Are You Up For The Hard Miles Required To Succeed Online? – Episode 41

In the twenty first century. What we're seeing is to succeed and generate business and appear in search and be all over social media and just kind of have a solid presence, uh, requires a massive effort. We've covered this a lot in previous podcasts. So...

Yeah, you need to know sort of what the end goal is and you need to sort of see, you need to know where you're going to work out how to get there. And I think strategy isn't it.

And I think you need to be honest with yourself, you know, if the if the organisation needs it badly enough and wants it badly enough, then you have to be honest about, you know, preparing yourself for the work that you have to do.

Yeah, the resource that's needed at their end. And, you know, and in whatever agency they're using, but all the resource that they're going to need, do they have enough resource to actually get there in the time period they want? one.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, testing out some new equipment. So bear with us. Uh, this week I'm joined by, well, this episode I'm joined by Caron and Julie. Oh, Caron's shaking her hand at me already. What's wrong?

You're wriggling around on your chair and squeaking.

Yeah, it's slightly squeaky. Okay, I'll try to wriggle around on the chair. So the guys haven't been given too much information.

We haven't been given any information. We're sitting here expectantly.

The reason is, I'm not. I'm not. I'm interested just to kind of see what you think about this idea. And it's nothing particularly complex or anything, but we are obviously working with a lot of companies on digital marketing and the companies we work with. We love them all, but to varying degrees, they, uh, get it, don't get it, recognise what they're up against, don't recognise what they're up against, I think, anyway. Um, and I read something which said, and I'm kind of quoting, although I'm not, I haven't written the exact quote down, but in sport, having the will to win is not enough, is it? It's pulling a face.

No, it's in sport.

Having the will to win is not enough. You need the will to prepare to win. And you know this Julian pointing.

To work at it. You need to slog away and slog away, don't you?

That's right. The more work you do, the harder you work. The likelihood of succeeding in sport increases. And even then, it doesn't. You're not guaranteed. You're not. You're not definitely going to win the marathon just because you did all the program and ran all the miles and did everything you were supposed to do. But, you know, but at least you've.

Got a chance.

You're standing a chance. That's right. So I think, and I might be wrong, but I think with digital marketing, a lot of people, you know, based on empirical evidence, a lot of companies still just don't get it. They, they, they, they might, for example, buy HubSpot, right? We bought some software, you know, that's, that shows how much we want this because we're now spending, you know, five, six, seven hundred quid a month on HubSpot because we know that's going to help us. And they might even hire or they might engage with an agency and they sort of make all the right noises about, you know, to show they've got the will to win, to show that they want to succeed and start to generate business from search, etcetera. But they don't in my what I'm seeing is a lot of them still don't really get the amount of work required.

We get asked all the time, well, can you go and do the SEO stuff? Mhm. Like, well, it doesn't work like that. You can go and look. Yeah, optimise pages, which is kind of what they mean by do the SEO. You can optimise pages, you can improve what's already there, but that's not enough. That is basically just the foundations. That's like picking up a tennis racquet and being able to just hit the ball. But if we're going down these analogy routes, which it's always about good, horribly wrong.

It's always about sport. Sport is anathema. You're, um.

You're picking up a tennis racket. You can hit a ball, but you've got to learn all the other stuff and you've got to keep practicing, which is all the, you know, the things that actually make your SEO start working properly.

You're learning your craft. You're learning how to think about what it is you need to do, and you need to be open to those ideas. So when we're putting thoughts and plans forward to clients and we're saying this is what needs to be done, I think that's when they're being prepared to win kicks in. And I don't know whether it's it's putting people off by saying, you have to do this and this and this.

Well, it's not. It's not being prepared to win. It's it's having.

The will, the will to prepare.

To win. Yeah. That's what I'm driving.

And it was a, it was a football analogy. And it was an American football coach who said it.

Yeah. It was it on a television or something?

No, it was something I read.

Heard it recently. I didn't hear it recently. I mean, how.

Many how many little boys want to be footballers? Mhm. Um, but how many of them actually, you know, go out every single day and kick balls against walls day after day after day, go to the gym, put the work in, make themselves stronger. Read everything there is to know about football. You know, improve little things, improve big things, go for a run. Put all that effort in. That actually involves being a footballer.

Mhm.

