. Yeah, that's not what, that's not what we talk about. It's not relevant. However, I was thinking we could talk about sort of like niching rather or specialising rather than generalising because it's.

It's been a hot topic for us, isn't.

It? A constant debate, you know, should you be everything to everybody and, you know, hedge your bets and like not miss any opportunities or should you really specialise in and, and then you, you know, it's, it's, it feels risky. Yeah. And you know, what are the pros and cons? And, you know, it's something that, um, that people go round and round with a lot It might be worth sort of unpicking a little bit.

Yeah, I don't mind doing that. Go on. Off you go. Um, I'll chip in if I've got out to sir.

Yeah. I mean the sort of the pros and cons sort of side of it. If you, if you generalise, you know, you're a, I don't know, you're an accountancy, your accountant that services all sorts of businesses, individuals, all sizes, all areas you do tax, you do invest, you do everything which, you know, you think well that way we'll maximise the number of customers we can get so we can do absolutely everything. Yeah. But then if somebody's maybe looking for a tax consultant that for a specific type of business, will they look at you and go, well, you probably don't really know what you're doing because you, you do a bit of everything. And um, I'm looking for an accountant that does what I do. And I've found like seventy accountants that all do a bit of everything. So I'll go for the one that that actually does the thing I'm looking for. Or so if you specialise, you know, there are you specialise in tax for medium sized businesses. So, um, if a small business or a large business or a medium sized, they want tax, but they're, oh, that's not for me. So they rule themselves out. If you're a medium sized business, but you don't want tax, you want something slightly different, you rule yourself out. So you're you're narrowing down your pool of potential customers. But then again, the medium sized business is looking for tax. They're surely much more likely to pick you than a generalist, um, accountant that does a bit of everything. So you know, that's the debate that goes on, you know. Yeah, we're narrowing it down. But out of that narrower pool, we're going to get higher conversion rate, you know, higher success rate because we do exactly what they're looking for, but it's a narrower pool of prospects. So, you know, the debate rages really in terms of, um, you know, which way you should go. And I think it, it, you know, it's always going to depend on the market. Um, how much, you know, how big the audience is for each niche you're looking at. But it is a, it's always something you've got to weigh up.

So what we're trying to drive out here is no matter what line of business you're in, no matter what line of work you're in, should you set your stall out, plain and simple, for the people that you know you can help the most effectively. The one. The one that you'll give the best value to? Or should you just as you've said, um, just generalise and say, well, we do accounts, we can do all, you know, any, all aspects of accounts and we can do it for everybody.

Yeah.

In which case.

Your audience is bigger, but you're six. Six. Well, this is no good if I can't even say success.

You do that every week.

I know your success rate is going to be much, much smaller because you're competing with a load of other people and you're not you're not sort of making them go, oh, yeah, these guys, as soon as they see you. Mhm.

The what we've experienced here because we niched well over a year ago, eighteen months ago. And to be fair, what we did is we decided to talk about the niches that we've been working with for a long time. We've been working with engineering and tech businesses like forever, but we didn't actually set our stall out to say we work best with. We prefer working with. We like working with tech and engineering businesses. Um, but we eventually did and there was nervousness in the team and that still resurfaces if things go a bit quiet. If enquiries are down, then suddenly it's like, oh, you know, is this because we niched down and there might be some truth in it, but at the same time, as you said, you know, if you are one of two hundred web stalk digital companies that can that that provide services in a generic sense, then then the people who are, you know, I don't know, whatever business they might be in. Um, you just do they come to you, you know, you might be lucky, they might come to you.

You've got like a one in a hundred chance or whatever.

Maybe. Yeah. But what we believed and what it's kind of shown to be the case is that if we set our stall out as we have saying, you know, to say, these are the kind of businesses we like to work with, tech and engineering, then we are fielding enquiries and getting work for tech and engineering businesses all over the place, you know, over overseas, not huge numbers overseas, but, you know, certainly throughout the UK, we're not being ruled out because of our geography. Were being ruled in because of our speciality.

Yeah. I mean, you could niche for a certain geography. You could you could niche for a certain size of business. You know, there's, there's all sorts of ways of doing it. Or you could niche for a certain skill set, you could just do PPC advertising, you could just do SEO, you could just do web design. You could niche by skill, you can niche by geography, you could niche by size of business to an extent. You can niche by industry. And we've niched by industry. And I think that's predominantly.

That's right. Yeah. Now there's still stuff comes along from time to time and we'll get an enquiry that says, oh, you know, we're probably not the right kind of business for you, but would you take a look at this for us? And we can look at it and think, yeah, we would.

We get people maybe because then they've got HubSpot website. They may not be like tech and engineering, but they've got HubSpot website and they know that we work with HubSpot.

So we've got a meeting tomorrow with a company who came to us primarily because of our HubSpot expertise, not necessarily because of our tech and engineering expertise.

