SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, landing pages, all of which can help to generate enquiries and generate sales.
I think there's a huge kind of benefit to doing all of these things holistically, right? It's one of the things that we see time and time again is people like to kind of look at these things as individual or in a vacuum, if you like, I'm going to do SEO, I'm going to do PPC. Ultimately, if you create landing pages that are optimised for keywords that people are using to find your site, you can also advertise on pay per click advertising platforms with those same landing pages, right? Because they're optimised for good keywords, they're interesting, they generate, they drive people to take action. I think there's a real benefit to looking at the thing as a complete picture and not saying, I'm going to go away and pay somebody to do my PPC. One of the most confusing things to me is always that people will sometimes pay different agencies to do different services.
Yep. Yeah, we see that.
Yeah. See, I find that very odd because these things are meant to work together.
Okay. So, um, this is a bit of a surprise episode for Alex because, uh, we're just starting the podcast and he still doesn't know what we're going to talk about.
Yeah.
I mean, Alex, over to you. Yeah. No, I thought we'd maybe chat a little bit about getting traffic. Okay. So digital marketing, you know, a lot of digital marketing. Raising awareness, whole lots of things, but a lot of it is around getting people onto a website or a landing page or something. So we'll have a little chat about getting traffic where you send that traffic. Like what, what is a landing page as opposed to just a page on your website and that sort of thing, and the different mechanisms that we can use just in very sort of broad terms, we'll touch on what each of them are, if you like, but it's really, I think, you know, a podcast that might be of interest to people who are not necessarily killing it, um, with, with their website. Um, they're not getting enquiries, they're not generating business online. And like all the different sort of tools at their disposal, they're sort of getting traffic tools. And then what we do with that, does that sound like we could maybe talk about that for half an hour or so.
You know, traffic vaguely interesting, I guess.
Vaguely interesting.
That's right.
So to start that off, um, you know, the much talked about subject of SEO search engine optimisation is it's like, almost like the panacea, isn't it? Because if you get it right, then without spending any money and of course, you have to spend a lot of money.
To.
Get into that position in the first place. But what the perception is, the perception is that once you've got that right, you get the right formula and you start to get traction in search engines. And by traction, I mean you start to appear in search results and people click through to your website. Then it can be a very, very powerful way of generating new business. No two ways about it.
You get to sit back and floods of people end up on your website. Yeah, yeah.
That's right. So fundamentally what what is SEO? Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?
The hot seat, I like it. Um, no, I mean, it's exactly what it says on the tin, right? It's the art or science of optimising your website so that it plays ball with Google. Yeah. Google, obviously, you know, they have algorithms that troll the web looking for pages to rank.
Lots of big words.
Yeah. Well, big for you, big for me.
Definitely big for me.
Uh, algorithm program, I guess is a fair. Yeah. I guess that's a synonym. Yeah. Um, it's.
Like a process, isn't it? I suppose.
Yeah. So yeah. Um, they build them, they run around on the internet, they find websites, they look at them and they say, oh, this page should rank for this keyword. Um, and then when somebody types something into Google, it ranks the pages according to how well they fit its criteria for ranking.
Yeah. And so without going into the the nuts and bolts of how Google does that, and we've touched on that in some of the other podcasts, and we'll definitely touch on it in more detail in some of the other podcasts. But broadly speaking, Google is trying to present to users people carrying out searches what it thinks is the best match. Yeah. For the search that they typed in for the words that they typed in.
And it's using, well, I think the number is like two hundred different factors.
Probably more. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.
I guess in simple terms, you can kind of boil it down to is the page talking about.
Is it relevant?
Yeah. The phrase or keyword that you're trying to rank it for. Yeah. Um, is it well liked, popular.
Trustworthy, authoritative. Yeah.
Um, and then does it have lots of detail, lots of information. Um, does it perform well? I mean, I guess that's a contentious one, right? Because lots of people say, oh, you know, engagement statistics don't affect your rankings. It doesn't matter if people spend time on the page, blah, blah, blah.
But there's also a lot of people who think it does matter, right?
Yeah. And yeah, let's be honest, nobody is one hundred and ten percent certain either way.
No, but broadly speaking, if you've built web pages where people come through from Google search and spend, you know, a second or two seconds before they hit the back button, then.