Yeah. And it's the same, I guess, in music. I've spent a lot of my life playing in bands and things, but probably never wanted to be a professional musician enough. Yeah. You know, I was like, yeah, I want to be a professional musician. I started playing the drums when I was eight years old, and I used to practice every day. And then I started playing in bands when I was about fourteen and we played around the clubs. Then we we started. One of the guys was writing music and we used to take those tapes down to London. It was really exciting getting on the train in Barrow in Furness and going down to A&R records and and shooting it, and they would listen to your tape, which you had to take down, physically take down. And, and, but I it was probably, I mean, there's an element of luck in all things and certainly in that game, I think that certainly the music game I think there was. But I just think probably I didn't want it enough. Probably I wasn't prepared to do everything that was.

Put the rest of your life on hold, basically, and do nothing else.

Move to London, be where all the action is, be where everything's going on. I kind of wasn't quite prepared to do that again. It's just it's just another analogy. But I think in, uh, in digital marketing, I think a lot of businesses, um, I think they still don't realise the amount of work required.

Yeah. And you can hire an agency, but the agency can't do everything, you know, particularly if it's if they're in engineering or something really technical, like a lot of our clients in renewables and oil and gas and stuff, then, you know, we can do so much to help them, but they have the expertise and we don't, and they have to give us the thing that makes them different is their expertise, which is what we don't have as an agency. So they have to give us that information that we can put on their website to, to make them stand out. And, and, you know, the thought leadership content and the expert content and, and things that people are looking for and things that people don't know, they have to give us that not just once, but over and over again for different parts of the website. And, and it's relentless.

But what gives what, what gives them the will to win? Do they have to engender that in themselves, or is that something that we can do for them?

Yeah, I'm just talking to the microphone.

Did you hear me?

I did.

Answer me!

Well, yeah. I mean, they kind of go, yeah, we want to be on page one of Google.

But yeah.

But they're like, it doesn't really matter because maybe they're getting referrals from other.

Places.

Whereas we've got some very small clients who absolutely relentlessly throw content at us because they're so small that they're motivated. It's life or death. Well, it's, you know, it's making a living. If they don't show up on Google, they're not going to make a living. So for them, they get it. Because, you know, every time something happens in their industry, they're sending us content to put on the website and they absolutely get it. Whereas the bigger clients, maybe the hunger is just not there as much.

Perhaps it's because you mentioned it earlier, you said a company, you said we work with a company who might not get it. So are we talking about the individual has to have that will, and then they have to be supported in making the doing the work that will give them the the work or the work sort of ethic.

Like manager might absolutely want to, to make this project work and, and see them, their, their sort of content on page one of Google or whatever, but maybe their subject matter experts, their technical team, their board kind of don't get it.

Yeah, I think you make a good point. I, I think at board level, I think there's general acceptance in the marketing world that at board level, it certainly in this country and in certain industries, um, marketing just isn't viewed as something serious. It's not.

They still see it as the colouring in department.

Yeah.

I love it when you say that. It just makes me laugh every time.

But you know.

But it's.

True though, they just think it's something sort of fluffy and they kind of, you know, print their logo on golf balls and that's the marketing department. And, um, you know, they don't see the contribution it makes. They see it kind of as a cost rather than something that actually can bring, you know, new clients into a business and they don't really take it seriously enough.

Mhm. That's right. So in the twenty first century, what we're saying is to succeed and generate business and, and appear in search and be all over social media and just kind of have a solid presence, uh, requires a massive effort. We've covered this a lot in previous podcasts. So. So what is it? I'm still not really getting to where they don't understand that. What what is it they don't understand going back to the, you know, going back to the um, do what's required to win, prepare to win. Um, the content thing, let's just, I mean, if you look at the.

Content, they don't understand.

Yeah. And why should they? You know, I get why they don't understand it is, is are we not explaining it well enough as to why we keep banging on about content and you know, why we're analysing, say, for example, you know, a certain search term would potentially generate business for a client. You know, we will dig in and find out how hard it's going to be to position one of our client's pages onto, you know, page one of Google so that there's a possibility of them getting some, some clicks to their website. And then from that, generating some, some enquiries.

We, you know, we talk them through it, we, um, we usually present something visual so they can see a diagram of all the different pieces of content that need to be sort of completed to, to give that, that them the best chance.

Content clusters we're talking about.

Yeah. I'm trying not to use geeky jargon content clusters. Sounds weird, but it does. It's a, it's a diagram with lots of blobs on it that are all the different pieces.

Sounds weird, I know.

Okay.