Yeah, so it works that way as well. That's a sort of that's a more a skill set niche, but we're picking up some of that as well. Yeah. Um, because we haven't ruled ourselves out of that because we do talk about that as well.

But if you, if you look at it in the round, um, he said sort of somewhat floundering, um, if you look at it in the round, look at it from a customer's point of view.

Mhm.

And if you are the marketing manager at a midsize engineering company and you're thinking, you know, our comms are poor, you know, our branding is, is weak. Um, um, and messaging is uninspiring. Um, are you thinking that a company that can just do that for anybody would be the right fit for you to solve those problems. Or would you look for a company who, as we like to say on our website, speak your language? Yeah. Would you would you be? So again, if you spin it around, if you spin it around and make it about the customer, I think niching makes more sense. Yeah. Because otherwise, you know, why would a company choose us if we're just a generic comms marketing, digital marketing web company? If we're just generic, I mean, yeah, they'll think, well, I can see they've built websites because they're capable of building websites. Will it be hard work working with them? Because they don't really they won't have a clue about what we actually do. And we're going to need them to do some writing. Are they going to be able to do that when they haven't got a clue? Whereas I like to think that when people look at us and see the range of businesses that we work with, tech and engineering businesses that we work with, they're going to think these guys could add real value to us. I like what they've done for these other companies, which are like us. So they're going to potentially be able to help us. Yeah.

And I think if you're if you're looking for, you know, a website, maybe branding, messaging, writing, SEO, a bit of everything, then you, it makes more sense to go for somebody who works in your industry, if you just want branding, if you just want one thing, you might go for somebody who just does that one thing. But there's different industries.

You know, they've still niched.

Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, we only do branding. We don't build websites, we don't do anything else. But we'll nail your brand, we'll nail your messaging.

And if that's all you want, you'd probably go for somebody who that's their niche. But if you want a bit of everything specific to, you know, your industry, then you probably go for an industry.

Because quite often a company, quite often organisations, customers kind of force them into niche markets. They used to be agencies in Aberdeen, for example, who they only really did food and drink.

Yeah.

For suspected spam go away. Um, I do like that feature of O2. It tells me when it's suspect. Nobody gets to know if it's suspected spam.

I am. I don't have that, but I just don't answer it if I don't know the phone number. I just, I just kind of basically don't answer my phone. So don't fool me.

What was I saying? I said something.

Um, like a company. Yeah. Companies in Aberdeen got forced down the food and drink.

Right. So if you were a whisky brand or vodka brand or whatever, or you were the, you know, high end sort of foodie type things, there were certain agencies that you would go to because they just had a track record of doing great work around food.

And drink, food and drink show type stuff.

That's right. And, um, but some of those businesses would also have handle the accounts for some of the engineering companies.

They probably would have done just because of location, geography.

Whether the work they did for the engineers was as effective as the work they were doing for the food.

And drink. You would wonder.

Yeah, is a question mark over that, I think depends.

How big the team is. I mean, if they if they're big enough, they might have an engineering team and a food and drink team who sort of specialised. But you're still niching that way. You've still got people who kind of know a certain area.

Remember we went to that thing in London and it was, um, an agent. I can't remember who ran it, but they made a brave guy talk like that. Yeah. That's right. And they made brave Guy was there and he was interesting. And then there was that lady who said, you know, their their set, their stall out as we only work with boring companies. Yeah. Companies do do things that most people perceive as being boring. We love companies like that.

Yeah.

So it's like, you know, it's an interesting pitch. If you're, if you're a boring company, then then come and speak to us because we'll be able to help you sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, people might think of some of our clients, you know, maybe a lot of our clients has been kind of boring companies, big bits of metal and things in the sea and things in, you know, people welding things and all that kind of, I, I don't, I think it's, I think it's fascinating as Mike who we bought this building off, um, I find it very interesting.

So yeah, I mean, I've worked very briefly in, I think we've had this conversation before in like food and drink fast moving like orange juice and cranberry juice. And I've worked in like more like big purchase, big ticket purchase type things. Um, and to be fair, working on orange juice is really, really boring. Like really boring. Eventually you're like, I just don't care. I really don't care which orange juice you choose to buy. It makes no difference to me whatsoever. And it's really quite hard to get enthusiastic about things like that because it matters so little. Whereas, you know, buying a big piece of kit or, you know, whatever, you know, something like that, that you're working on engineering or even a piece of like corporate software. I mean, it actually makes a difference to something that orange juice just doesn't.

Yeah. And one thing to think about, if you're thinking about niching, you know, whether you're in engineering company thinking, we're going to niche because a lot of engineering and tech businesses do.

And a lot don't.

They do.

A lot.

Do a lot of them.

We can do whatever it is. You want us to.

Know what they're good at. They learn what they're good at. And they also, I mean, if we took on a client and it was a bit of a bit of a risk for us and them, you know, the worst that can happen is we do some foot in the door projects. We do some little bits and bobs. We might run a paid search campaign, we might build something for them, some web thing or whatever, and you know what I mean? And if we all get this isn't really working, you know, there's a few thousand quid.