Something's.
Wrong. Something's wrong. And if you were a search engine and you saw people persistently visiting a certain web page, which you threw up in a search result, and they came back to you looking for something else, within two seconds.
You'd probably say this.
You'd be thinking, I'm not giving them the right experience here. And that page is maybe not great. So yeah, I can certainly see why they would do that. Yeah. But yeah, so so Google's trying, you know, search engine optimisation is this kind of balancing act between making sure that you've got a page which has enough detail, has enough, um, of what the search engines are looking for. But, but more than, more importantly than that will engage visitors when they come through from the search engines. Yeah. And you know, it. Google is not trying to be nice when it doesn't rank a web page. It's an all. It's. It's an automated process, an algorithm, as you say, lines of code, a process. And it's trying to show results to people that match what they're looking for. And it's, and it's trusting the algorithm to pick sites that are relevant, trustworthy, as you just said, and it's your job if you're doing search engine optimisation to make your page or your client's page tick those boxes, irrespective of like some of the technical stuff, which we'll talk about in the future, we'll maybe try and get the guys on from site web, if they'll come on and talk a little bit about some of the technical SEO subjects that we could talk about. Um, but broadly speaking, it's, it is a bit of a popularity contest, but broadly speaking, you know, all Google is trying to do is show its end users the best possible result that genuinely helps them alongside a bunch of adverts from people who are prepared to pay to be clicked.
Right.
Which will which we'll talk about in a minute. The PPC pay per click. Um, and it's motivation for doing that is that if it gets it wrong persistently, if it becomes a bad user experience, then people's sentiment will move away and they'll start using Bing or DuckDuckGo or some of the other search engines that are out there.
Right? So I guess that's the kind of the crucial point, isn't it, is that it is a popularity contest because ultimately what Google is trying to serve people is the most popular websites, the websites people like to use, because that is what keeps people coming back to Google and lets them sell expensive advertising space. So yeah, absolutely. You're kind of trying to, um, it's not about gaming the algorithm. It's just about complying with what the algorithm wants. Um, giving Google what it needs to, to, which.
Can sometimes be as simple as making sure the page responds quickly, making sure that the page is laid out in the very specific format, which everybody who does this stuff understands. Yeah. You know, if it's laid out in the right format, then the the search engine software can actually what's known as indexing. It can actually, you know, in inverted commas, read the page and again in inverted commas, understand what the page is about.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And I, I don't really understand. Maybe I should, but I don't really understand why people, you know, get in such a twist about it, you know?
Um, I think it's made to seem much more complicated as we've discussed before than it really is for sure.
Well, you alluded to it being part science, part art form. And in fact, there's a great book called the Art of SEO, isn't there, which states that quite clearly.
Yeah. And I think that's the kind of pivotal thing, isn't it, with a lot of SEO stuff, it, you know, it's a science in the sense that there are things you can measure. It's an art form in the sense that half the time the things you measure don't actually kind of pan out or play out the way you expect them to. So yeah, it's a bit of both, really.
But why is it. Why is it you think that people keep getting so twisted up about it? Is it because they believe? Well, I certainly I've heard anecdotally, I've heard people like, say like our website, our web page is so much better than.
Right.
Than the other person's. But like, we're nowhere. We're not. I've, I've searched for us. We're not even in the top ten pages. And yet they're number one and our page is so much better than theirs. I think is it, is it just they're not really understanding in even in a simple way what how Google is making the decisions you think?
Yeah. I mean, I think this is part of the problem, isn't it? It's like reading tea leaves or something you're looking at.
Is that what Google does?
Um, it's, it's guessing at or assigning too much importance to the wrong things, right? So people get it in their heads that if their site has more content than somebody else's, it should rank better. And then they're like, well, I've written three thousand words. How come this five hundred word blog post ranks in front of mine? Yeah. The problem is that you just kind of looking too granularly at something that is innately holistic, right? Google are looking at the whole picture. That's right. They're looking at two hundred plus factors. And you're looking at three or four and you're saying how come this website that is has less domain authority? Um, which means don't do it. Do it.
Explain that to me.