You have to know, but you have to know the client. And it's always about the individual. That's why I mentioned company because in the end, we're talking about individuals. Yeah. So if we can give an individual the support or an individual or group of individuals, say a team, you know, three, four, five, whoever, if we can give them the support and the, the understanding, even if they don't know why they're doing stuff, we can, we can explain why we're asking for something or why something has to be done, but we can, we can demonstrate to them. And there's different ways, because you need to know the personalities that you're working with. So for some individuals, we can say, well, look at this, this competitor's page, this is the page that's at number one for a particular search. So if you take it very simply, and then we show them what the page looks like and say, and we say things like, you know, be honest. If you saw that page, would you be won over? And if you saw your page at the moment, you know, the way it looks, would you be won over by that? Which one would win in your opinion?

Well, let's give people a few insights as to the sort of things we might do to try and understand why a particular web page is ranking well for a search term. If it's a let's say, for example, as a search term that we would like our client to rank for or they, you know, it would definitely make sense for them to rank for the search term. Like what are some of the things that we might look at in order to ascertain what we have to do? Um, what we have to do to prepare to win to, to win over that, that search result position.

Well, we'd look at where they are now. Do they have a page that ranks for that at all? Do they have a page that that's closed. Do they have anything on the on the subject. Do they have other pages that could support that? Because Google likes of to know that you haven't just got one page on something, but you've got lots of content. So it kind of proves that you're an expert on that subject. So what have they got? Just now we do a thorough audit of where they are now, what they've got and, you know, is that suitable for improving or are there big gaps that we need to fill?

I think for a starting position for that, just to put some meat on the bones might be that we would use one of the proprietary tools like SEMrush or Moz Site explorer to figure out what the world. What the search engines. What internet land thinks in inverted commas about our customers, our clients website. Yeah. So, you know, a starting point might be like using those tools. We can establish that our client site. Let's assume it's a new client. So we've done virtually nothing to it. We're at we're at the start of the process. Um doesn't have very good authority. And that sounds a bit techie, but basically we're saying how much do the search engines trust our client's website? How much do they. How much credence do they give to it? So that's a great starting point. So for example, it's usually a score out of one hundred. It's not unusual to see a website with a score of, say, fifteen or twenty. So we figure that out. Our client's website has got a score of fifteen out of one hundred. We analyse the page one results and sometimes they might all be forty or fifty. Trust, you know, authority. So that's like a starting position, isn't it? That's almost like the first conversation with the customer is like.

The site itself.

Yeah, Google, let's just call it Google rather than search engines. Google doesn't trust your website. And then, you know, there's a reason for that. We could dig into that a bit deeper, but that's like the starting position.

And then you figure out why.

Then we figure out why. That's right. So we look at, we might then look at the sites that are the pages, rather that are ranking for a particular search term. And they belong to websites that have high authority, for example. And along with the high authority, they've got, um, a lot of content now, you know, all we're doing at the moment is, is weighing that content. We're not actually working out whether it's high quality or anything, but we're saying, right, your website, Mr. New client has got fifty pages on it, and we've looked at the pages of the, you know, the sites that, that the pages that are on position on page one. They've all they're all websites that have got four, five, six hundred pages, for example. So now we've got two metrics. We've got like, there's, there's no authority compared to the sites that are ranking. There's a, there's an obvious reason that they've got that much content on these other sites. Do you think then they start to understand why it might be a content game? Or do you think they look at that and go, well, that seems like a mountain to climb. Let's not bother.

I think a lot of clients go.

For.

It, but ours is much prettier. So why is theirs ranking higher and, and the, the sort of visual aspect and you know, the, the pride in their own website is quite difficult to get past. And it's like, yeah, that's, that's fine. That's for the users. But Google isn't caring how pretty it is. Google's looking at the content and how useful it is.

Well, Google might care about the prettiness, but in a different way. If people land on the website and they stay on the website after being sent there from a link in a Google search result, Google's measuring that in all likelihood, it doesn't say when I send people to this website, They don't come back to the search result. 10s later, they seem to stay there. Yeah. And so that will play into what.

It looks like. Or maybe it's got really nice images or very nice videos or it's just got. Yeah, it's easy to navigate or something, but there's ways of making people stay around longer. But Google's not actually going is because it's beautiful. It's going it's because people are finding it easy to use or enjoy using it or like looking at it. Yeah.

So but the algorithm is also assessing constantly whether people are using the site because it's well structured. Like you say, the pages are well structured. People can find the things they want to. So it might not be a prettiness or, or anything. It could be really awful looking website, but people are finding their way around it and they're finding the information they need and, you know, page structure and the way it's the way it's laid out and whether it's got lots of nasty code that's got to be.

Let's keep it.

But but Google will you know, the algorithm will only return pages that that seem to be successful. So I think you have to, you know, all those metrics, the two that you found, you know, the, the, the, the relative authority and then the amount of content that one site has as opposed to your client's site or several sites. It's a drip feed. It's, it's, but it's not.