Yeah.

You know, been spent and that's about it. But if you, you know, if you go to like a tech business or an engineering business, you know, you, you could be, you know, half a million quid into something before the engineering company said, this is too hard.

We can't figure it out. This actually isn't our thing.

We've never.

Done.

This before. That can happen. And, you know, so that's why I think, you know, in engineering, you know, like some of the companies we've worked with over the years, you think like these people are the experts in like cleaning up wellbores. Yes, that's all they do. Big wire, push down a wellbore, clean it out safely, and dispose of all the crap that comes out and all the rest of it. Great. You know, that's what they do, you know, now they're engineers. You could go to them and say, you know, I want you to design me a new engine. And, you know, they've got the technical capability.

To do.

It, but it's not what they do.

No.

That's right. You know, and so they choose not to do it because it's, you know, there's somebody else who specialises in that will be much better at it.

I've heard radio ads for people saying basically that if you can think it, we'll build it. And why would you go to them? You're like, but, but if I want if I want this thing, I'll go to somebody who does that thing, not somebody who does a bit of it. That would not give me the remotest bit of confidence.

No. That's right. And I think if you do go down that route of of niching, you're going to go through a lot of um, through a lot of different emotions if that's the right way of putting it. I mean, if you think about it, the journey we've been on, um, you know, we've had situations where like the staff have been saying, look, you know, the enquiries are drying up. We've got plenty of retained work, which not like we've got nothing to do, but the enquiries are drying up. Is this because we've niched down and yeah, if we, if we weren't niche, you know, could we have got X, Y, and Z instead?

You start second guessing yourself.

You do start second guessing yourself. I mean, you know, in that situation, you know, I met up with another agency in town and said basically, you know, you know, we're okay for work, but, you know, things don't there's not a lot going on. And they were like, yeah, we're exactly the same. There's just literally nothing coming in, nothing coming in. And it's all a bit bottom feed y type stuff that's coming through. And so, and.

We're not getting, we're not getting.

The network of other agencies. Um, and they said it's sort of network wide. People are saying the same thing. So there was us thinking, oh, has this niching been a bit of a mistake? And it's actually not just the industry in general is a bit subdued at the moment. You know, people are uncertain because of the economy and the government and Prime Minister every five minutes. And so yeah, yeah.

Um and we've kind of ruled ourselves out of what you call the bottom feed sort of stuff. The cheapo. Yeah. We're, we're definitely not getting as much of the sort of, um, you know, I've got a tiny budget and can you do all these things for it? Yeah. Well, actually, I did get a phone call the other day from somebody who, um, had a clothing website and for some reason called us and wanted basically, you know, the first question, how much does it cost? And I gave him a bit of an outline and he got off the phone quite quickly after that, but it sounded like a very, very small, um, business.

I mean, that can happen to us because if somebody carries out a search, Google or Claude or Perplexity or whatever, they could finish up on a page on our website about a particular thing that we can do. And maybe we haven't really majored on the fact that, but we only do it for engineering companies. And so they would just pick the phone up or send us an email and start a conversation.

So I think was what had happened. Or maybe they'd just gone to ChatGPT and said, like, find me a local agency that builds websites and, and just gone from there.

Perhaps that's right.

Um, but yeah, the, um, I read something that was quite helpful, like specialising would give you like ten prospects who think, yep, that's exactly what we need. Or one hundred prospects who go, yeah, well, I'll there's them and loads of others and I'll compare them. So yeah. Um.

Again, if you think about it, you know, this, this stuff about becoming, um, getting a, becoming a niche or working in a niche area of business is, is part of your brand as well.

Yeah.

You know what we would want to see what we would want people to say about us when we're not in the room is like, oh yeah, you know, when it comes to engineering, um, when it comes to tech companies, SaaS companies, these guys know their stuff. You know, they'll, they'll, they'll understand what you're telling them. They'll take the brief on board, they'll come back with great ideas and it'll all kind of make sense.

And they'll be able to write stuff that you don't have to like completely rewrite every time. They'll, they'll, they'll get pretty close pretty early on, and then you'll be able to let them get on with it fairly quickly, Which I think for a lot of marketing managers is a big deal. Yeah. I mean, I've had, you know, years ago, like PR agencies, even in the right industry and, you know, they send you over stuff and you've got to completely rewrite it. What's the point?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting because if they actually should have known, that's, that speaks to a slightly bigger challenge than, than not being in the right niche. Just, just basically.

Your niche because your PR and your niche, because you're in a certain industry and you still send stuff over that needs to be completely rewritten. Not great.