Uh, yeah. He didn't hit me that time, luckily. Um, yeah. No. So, um, domain authority is a third party metric, right? So it's Moz. A company called Moz invented it as a way of measuring how often somebody sites or references your website. So how popular is your website basically?
Yeah.
Domain authority is a score out of one hundred. And people often come to us and say, you know, oh, my website has a domain authority of sixty two, but somebody with a domain authority of forty is two positions ahead of me in search. How can this be? And, you know, it all comes back to this whole idea that you're like looking at the little cup full of tea leaves and you're saying, oh, look, they've made this configuration. You've missed the kind of bigger picture, which is that there are many other things that go into ranking a website.
I mean, what this conversation clearly, clearly illustrates is that, you know, you and I could probably debate this and not necessarily agree.
Absolutely.
On some aspects of it. And so to the poor chief marketing officer or marketing exec who's trying to make sense of it and trying to, you know, report back to the board and explain why people are finding their competitor and not them in search. It is very frustrating, and I get that. But I think if you keep the maxim that, you know, build a website, create web pages that deserve to rank.
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, again, that's not a guarantee, but I think it sets you in good stead. I think, I think it helps to at least take away some of the the pain, because there's a good chance if your page genuinely deserves to rank because you've put the work in, it's a really good, really useful page. And other people think it is as well. So they're, you know, linking to it, etc., that it will, you know, the cream will float to the top. But I think sometimes it doesn't. And we've spoken in, in other in other podcasts about how Google is still more than capable of serving up absolutely awful results.
It sometimes serves up really awful ones. And I think the other thing to really kind of like hone in on here is this whole idea that sometimes, you know, just creating a website that deserves to be linked to doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to link to it.
Especially if they don't find it.
Right. And I think.
Chicken and egg in it.
Well, that's a huge frustration for a lot of people, right? They spend loads of money building a website. They make it really nice. They fill it full of good content, and then nobody knows about it. And there's a kind of momentum thing going on, right? You have to get people to start mentioning your website for it to start appearing in search for people to see your content, for people to link to your content, for it to start ranking in search. So if you never pick up that initial momentum, it can be an immensely frustrating experience. You just kind of sit languishing at the bottom. Nobody notices you, nobody ranks for you. Um, and I guess that's something that like we often help people with, right? Is like getting that initial kind of spark, if you like that initial kind of little bit of momentum. Um, and often that's all it takes. But like you say, you have to have all the pieces in place first. You have to actually build a website that people want to link to read, visit.
Yeah. And we, you know, yeah, we do that. We've done that for clients. We've done it for ourselves. But it's not always the piece of content that you think is killing it. That is fantastic, that achieves that. It can I mean, you mentioned earlier that, you know, how come my how come that five hundred word web page is ranking above us and, you know, we're a more authoritative, stronger website? Well, there's so many other factors. I mean, it could be that that piece of content that's only five hundred words is killing it, nails it. And lots of people love it and lots of people have linked to it. So it's hugely popular and it doesn't matter what you do, you're never going to shift it.
Yeah. I mean, well, you know, we see this with our own blog, right? You've written posts years ago, um, called, you know, white text on a white background for SEO.
Work, a masterful piece of work.
It's a short blog post that ranks very well, but, um, and it is good. Like, you know, don't get me wrong, um, but it's not something that if you sat down and looked at the backlog of content on our website that you'd immediately point to and say, that's going to rank really well and drive loads of traffic. Because it doesn't, it looks quite unassuming on the surface. You never know what you're kind of hidden gems are. I guess.
That's right. Okay, so big subject SEO, it's easy to get to get bent out of shape trying to get it right. Lots of great resources like Moz dot com, lots of good tools on dot com and a great, um, tutorial plug. Our website, it's our website. Got content on it that's actually useful for other people in our blog. Also it has. Yeah. Um, and these podcasts obviously, but you know, that's a source of traffic. So it's a way of getting traffic. Uh, fair to say it's rarely, not always the case, but rarely fast. Right. Um, you know, six to nine months, maybe sometimes you can get quick wins. You can sometimes, I mean, where you can get a quick win is where you've got a really strong website that's got good authority but is badly optimised. And we do come across that from time to time. So sometimes there are quick wins around, um, getting traffic from search. Okay. So that that's one aspect. Another aspect would be your area of expertise and paid search, pay per click advertising, for example, Google AdWords.