But I want to, I want to keep.

Bad news constantly about.

Yeah, yeah, but I want, I want to sort of look at these metrics so that we can try and give people the information they need if they have got the appetite to prepare to win. So these are the sort of things we're saying. So, so, but when it comes down to the individual page, as you were just talking about, what we'll also do is say, well, for this particular search term, the pages that are ranking the highest have these characteristics. These this is apart from whether the site overall has got high authority and lots of pages on it. What about the actual page? What sort of content has it got? Well, actually, you know, for this particular subject, this particular search query that Google seems to be favoring pages that have got video on videos.

Yeah.

Because Elliot spoke about this when he came on the show. And it's a great episode for anyone who's interested in video because video is a really hot topic. But he, he came up with a stat which talked about how much more likely a page is to appear in a, you know, high up in a search, in a search result, if it's got video on it. So as well as the sort of site authority and the site size, looking at the page itself, what's has it got video on it? Has it got has it got lots of words on it? We might, we might actually count the words. There's lots of tools out there that help you count content. So there's no point sort of expecting a three hundred word piece of content to dominate a market. Yeah. If the existing pages, if the content that's already hoovering up all of that attention of of all got on average two or three thousand words on them. This is where, you know, you get into the idea of what's called long form content. I don't think they sometimes call them skyscraper pages. You know, it's like you don't just say, here's some information about this subject. You say, here is chapter and verse. Here is here is a piece of content which is going to answer all your questions, give you all your information, you can read it, you can watch a video, you can do whatever you like. It's, it's kind of like the last word on this subject. And it's, it's that level of effort which is required in order to get the, get the success that we want. So this, this will to win is now being supported by the hard work required to win.

Yeah.

Yeah, that.

Makes sense to have a really comprehensive page on the subject if that's what the market needs. Yeah, it might be that that's not. But for example, a really comprehensive page supported by other pages that prove that it's not just a one off. And you've done that page and walked away and ticked a box.

But I can see why people get fed up and I can feel why they get hacked off with that.

Because it's hard.

Well, it's hard, but let's say you could put a lot of effort. I mean, because we understand how all this stuff works. We could write, we could create a website about something that we know nothing about, but we could do the research. We could, we could, we could produce a site that actually starts to get good rankings and starts to get lots of attention, even though it's not something we could actually deliver. It's not it's not a service or a product that we offer. That's true. This is like affiliate sites. So affiliate sites will put a power of working so that people find them and not the actual producers of the products or services. And then the affiliates make money when people click the links. Yeah.

So they sell, they sell the links. They're like, look, if you want to get found, people will find our site and then they'll click on the links and they'll find your site and they can make a lot of money out of it. And yes, it seems kind of slightly unfair, but you know. Yeah, they've put a heap of work in. Yeah. And that's why they're winning.

That's right. And but but we I think we can all understand why. Say, for example, if you were a firm of lawyers, but you were paying for referrals from an affiliate site because they had a ten thousand page website that was dominating the search rankings, even though they weren't lawyers, they'd actually just gone out and played the content game, and they were hoovering up all that attention. You could understand why, if our client was a lawyer, they were like, well, you know, we can't compete with that. Remember, that enquiry had not too long ago from the organisation in America, and they basically decided to create their own affiliate site because they said in their market, it seemed to be affiliate sites that were dominating the search results. And so they said, well, you know, we can't beat them. Let's join them. Let's create an affiliate site because it seems that they're the sites, they're the type of pages and sites that are getting favoured by the search engine algorithms. So, you know, going back to what we were talking about, you know, they were prepared to do that because that's what it was.

Important to win. They they realised that that that was the way forward. And they wanted they wanted it badly enough to actually put that work in.

But the good.

News is, you know, there's a lot of, um, areas of business or niches or for our American listeners, niches where you don't need like ten thousand page strong websites with, with each page has got three thousand words on it. And there's, there's plenty of opportunity to, to figure out, you know, if you do the, if you do the hard work and figure out what's required, what you need to do in order to succeed, there's still plenty of opportunity.

There's plenty of really bad websites out there, and there's plenty of websites with pages with a couple of sentences on. Um, so it's pretty easy to, to sort of do better than them. And so, you know, in certain industries, it's not hard at all.

So is that, does that bring us to the, you know, looking at the work that you will have to do if you are motivated by looking at some of the sites that are that you would compete against that don't have so much work on them, they're just ranking by accident. So you can find those those sort of accidental wins, and that can give you hope. It can prepare you to do the work in a small way and achieve somewhat of a, of a win. But not only that, get your brain working and your, your team working in a way that you can replicate that effort, maybe, maybe work harder, but replicate that effort and that type of effort again and again and again.