No, no. But I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. It seems to me that thinking about this stuff logically then if you want to provide, you know, if you're in an area of business like we're in, you know, digital marketing, you know, web, etc., uh, if you say like, we can do this for absolutely everybody, it sort of common sense suggests that, well, that's a good thing. Your market's massive. But the reality is, you know, given that most people based on emotion then like, yeah, but I know all these companies can build a nice website and they've got great portfolios. But these guys look, they've worked with this, this client and that client and this client, and they're kind of similar to what we do. And so clearly get us or they'll probably get us and it'll yeah, it'll just make more sense. And that to me stacks up better than anything else.

I would say. So. Yes. Um, the other thing is that you're probably going to get better quality of enquiry.

Yeah.

If your niche, um, just because people expect to pay more for people who are specialists than, than generalists.

Yes, I would say so. Uh, you know, if you think about other aspects of your life. Yeah. Then I mean, there's the obvious health ones. I mean, that doesn't really that's not really making a good point. You know, like, of course you're going to go to, you know, a medical doctor if you've got something wrong with you as opposed to somebody with a PhD. And yeah, Origami.

But um, also you go to your GP for like a general problem, then they refer you to a consultant who basically charges more.

It's the specialist.

That's right. Because they're the specialist in the whatever bone or brain or eye problem you've got.

I guess from in when you're in the creative industries like we are. I mean, the flip side is that, you know, it's, it's easy for to understand how people might think or it would be nice to work with a company that does something completely different. Yeah. You know, because it's because it's because it's boring. But to be honest, I mean, if you think the businesses we were, the imagery when we managed to get it from.

Them.

Is actually usually quite interesting to look at, you know, and everything else is the same writing lines of code for a website that sells some engineering service or product or whatever, compared to ice cream, I mean, six and two threes, isn't it really? I mean, it's, it's not when it comes down to it.

But also it's always a bit of a red flag. If somebody says, I want my website to look completely different and I want all the menu items to, um, you know, not I don't want to say contact us about us, what we do or services. I want to say something really wacky there. And I want my blog to be called, you know, musings from outer space or whatever. That's right. And then somebody comes on your website and they're looking for your blog or your case studies, and they're called something really mental and they can't find them. So you actually, you've got to think of your customers. You don't want it to look completely different unless you are in a really sort of out there industry where that's what people expect. If you're, if you're looking for like engineering, you don't want to go and say, well, I want mine to look completely different. You want to. When people come on your website, you want them to be able to understand what it is straight away and find what they're looking for straight away and not have to like, think about what on earth they're doing, because that comes back to the don't make me think thing of websites. And you know that you don't want your website to be completely different, however much you think you do. You've got to think of how easy it is to use and recognisable. And people can find the thing they're looking for straight away. Mhm.

Okay. All right. So niching to niche or not to niche. That's a question.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am I'm I'm all for niching.

Well, you always kind of were. I wasn't against the idea, but I think yeah, the fact that you're an actual chartered marketer, I mean, you've studied this and you understand that this is the you know, this is the way that the world works. So yeah.

Anyway, definitely.

Find something interesting in your list. That was awful.

I thought we at least we managed to discuss at least it was a debatable topic rather than this is what Google says, which is my next thing. So maybe you should go next.

No, because I'm looking at some of the things I wrote down and I'm thinking, are they actually is it is that really something I want to talk about? So while I muse that if you've got something on your list, because I know you decided that some of it was awful. This is the thing, you know, this is? This is we keep saying it. It's Digital Marketing From The Coalface. We're not sitting down and say, right, we're going to give you eight ways to do this better or that better.

No, this is.

Like we're just kind of this, this kind of.

Stuff that we're up against every day. Really. Okay. Well, like from the coalface, the thrilling world of meta descriptions.

Oh my God, I know.

I know.

Okay, well, first of all, spell out what they are.

Yeah. What is meta description? If you look on Google, you'll get the after you get the overview and the ads and the maps and the if you search blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Um, you'll eventually get a blue link, which is the page title, which sometimes. Well, you will get blue link eventually.

It's only sometimes the page title is what I'm saying.

It's, um, it's what Google has decided.

That the page title isn't the page title. It's not what you see on the page. And with, you know.

It's called. Yeah. It's the bit of bit of code that tells Google what the page is about. And then underneath that you get a description of what the page is about. And if you're lucky, it's the meta description that you have put into the back end.

And that just means data about data, i.e. an an an explanation of what the page is about. Yeah. You know data about the data. Yeah. Right.

Description.

So yeah. So in theory, just to recap for the hard of understanding.

You put.

A do a search, you get some blue links. Like you say, you get AI overviews, you get all that other crap as well. But you see just traditional search, you get the blue link. That's the page title element. It's what the page is called, if you like, under the hood. And then you get the meta description, which is the description under the hood of what that page is about.

Yeah. Yeah, that is it. So Google's come out with some information in the last couple of weeks about.

Really I'm all ears.

Yeah. So, um, first of all, it's come out very clearly and said it's not a ranking thing, which we know it never has been. It doesn't affect your ranking. It's just there to help people decide whether to click through or not.

So it's a click through factor for sure.

Yeah. Um, it's not a requirement. Google does not penalise you if you don't have one.