Not my area of expertise.
I think it well, you told me it was. I mean, if it isn't, I'm deeply disappointed. But this, again, is a subject where people to repeat myself get bent out of shape. Yeah. Oh, yes, we tried it. It doesn't work. Right. It kind of does work.
It does work. Yeah.
And it's possible to do it in a way that it doesn't work. It's possible to spend a lot of money on it and it doesn't work. And it's possible to get frustrated with it in exactly the same way that you might get frustrated with SEO.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the problem with PPC as well is that you, you know, you kind of see the money coming out and no clicks, or you see the money coming out and all these clicks racking up.
So just for anyone who's like, really doesn't know about this PPC pay per click, so your advert, somebody does a search, you're bidding on the words that they've put into search so that your advert appears, your advert says, you know, buy stuff from us or whatever it says.
Sure.
I hope you hope that that's what you do in your efforts. They click the advert, at which point you're now being charged, and they then come to your website and or a landing page will cover landing pages in a minute and hopefully engage. Buy something, do whatever. So it's, it feels more or less the same as SEO in, in, as in a user experience. Yep. They do a search, they click a link on a search results page.
I mean, half the time people don't even realise they're clicking ads nowadays, right? Because they've become so, so well hidden. They blend so well disguised. Um, yeah, I remember when they used to be bright yellow and stick out like a sore thumb. Um they.
Did.
But yeah, no, so exactly for from an end user perspective, I guess it is very like SEO from a kind of provider or company perspective. If you're marketing, it's a very different experience because you can actually say, I want to pay X amount of money to appear right at the top of the page. And nobody can argue with that. You know, if you're willing to outspend everybody else, you get to be at the top of the page whether or not that does you any good is a different story entirely, right? Because as you've kind of alluded to a couple of times, what you actually do with the traffic you're paying for is really important. And I think this is where.
Yeah, I think, I think that's where people get it horribly wrong. First of all, they buy clicks for searches who are not for people doing searches, who are not looking for what they sell.
Right.
So this is so it's wrong, right from that point of view. And the second big mistake I think, is when people do click, they land on a page which isn't entirely relevant, which will also have meant they've paid more for the click because of the way the Google.
Scores you scores.
You for getting a good user experience. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think just to pick up on the first point, we talk a lot in PPC and in SEO about intent, right? The intent of a keyword does, does looking at the keyword, can you tell whether somebody is using that to try and find a product to research a product? You know, what does it suggest about somebody's behavior or interests? And that's like really important. It's also really overlooked because if somebody's using a keyword like, I don't know, trying to think of an example, like clean my oil tank, um, you know, maybe they're just looking for a how to guide. Maybe they're looking for a service provider who can come and clean their oil tank. There's no real intent there. That's right. Um, if you're looking for oil tank cleaning services, tons of intent, you know, somebody looking to buy something. And often people get really caught out because they'll bid on keywords with no intent and spend a lot of money doing it, or they'll miss kind of key words at the very top of the funnel, as in when people are first searching for something like, how do I clean my oil tank? Well, there's actually an opportunity to get in there and say, oh, we'll do it for you for less than you can do it.
Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we're not getting into the technical aspects of PPC on this, in this chat just now. So we're talking about it as a means of generating traffic as a means of getting people to your website. It can be really effective. Yeah. I mean, sometimes the costs are high. I mean, I've certainly seen, um, costs of twenty, thirty quid for one click. Absolutely. And I can see how people go, well that's not, we can't possibly do that. But you know, that's only if the value of that click has potential to be significant. It's not like you're going to pay thirty quid for a click if you're selling two pounds ninety nine pence Crocs.
Well, I mean, I've seen it done.
That's a special kind of cock up.
I mean yeah, I've seen some pretty appalling things. Um but yeah, generally speaking, if you, you know, if you're, if a customer is worth a thousand pounds a month to you or even, you know, six thousand pounds a month to you, you can afford to spend a lot on getting those clicks in the first place. If not, then no.