When we do, when we do a review, say, for example, and we and we offer this, this as a completely free service, if anyone's interested in sitting down, usually over Zoom with, with, with me or one of the guys here to go through the website. And what we often do when we do that is, uh, they will, they will maybe bring up some of their competitors and say, oh, you know, when I type this into Google, I find my competitors, I don't find me. And it's very quick and easy using some search techniques to, to, to show them why, you know, this is why you're not getting that traffic. I mean, a common one, and it came up last week with a new prospect is they expected, I think I mentioned this last time in the other podcast, but, you know, we should rank when people type this in. And yet that phrase didn't appear anywhere on their website.

And, you know.

They and they kind of they laugh, they went, oh, okay, you know, it, it just hadn't really.

Made.

Sense to them, you know, so.

When they see it, it was.

But at the same time, to your point, it is possible that some pages are ranking because Google is like seeing people searching for something and nobody's really bothered to try and go after that, that, that audience. And so.

Google's.

Yeah, Google's kind of working it out and doing its best. And that might mean that's when you get these situations where you get companies that have invested, they've got great website, great brand and everything else, and they're at position nineteen. Yeah. And, you know, like some horrible little website that was built when God was in short pants is actually getting all the traffic. It's at number one, even though they've never tried to optimise for it. It's almost just like you said, accidental, uh, rankings, I suppose. Yeah. Okay. So what, what advice are we offering just to sort of like some this just, you know, just to bring this one to a conclusion. You know, I think it's much better in life, you know, to, to understand what you're up against. If you're gonna start out again, start out to try and achieve something that's hard.

Yeah. You need to know sort of what the end goal is. And you need to sort of see if you need to know where you're going to work out how to get there.

And I think.

Strategy isn't.

It. And I think you need to be honest with yourself because sometimes, you know, you, you, and you do it in your own life. You'll look at somebody doing something better than you or or something that's working out better than what it's worth. You know, the same things working out for you. And you look at it and you know exactly what that that other thing is and why it's doing so well. And your brain just goes, I don't know if I want to do that. I don't know if I want it badly enough. But I think for an organisation, you know, if if the organisation needs it badly enough and wants it badly enough, then you have to be honest about, you know, preparing yourself for the work that you have to.

Do, the resource that's needed at their end. And, you know, and in whatever agency they're using, but all the resource that they're going to need, do they have enough resource to actually get there in the time period they want? They could, you know, you've got to go for it. And, you know, some companies just don't have that resource available.

Mhm. That's right. I'm just watching that microphone.

I know it's wobbling isn't it.

Teetering and about to fall off your desk. Which which might be a, um, some sort of metaphor for, for winding this thing up. I'm not really.

Sure it's all going to come crashing down in a.

Minute. Yeah. I mean, it was one of those where I didn't really want to. I just really wanted to throw it out there and, and have a kind of round table discussion about it, which I think I think we've done somewhat. I mean, it's it's a bit of a strange subject in some respects, because it does feel a bit like we're beating people with a stick, saying, if you want to get your website found, if you want to generate business online, then you know, you need the will to prepare to win. Just like in sport, if you want to achieve something. But it kind of is, it kind of is how it is.

But we, I think we, we do, um, we do a good job, I think of, of helping people see it without feeling afraid of it because we're there, you know, sort of helping, helping, helping their hands, telling them what they need.

To do next. So yeah, it's not, it's not like a huge mountain. It's just like one step at a time. Um, and, and, and they've got a map because we provided them with a map. So it's not as quite as daunting, but, but you just need to keep putting one foot in front of another over and over again.

Yeah, I think like with a lot of things in life, you know, some things that seem insurmountable, some things that feel like they're going to be really difficult. Is it worth even bothering? It's amazing what you can achieve if you just keep putting one step in front of the other, I think. Okay. Um, so this has been, uh, me, Dave, Caron and Julie on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, if you'd like to come on the show and we've got some great guests lined up, we're now getting requests from people, which is lovely. Then just go to https://www.redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface and go onto the contacts tab or go to redevolution.com. And pretty much every page on our website has got a way to get in touch with us. Um, if you want to come on, that's great. If you've got any questions, feel free to fire the questions through and we'll include them in future podcasts and discuss them for you and give you a namecheck when we do it, if that's what you want. So that's all for now and we'll see you next time.

Bye bye.

Bye.