It kind of does, because if it goes and grabs content off your page, it can just grab some gobbledygook off your page and it makes no sense. So it kind of is penalising it.

Not technically penalising maybe in the eyes of it's more being, you're being penalised, not.

You're penalising yourself. Really?

Yeah. That's it. So, um, you know, Google doesn't go, well, I'm not going to show you because you don't have one. It'll just grab something off your page.

Try and understand what the page is about.

Exactly. So but there's some information to come out about like what you should and shouldn't do. Okay. To put in your meta description. Um, it says focus on your most important pages if you've got one, if you've got a site with loads of products or loads of things and you basically go, well, when am I ever going to manage to put in meta descriptions for all of them? And you go through all the, um, you know, the search tools and they go, oh, you've got duplicate meta descriptions in these pages. Google's good. Doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter as long as there's songs, there's something there that tells somebody what's on the page. It doesn't really matter. So focus on making your most important pages, your most used pages, the pages you want people to visit. Make them really good. And don't worry too much about the others. That's what it's saying. Yeah.

Um, although there are tools that will automatically do the meta descriptions for you.

They do, but they always put far too many characters in it.

Yeah. Again, I'm not sure how important that is as well. I mean, it'll get it'll get.

The thing I read said one hundred and twenty characters from the description, which seems really short.

It'll just mean it'll chop it off and put the dot, dot.

Dot HubSpot puts in like a good two hundred nod if you ask it to do it. It actually does it quite well, but it always makes it really long. Yeah. So anyway, the meta description has to summarise what's on the page. It shouldn't be a sales pitch. People do it. They're like, you know, they make it into a sales pitch. But if the if what you put in the meta description doesn't accurately describe what is actually on the page. That's when Google will just go and make it up and grab something off the page instead.

It'll also match it to the search as well, won't it? Yeah.

Yeah. So there were some, I found some tips on making that work a bit better. Okay. And so it doesn't have to be sentences. You don't have to craft it into beautiful sentences. You could just put like the, the author, the date and the title of the blog post. And you can put like the, um, product t shirt, white t shirt size small fourteen point nine nine. You can put that. It doesn't have to be a beautiful crafted sentence. It just has to.

I'm still waiting for the revelation.

There isn't one. Just has to be an accurate description of what's on the page, which doesn't have to be a haiku or anything. Yeah, but people get really muddled up about them. And which.

People.

Have you not seen any, like, meta descriptions that have.

Oh, yeah. I thought you meant some people in particular were getting confused and muddled about meta descriptions. All of a sudden people generally.

Um, if it doesn't describe what's on the page, Google will rewrite it. Um.

Even if it does describe what's on the page.

It might Google rewrite it.

Because it's along to itself.

Don't, um, don't just make it full of keywords because Google will definitely rewrite it. Um, don't make it like really clickbaity, you know, find out how blah, blah, blah, you know, um, Google will also rewrite it if it's really clickbaity. Um, don't try and like anticipate the intent of the person. Don't go like, you know, if you're an engineer looking for information on such and such, we have exactly what you need because again, that's not describing what's on the page. That's just, um, clickbaity. Mhm. Um, and don't make it a sales pitch, you know, the best marketing agency ever, you know, find out how we can change your life.

Well, if somebody searched who is the best marketing agency ever? And you've got a page talking about why you're the best marketing agency ever, then your meta description would say, we're the best marketing ever.

All right.

But that's an extreme situation. Yeah. Just to make the point. Yeah. Yeah.

If unless unless the page is that, then don't make it a sales pitch for the page, basically. And but then there was some quite good tips about using AI to try and get it right. So, um, you could have a page run it through your favourite AI engine, whoever that is, and say, um, you know, what's this page about? What one thing is this page about or what one question does this page answer? And then go, okay and summarise what's on the page to answer that question. So then it kind of narrows it down and then just sort of rewrite it so that it doesn't sound like the answer to a question. So it's more of a description and, and then and get the character count, right. Whatever today's version of the character count is. Yeah.

Um, short and sweet. Just keep it short and sweet and you won't go far.

Yeah. But just basically like, you know, what's this page about? And, and the what? I read something that said, if you can't write a meta description to see in like one sentence what the page is about, maybe look at your page.

Maybe it should be more than one page. It should be broken up. Maybe.

Yeah. Or it says, if you do have various subtopics, start each subtopic with a kind of mini meta description. Okay, on the page, you know.

All right. So it might pick that bit.

So that yeah. So if it's your main meta description, it goes well, that doesn't match the question that the person's asked. It'll look on the page for something better. And if, if you've got like a subtopic and it has a little paragraph at the top, that's kind of roughly meta description size and summarises what's in that paragraph, then then it might grab that instead. So if you can't sort of nail the page down to just answering one thing, put little answers within the content so that Google has something to grab, because otherwise it can be really weird about what it grabs and what it makes up. So yeah, it was just some clarification really that came out. Yeah. But I mean, it was Google kind of clarifying what meta description is and, and what not to do. So we're all clear now, aren't we?