Yeah. But it can be very competitive. I mean, you know, like you say, like SEO is competitive. And, and do you think there's a correlation between stuff that's expensive for clicks and how hard it would be to rank for it using SEO organic ranking? So if a clicks going to cost, you say thirty quid, the good chance is that organic rankings for that search term are going to be astronomical.
Yeah, I think so. Although I think it's really interesting how often that isn't the case, right? Where people are like, missed a trick. Okay. I think it's especially true of SEO because there'll be terms that people have realised that, you know, you can. You can make loads of money from these terms and start bidding on them with AdWords. And it takes ages for somebody to catch up on the SEO side. And actually, I'm going to write some content about this that ranks. And so yeah, I think there's some good opportunities sometimes there.
And one thing that we often get asked is if you spend money with Google and and appear in the paid search results, pay per click as we that we're talking about that, that somehow has a knock on effect and improves your organic normal search rankings, your SEO.
I love these conspiracy theories because they're both baseless.
I've spoken to people who are, you know, deadly serious that they, you know, as far as they're concerned, empirical evidence, they've seen it happen. It absolutely, definitely happens.
Yeah. I mean, this.
Is.
This is just cognitive bias, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. It's bullshit. I think it it got to be hasn't it.
Yeah. I think this is just people that look at, you know, that they'll start writing content, they'll get bored, they'll start paying for clicks for PPC, they'll see their content finally start ranking and they'll think, oh, I started paying.
Yeah. And all that's happened is time has lapsed and the organic, you know, work, the content stuff that they've done and started having started working.
Basically, I think the thing you've got to think about is, from Google's perspective, if you were going to be super nefarious, um, would you actually want to rank the content for the people who are already paying you to appear on the page for adverts, or would you like to keep them paying you?
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the argument that people would use and you could see how that makes sense. I mean, you know, I'm sure it's not the case. And Google would certainly deny it being the case. Okay. So search engine optimisation, you can, you know, done right. You can generate traffic gets people to your website, PPC done right, gets the right people, gets the wrong people. If you do it wrong, but gets the right people to your website. Uh, what about social media? I know it's not really your bag. And you know, other than being an avid user of Twitter, it's maybe not mine either, but a social media got the power to drive traffic to a website webpage.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, absolutely. The question is just whether or not that traffic is as good as the traffic from Google. Yeah. Um, and I think this all comes back to this whole idea of intent.
Intent.
When I'm sat at home scrolling through my Facebook feed, I'm not particularly receptive to people saying, you should buy this. Yeah, I'm not in that headspace.
Have you ever bought something? I think I have, and I can't remember what it was. I'm sure I saw a Facebook ad once and I thought, oh, actually I am. I am interested in that. And I clicked through to it and I'm pretty sure I did. Julie. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.
But I've seen it. Yeah. Or the retargeting has worked for me.
Okay. Okay.
That's a good point.
Looking for something. And then it's come up. And sometimes I look for things on purpose so that I get ads for them so that I can get more choice.
I don't know if we're hearing any of that because of these microphones, but basically, basically Julie is in the office with us and she's saying that she definitely has bought stuff as a result of, um, what she's, you know, something, an advert that she's seen or something that's been promoted on Facebook and yeah, so, so undoubtedly it can work.
Yeah. And I think going back to that whole idea of like, um, kind of generating demand for your products and that kind of thing, right? As a way of kind of exposing yourself to somebody for the first time. Yeah. For choice of phrase.
Yeah. You really want Leslie to edit that out, don't you? But, you know, she's not gonna.
Yeah, but if you want somebody to be introduced to your product, you know, early on in the whole kind of process of choosing a product, buying something, whatever, social media is a great way to do it.
I mean, it's got to be why, you know, the astronomical values that are on platforms like Facebook is because, you know, you can put your message in front of the right people at the right time.
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, I guess the point is LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those advertising on them can be far more expensive than pay per click advertising.
At least on Facebook. The adverts, the adverts should be in context. They should be related, shouldn't they? Yeah. Whereas I mean, you know, I watch any TV that I watch is it's nearly all catch up TV. So and I am watching a few things like Hill Street Blues, for example, which has been, which is available on channel four. And now you can pay for an advert free version of the channel four catch up tool, but I am not using that at the moment. Um, and the adverts just drive you to distraction. And yesterday I was, I was watching the on ITV four. I was watching the tour of Britain because it came past our house and the adverts were just unbelievable. I mean it was, it was, it was, they were, they were on for ages.
And.
They seemed to be on every five minutes and they were totally irrelevant. I mean, the adverts, I kind of know the scripts for the adverts that I watch when I watch Hill Street Blues on, on channel four. It's like there's an advert for um, I think it might be a car. I mean, this is it. I'm not even one hundred percent sure what the adverts for, but I know the advert almost word for word. Um and it's, it's a couple driving in a car and they're trying to get the kid to go to sleep and they drive through a pothole and then the baby gurgles and they're like, oh no, the baby's gonna wake up and it doesn't wake up. Right? And it's like, uh, and then, and then there's the newman[dot]com, dysfunction. Contact newman[dot]com!
I know there's.
That one that is always on. It's like, well, okay, I know I'm a fifty seven year old guy, but I'm not quite there yet. You know, I'm okay. And, but for somehow whether or not I don't know what it is, but you just get bombarded with the same adverts over and over again. I mean, that is something we can definitely avoid. Yeah. On the, on the, uh, digital platforms that we're involved with.
But it's interesting that you should say that because I think sometimes, you know, when I'm scrolling my LinkedIn feed, for example, I see adverts for the same providers pop up over and over and over again. So it's one of those things where I think, yeah, digital's great because it gives you the tools to avoid those mistakes and target your advertising. Like you say, right person, right place. Yeah. But only if you're smart with them. And some people are very lazy with them. And I think that's where a lot.
You're right. I tell you, the worst offenders. Um, I, I, I use Twitter predominantly because I'm interested in politics and I follow people. I follow people across the whole political spectrum, not just a particular group of people. Um, because I'm interested in everybody's opinion and quite often they'll put articles on.
Sure.
So it might be on The Scotsman or the Herald or, you know, various other newspapers, the ones that aren't gated and the way that newspapers these are businesses who for the last two hundred years have communicated with people and fed them information, stories, etc., as well as carrying adverts. In my opinion, they are getting this spectacularly wrong. I mean, it's horrible. The pages are utterly unusable. I mean, they're completely and utterly. It has gone now. They might turn around and say, well, it's working for us because it's generating revenue, but you don't know what you don't know. I mean, how many people are getting turned off? Or maybe, you know, you buy a subscription and suddenly you don't see those adverts anymore. Maybe. Right. But they are getting it big time wrong.
It's horrible. I find that really interesting too, right? Because this is something.
Of clickbait.
But it's something that YouTube push really aggressively to the subscription service. You can pay YouTube to not see advertising when your advertising is the stick with which you beat customers towards a subscription model, you're doing something wrong because adults shouldn't be so offensive.
Certainly running out of ideas. I haven't got the answer, by the way. But you're right. I think they've run out.
You shouldn't have to pay people not to see your adverts, because your adverts should, by definition, either be unnoticeable or actually fun to watch.
Well, I was you took the words right out of my mouth because we all remember funny adverts or classy adverts. Really great advertising sticks with us throughout our lives. I mean, you know, when I was just before we started the podcast, I went the the club biscuits, if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club. And so that's, that's an advert I must have heard when I was a kid. Right. And it still sticks with me now. And I just went out and bought club biscuits, you know, like, you know, forty years after hearing that advert for the first time.
And that is effective advertising, right? Yeah.
The biscuits are nice. I mean, that helps. Okay, so SEO, PPC, social media and social media, are we wrapping in, you know, the likes of LinkedIn etc., which is different.
I think audience to, to wrap in things like YouTube and TikTok and things now, right? Although those are big scary words for us because we're too old to understand TikTok.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Although it isn't, you know, a lot of the TikTok stuff I see that does the rounds in the WhatsApp groups and things like that. It seems to be like, you know, guys my age doing funny things on TikTok.
I think it's just people doing stupid shit. Yeah, that's all it is.
Yeah. I mean, and in part, that's why the internet is totally necessary in our lives, right? Because we want to see people doing stupid shit.
I mean.
Okay, so all right, so all of this stuff is designed to get people to look at our website or a landing page. So we all know what a website is. We hope that people are sending people to a specific page on their website. But the other option is landing pages, right?