Yeah. Crystal.

There you go. Thank you, Google, for making it.

Like with a lot of things, people have experimented or done it in error or tried to game search engines with page title elements, with meta descriptions, with on page content, with white text on a white background. Yeah, there's a blog about that. Uh, yeah, just Google white text on a white background. You'll find us at number one. Yeah. Um, but yeah, all of this stuff, even, you know, alt tags for images. The alt tag for an image should describe the image, the image. It shouldn't be a sales pitch. It's not trying to do anything other than like if someone can't see the image because they chose not to download it, or they literally can't see it. It describes what the image is.

T shirt.

Yeah, yeah. That's right. And people have always kind of almost feels like they're willfully misunderstanding this stuff because, you know, the simpler you make it, you know, follow them rules. And yeah, I mean, there'll be people jumping up and down saying, yeah, but I didn't follow the rules. I broke the rules, I gamed the system and it worked and it generated me a lot of business.

It can do at some point, but you're always risking at some point it just getting shut down and then you just disappear off the face of the earth. And it does happen. People's websites suddenly just vanish out of Google and the entire business goes down the pan because, you know, they got away with it for so long and then they get caught up with and maybe you won't, but maybe you will.

Mhm. Well, one of the subjects I wrote down, which I was debating, it was this, um, fear of missing out on digital marketing. And I think it kind of dovetails with what you're just saying, because I think that fear of missing out is what prompts people, not AI pun intended, um, to, to try and do things with meta descriptions and titles and content and h1's and hidden text.

My mate down the pub said that if you do this, then it'll change the world.

Because one thing I notice is, I mean, I consume, you know, I consume content from various platforms and it's, it just maybe it's just me, I don't know, but I feel it's just getting tedious with the kind of if you're not doing this, you're dead. If you're not doing this, you're wasting your time. If you're forget what you're new, you know, forget SEO, it's all dead. I was reading a post on a on a well-respected organisations website, should I say, you know, and it was basically saying, you know, in this particular industry, SEO is dead if you're not doing, uh, GE or, uh, or whichever you prefer to call it generative engine optimisation or a artificial intelligence optimisation or whatever the hell it is. If you're not doing what it's called, it just seems that our industry is so good at just kind of trying to scare people into spending money all the time.

Fear. Fear is the main.

Emotion.

That sells.

That's right. Fear and fear and greed. You know, it's what drives a lot of businesses. And so I understand why people are doing it. But it's, you know, and like, it's the same with AI. I mean, there's certain people posting on TikTok and other platforms and it's like, you know, and they're sort of opening gambit is just like, you know, if you're doing this, then, you know, it's, that's ancient history. You know what I mean? Whereas like two weeks ago, they were telling you to do that. And that's, that's the, that's their aim. That's what they sell.

Yeah. And it's just like, you know.

Kind of your, you know, I've got my finger on the pulse. You're missing out. You're not doing X, Y, and Z.

This, this is the one thing you know, it's the same with like health foods or whatever. You know, take this one supplement and it's the answer to all your problems and you'll feel like a new person in two weeks or whatever. And it's the same with, with anything. It's just like it's too easy to put stuff out there now.

And it is. But one of the things I was going to was going to talk about because like, if you if I go back to this fear of missing out, you know, with the digital marketing industry kind of telling people what they should be doing all the time, they literally would just spend all of their spare cash or all of their cash full stop trying to tick all these boxes and do.

All the time.

All the time. And it just is, you know, it's, it's infuriating, it's frustrating. It's, it's not healthy for anybody. This constant churn of, of like, don't waste your time doing that. Now do this instead.

It makes people just rush around doing what we call random random acts of marketing, rather than actually having any sort of plan in terms of like, okay, this is where I want to get to and I'll do the, the most important things first and then do the, the less important stuff. But it's just like flying around, doing like random tweaks and thinking it's going to change the world. Mhm. Mhm. Um, but it has always been the same.

It probably has. I mean, I don't know. I mean, before digital, before the internet, what was marketing doing? Was it, was it talking about, oh, you've got to do this type of leaf and it must be, it must be glossy and full color or it.

Must was there were trends in terms of what, what paper you used. It was like the spot lamination, everything had to be shiny and embossed and blah de blah. And there were.

Or you were dead in the water.

Wasn't it was um, you know, I had a boss that would come in and go like, you know, we've got to do this now, you know, so yes, it was, it was the same, but the, the pace wasn't the same. It wasn't every two weeks you had to like totally do something different. It was much slower change, but there were still trends. There were still things that, oh, suddenly, yeah, everyone's doing this. So you've got to be doing that. But it's, there's just way too much of it now, I think.

Yeah, I think so. It feels it feels like it is. Yeah. I mean, it's maybe we feel it more because we're in the industry.

So yeah, the echo chamber.

We've.

Got.

To keep our finger on the pulse and we've got to make sure that we're understanding everything that's happening so that we can, um, you know, make sure that we keep our clients right.

But we also get clients coming and going. We need to be doing this thing because, because I saw it somewhere and like, well, yeah, you probably do need to be doing that thing. But if you do that thing before you've done all the basics, then it's not really going to help because you've got to get your strategy right first. And if you're doing that thing, but you absolutely, it's never going to work because you don't have, you know, the, the concept. Right.

Well, a good example of that, I suppose, is if you kind of ignored the advice around putting helpful content on your website and focus just on putting like, this is what we do. Yeah. That's it. It's just basically like product or service pages and didn't put helpful content out. And I understand the arguments for not doing it because it's, it sometimes feels like a, yeah, why, why would I do that sort of thing? I understand that, but if you ignored that advice and so you don't have a solid foundation of content on your website showing up in general search results or organic search results, Google normal search, then trying now to leverage the latest wave of search around AI is it's just impossible because you can't. You can't just start now and say, right, I'm not going to bother with SEO. I'm only going to do GE or it's like, you.

Still need the content.

GE always kind of just built on top of SEO. So if you haven't got a site that's got authority, plenty of content and it's already, you know, he's already generating organic traffic, search traffic, the a or stuff is going to the GE or stuff is just, can we just decide? We'll call it GE or geo. That'll do it. Okay. Geo because George.

It's um, it's just looking for words. It's just looking for words that follow other words and patterns of of words. If you don't have enough words, it's not got nothing to find, basically.

That's right. Yeah. Right. Go on. Oh, we're doing quite well, considering we would have nothing to say because it's nearly forty minutes now. Although you did spend ten minutes talking about batteries.

If we're judging the podcast quality on how many minutes it takes, I'm sure we can keep talking about rubbish. Um, well, I was going to talk about the, um, the little workout app that I ended up making with Claude. Um, which is weird because I still have no idea how we did it. Me and Claude and I don't think me or Claude intended to make an app when we started, and I suddenly ended up with this little app on my phone, and I am still not entirely sure how I got there, but I thought it was really cool. But it's amazing. Like you can somebody who has absolutely no idea what they're doing and a machine can like end up making something really quite useful. Um a thing, um, my mind is still blown by every time I use it and it works. And if I want to tweak it, I can just go back to cloud and.

Do this as well.

Tweak it. Yeah. So actually, can you change the order of this or can you swap that from day one to day two. And so I've got the exact workout I want to do on my phone. And I can record like, um, how many reps and stuff on it because I've been using a free one off the internet, but it only gave me like three workouts. And then I wanted to add another one and I couldn't, I'm like, I don't want, I don't want to find another app and I don't want to change them. And, and I don't want.

This is a threat to SaaS, isn't it? If you're thinking about it in the context of this podcast, that's the threat to SaaS.

And I think the one I've made now I like better than the one that I downloaded off the app.

You made it to do exactly what you wanted it to do. You didn't have to make any compromises. I mean, we've always had this, this conversation when it comes to software development, because we've done a lot of software development over the years and we still do software development for, you know, sort of certainly for one or two large clients. And, you know, the conversations with them were always along the lines of, well, we can build some software that does exactly what you want it to do and it'll cost a fortune. Or you can use this thing off the shelf, which does most of what you want to do, and you'll make some compromises, and you can be up and running in a week. Yeah. And you know, it was often a short conversation. It was like, you know, when you compared like fifty grams worth of web software development for that, or you can have this for twenty thousand a month or something starting now and use it now, then that would be the obvious, you know, choice to make. Yeah, but with plenty of caveats. Um, yeah, this, this ability to talk to a machine and it will write the code for you and build the thing for you is, is just yes, we're in a new era.

I mean, I didn't, I didn't even want one. I didn't want I literally wanted to, I just got it to make a word document. And then I was like, oh, can you make something that'll maybe go in my, my notes app on my phone so I can record it and, and update it. And then it goes, do you up. I'm like, yeah, why not?

Yeah.

Which is really what I wanted in the first place. But I didn't even know that I wanted it.

Um, well, on a grand scale, I mean, you can, you can literally throw, um, put Claude or, you know, or whatever, point it at an app and it will go and figure out what the app's doing and then go and build you your own. Yeah. And that's again, you know, going back to it, that's why it feels slightly illegal. It does feel a bit odd. Yeah. But yeah, that's, I guess that's what, you know, in most, in most lines of business, it's, there's a lot of copying isn't there?

Yeah. I mean, I guess people would, would, would do that, you know, manually you look at an app and, and build something.

And the thing is yours, doesn't that app for you that it's built for you? It doesn't have to be industrial strength. It doesn't have to be enterprise grade. It just needs to do that one thing that you want it to do and it does it. And that's, and if you need it to do another thing, you just tell it, do this, make it, do this as well. And it will. Yeah. Um, when you think about, you know, the thing we use our red man app that we built for managing. You know, that's kind of that evolved. And it was an app that was built the hard way. And then when we rebuilt it, uh, Phil worked, worked, worked predominantly with Claude to develop it. And it got to the point in the development cycle where I was just putting something into GitHub saying, I need it to do this.