So standalone pages that are designed to drive people to take a specific action. Yeah. So signing up for something, downloading something, buying something is probably the best.
With a lot of distractions removed.
Right? So that's the whole point of a landing page. It's single path, right? You can only do one thing on there, or it's going to drive you to take one specific action.
And you can either build them on your website just in a separate part of your website, or you can use we, we, for example, will use HubSpot for our own landing pages. We use HubSpot and Unbounce for clients landing pages. So there are platforms out there where you can create.
Standalone.
Standalone pages. In fact, for one particular customer, we created a landing page for their entire website and it was for a sporting event and it was really successful. Yeah. I mean, they sold out within two or three days. The whole event was sold out within two or three, and it was a one page landing page on Unbounce that we used to build it. Yeah. Fantastically successful. That was, I think they got their traffic via a mailshot an email shot.
So assuming that there was one action right by it.
Yeah, there was basically like, here's the information about the event. This is, you know, send us your information using this form. Um, and you'll be in the mix kind of thing. And then, you know, and this is, well, this is the event, this is how much it costs. This is when it is, it's a golfing event, a five day, four day golfing event, which was and it sold out like within days. It was great. It was great.
It sounds dreadful.
Sounds dreadful, I love it. In fact, after we finished podcasting today, I'm actually gonna head over to the golf course, um, on my Jack Jones and hit some golf balls around because it's quite a nice evening, although the sun's gone in now. But anyway, I'm rambling. Um, okay, so landing pages are very effective because you remove the distraction, you remove like the menu and all you just, it's just, it has an action. Yeah. What if people don't take that action?
Uh, then you're screwed.
But is that basically just means the landing page, isn't it?
Right, right. And and so this is the kind of axe that I bring to, to grind on this subject is, is this whole idea that, you know, a landing page is something you can just kind of throw up. It's done. Right. You just, you just throw it up there and you have a form at the bottom and people will just magically take action. But it doesn't work like that. Unfortunately. There's a lot of, I guess, both science and art that goes into creating good landing pages too. Yeah. Um, and this is, I guess where the whole foundation of the idea of conversion rate optimisation comes from once you've driven somebody onto a page, how can you then drive them to take action? And it's not an easy thing to do. You can't. A lot of the time, it's not as simple as just kind of, you know, put your stall out and say, oh, I sell, you know, blue widgets, please buy one. Um, that just doesn't work anymore. The internet's a very noisy place. Everyone's shouting about something. Yeah. Um, so you've got to do something. I think nowadays quite interesting. Um, a lot of the time we do really interesting work with the design, for example, on landing pages that we put up there make them nice and eye catching, easy to read.
To try and engage, engage people straight away. Uses of use of video, background videos, things like that to try and, you know, try and tell a story as quickly as you can and try and engage the person who's visiting. Okay. I mean, again, going back to traffic generation, one thing that we didn't talk about because, you know, we probably should do more of it ourselves is email marketing. And I mentioned that for that very successful landing page that we created for the sporting event, the golf event, the, the people who signed up for that were part of a mailing list, you know. So now this is a bit of a strange one, isn't it, because I, I mean, it's it's statistically a very powerful means of generating business.
Yeah.
At the same time, where, you know, today, out of the far too many emails that have landed in my inbox, probably eighty percent of them have been a complete waste of my time. I don't even open them. I can see that they're spam. So it is abused on a scale like you just can't imagine.
Well, this is the problem, isn't it? It's too easy to abuse and therefore very difficult to stand out nowadays.
So how do you stand out?
Well, it's a good question. Um, I remember I read a really interesting study once about a company that decided to ditch their email marketing and write traditional letters to people instead. Wildly successful because no one was expecting it. Um, but I think there are ways of standing out in people's email inboxes.
Um, well, first of all, only send emails to people who might be interested in what you get because most of the interest in most of the emails I get, I mean, I'm not even their audience. They're not even their target audience.
To for the people listening, we run a digital design marketing business, and we get emails offering to do SEO for us all the time. I mean, yeah, absolutely. It's like trying to sell a carpenter carpentry. You know, it's just not going to happen, is it? Um, but yeah, I think that's exactly it. You've got to have a relevant audience. You've got to know who your target audience is to start with. And you've got to do something interesting, whether it's with your headlines, whether it's with what's actually in your emails, you've got to do something to stand out from all that noise because yeah, everybody's closing.
You know, that must have always been the case. I mean, it must always have been the case even before we were doing using emails to send out, you know, you know, direct response marketing. You know, if you sent ten thousand out and it was to the wrong people, then, you know, you're not going to get a good response, are you? It's just as simple as that, really. No different.
I think I might be nodding.
I'm saying it's, um, it's all down to your list.
It's all down the list. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's right.
And that does not mean go and buy a list.
No Permission based marketing. That's right. Okay. All right. So, you know, we've covered a lot of subjects there. I mean, SEO, PPC, uh, social media, email marketing, landing pages, all of which can help to generate enquiries and generate sales in some respects, sometimes the landing page is actually selling something. You know, it's like you land on the page and it's like, here it is, it's nine point nine nine, buy it now sort of thing. But, um, you know, for us, most of the things we do is, uh, business to business, professional services, engineering company, stuff like that. It's not the stuff that people buy online traditionally, generally speaking. So, but um, okay. I mean, I mean, we'll probably look at some of these subjects in a bit more detail in other podcasts, but.
I think it's good to know how they all kind of fit together in a mix, isn't it? It's very easy to get sidetracked.
Well, that's a good point. So if you start from, let's say we've got a business and we've had businesses like this who they've got basically no brand, no website, no digital presence at all. Yeah. So where do each of the bits that we've just discussed fit in? Let's just, just, just to finish the podcast off.
Well, I think, um, that's it. Does that not depend entirely on the business and their audience? Right. Isn't this.
Well it does. I was thinking from a practical point of view. So from a practical point of view, PPC is likely to generate enquiries and get people looking at a website quickly.
Sure.
SEO is more long term social media. Once you start to get a head of steam with your content. So you've got something worth saying in social media that will start kicking in. So you'll then start using, you know, landing pages, etc.. So for, for brand new businesses who kind of are in a position where they would like to start finding new customers straight away.
Sure.
You start your SEO and your PPC together. Maybe, but your PPC is what's going to deliver.
In the in the short term. Absolutely.
You could almost argue that you would use the PPC till the SEO starts to kick in. Maybe.
Yeah. But I think there's a huge kind of benefit to doing all of these things holistically, right? It's it's one of the things that we see time and time again is people like to kind of look at these things as individual or in a vacuum, if you like. I'm going to do SEO. I'm going to do PPC. Ultimately, if you create landing pages that are optimised for keywords that people are using to find your site, you can also advertise on pay per click advertising platforms with those same landing pages, right? Because they're optimised for good keywords. They're interesting. They generate they drive people to take action. I think there's a real benefit to looking at the thing as a kind of complete picture, if you like, and not saying, I'm going to go away and pay somebody to do my PPC. Um, one of the most confusing things to me is always that people will sometimes pay different agencies to do different services.
Yeah. Yeah. We see that. We do.
Yeah. I find that very odd because these things are meant to work together, you know, fundamentally fair enough.
If the agencies are all working together, you know, they're all happy to like you do your bit. We'll do our bit like we work with some PR agencies, don't we? Some of our customers have got their own PR agency or they've got they've hired a PR agency rather than we work with them. I mean, not always entirely successfully. We speak a different language. Yeah. We've maybe got different aims and goals. And although we can all get around the table and agree stuff, we find that once everybody goes off that it doesn't always.
Well, this is exactly it, isn't it? If somebody's creating your social media adverts or your social media posts and somebody else is creating your landing pages, and those messages don't mesh or line up, then that's weird for customers, right? You know it because everybody's been on a website where what they land on is very different to the advert that drove them there. Or, you know, you'll see a brand on Facebook and you think, oh, this is this kind of brand. And then you go through to their website and you find out that, you know, they're actually portraying themselves in a very different light. Yeah. Um, so I think it is kind of important to keep these things connected if you can. Mhm. Um, but yeah.
Good. All right. I think that was worth worth chatting about. And, uh, we'll pick up on some of those subjects and go into them probably in a bit of a deeper dive in some future podcasts.
Absolutely.