And Claude was doing it.

And then you just Claude in in GitHub, and it would just go off and Claude would do it. Yeah, it was making a mess of it. It was still extremely useful to have an actual developer there. Yeah. But, um, yeah, I mean, there's, there's lots of arguments, you know, for and against, um, uh, AI coding, like, you know, Claude code and stuff like that. But yeah, if you, if, if you're not using it and experimenting with it, you probably are missing out. Going back to our formal thing.

Yeah.

Because it's the rapid development you can do with it is unbelievable. Well, you just proved it. You didn't even realise you were writing an app and you've written an app, which you now use.

I've written an app that I've used twice. And yeah, I didn't even realise that what I was doing and I accidentally built a really useful app for myself. So yeah. Um, incredible. And yeah, you should try it. Mhm.

You need to solve a problem. You know, if you need to solve a problem, then try and solve it, you know, with these tools and see, see what it throws out at you. Mhm. Or even, you know, an even simpler version of that is, is work with the AI tools to build a spreadsheet that does stuff that, you know, if you've sat there. So we all have trying to put together a formula in a spreadsheet. Well, you don't have to now you just say, I need a formula that does this and it'll just create the formula for you and build the spreadsheet for you and do all the.

You look a lot better.

And look.

Prettier.

That's right.

It makes things look a lot prettier than I can manage.

Well that's right. I mean, you know, people criticise AI and we've embraced it, but, you know, we're not blind to its shortcomings. But.

Oh no.

Some days it's the donkey work stuff. It just batters through it.

Some days it It has terrible days that it can't do anything right. I've been using.

I've been using fable, but that tomorrow I think fable gets expensive.

Yeah.

You get some API charging or whatever. So that'll be like every call will be. Yeah, be more expensive. I'll see, I don't know. I mean, I've been using it the last few days, last year for the last difference. Um, it's certainly the work it's produced has been absolutely top drawer. I'm not talking about generative. I'm talking about helping you solve problems, crunching data, um, looking, looking for issues in amongst the data and surfacing them and all that kind of stuff.

I think we spoke last week, I asked it to crunch a load of data and it made it all up.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

It's like what you're, you're not supposed to have an imagination. Why are you making stuff up? But, um, did it actually manage to crunch the data without making stuff up?

Yeah, absolutely. It's the stuff that it found out was useful. Definitely. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it would you know, it's the sort of thing I could have sat there for two days going through that stuff. Yeah. So. Yeah. Same as you. You actually. Yeah. Two days wouldn't even touch the surface if you wanted to write an app from scratch when you're not according to start with. I mean, I would try, try, try two years.

Yeah, exactly.

Crazy stuff. Yeah.

Absolutely crazy.

Anything else?

Um. No. Okay.

Just to finish off on on the, um, for the podcast again, I'm going to bleat on a little bit. If you're using AI tools and you're not experimenting with MCP. MCP service model context protocol service, you're definitely missing a trick. Um, start off with some very simple things like connect it to your gmail, for example, and then carry out complex searches. Ask it things about your gmail and let it go off. And because, you know, if anyone's listening and they haven't been up to speed with what MCP servers are, it's really just a way of connecting AI to the tools you're already using. So if we use Monday, there's an MCP server, we use HubSpot, there's an MCP server. Um, and then you get these like mega MCP servers, like we use Zapier and it's got an MCP server, which will then talk to zero and a million other apps just through that one MCP connection. Um, but getting AI to talk to all your favorite tools will really accelerate your, um, understanding of, um, what the capabilities really are. Yeah. You know, move away from the chatbot. I mean, you see that a lot in social media. You know, if you do this, you'll realise it's not just a chatbot. I think a lot of people listen to this will realise that, you know, these tools are not just chatbots, but giving them access. Yeah. Yeah. They are. It is game changing. And, um, yeah, start off with something simple, like let it search your Google Drive or let it search your gmail or. I'm just trying to think of some of the ones that we've got. Um, it'll connect to most of the, you know, the, the, the basic Google tools, like it'll connect to, to Google analytics and it'll connect to, um, Google ads and stuff like that. And so you can just use natural language to say, go into my Google ads and find this information for me. You don't have to know how to kind of create reports and speak the, um, the language of Google ads, which yeah, is gobbledygook mostly. Um, all right. That's that's it. Okay. We managed to, I managed to shoehorn in those things, which I wasn't sure I was going to. Oh that's good. And, um, we managed to blather on for the best part of fifty minutes, so that is a surprise. Sorry. I came into this with zero expectation and not very much enthusiasm either, but I've quite enjoyed it.

We got there in the end. Maybe we shouldn't do it on a Monday.

Yeah, maybe that's a good point.

Okay.

Good stuff.

Bye bye.