How To Generate Business From Your Website: The Logic Behind High-Converting Web Architecture – Episode 47

These conversations about the challenge of generating business from your website are quite common for us. We have them a lot. What does Google want? Search traffic.

The idea being is that we'll give you a clear picture. I mean, you know, Google's not alive. It hasn't got a personality, but it does not.

It's not an evil genius with a white cat.

Might be, but it does definitely have preferences. And if it's decided that for a search term, like how much does should stone wrinkling?

He nearly said it.

Didn't.

Cost.

Um, and it's decided that the best kind of content to answer that is an FAQ page with thirty different questions and answers about the product. That's what you need to produce. If instead, they've decided that the best thing to rank for is a video, that's what you need to produce. It's not rocket science, is it? It's just look at what Google wants to rank and then do something better.

Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Uh, I'm with Alex.

Yep.

Who's obviously really enthusiastic about this podcast.

Hey, I was just reeling. You managed to get it right. It only took, what, like forty odd episodes? No more stumbles.

Well, yeah. You know, the thing is as well, the reason, um, we're closing in now on, on episode fifty. Um, and I thought it was a good time to do a podcast, a sort of generic podcast, which is capturing, you know, a chat about all of the stuff that we do day in, day out. I mean, we had the sort of working title for this as the challenge, if you like, the challenge of getting traffic and generating traffic to your website and generating business from that traffic. So generating business from your website is the broad subject today. So it's, it's just big picture stuff, and I think it'll be maybe a useful episode for people who are probably somewhat across it, but still not quite getting it. But it would also, I think, be useful for people who are like start up businesses and the like, who are kind of like, well, you know what? Overall, what, what are we trying to achieve? These conversations often, we often have these conversations when we do discovery sessions with, with potential customers. I mean, just, just, just to kind of mini pitch that the way that we work at read eval is if a business comes to us because they want to generate enquiries from the website, the website's not working for them. Then we would start the process off with a completely free piece of work where we work with the company representatives. We let the marketing department or the company owner depends, and we'll work through a process where we figure out where they are, where they would like to be, how they might get from where they are to where they would like to be, and everything in between. And we do that as an exercise to figure out whether whether it's possible, uh, whether it's something that we are the right people to help with a whole range of things. So these conversations about the challenge of generating business from your website are quite common for us. We have them a lot.

They are quite common. I also think they're really useful, right? Because it's really easy to get kind of really sucked into the tactics that you're using and, you know, just doing SEO for the sake of SEO or PPC for the sake of PPC and kind of lose sight of the, the overall objective and how it all ties together. So I think, yeah, sometimes it's really nice just to kind of sit back and have a think about how it all interlinks really?

Yeah. You're talking about the random acts of marketing, which we quite often refer to, which is a phrase coined, I think, by Mike Lieberman at square two. Uh, this idea of random acts of marketing. Let's try this, let's try that, let's try this. I mean, sometimes you can do that. You can just like chuck something at the wall and sometimes it sticks.

If you've got a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of wall. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So let's, um, let's have, uh, a maybe a fictitious business. Um.

Go on. Let's see what we what we conjure this time.

Well, I'm trying to think. Really. I mean, a fictitious business. Who who can provide their services? Let's go for services so they can provide their services to, shall we say, a global audience or a UK wide audience or basically. Yeah, they're not necessarily fixed geographically. Or we could make it simpler. Let's just say, you know, they're a company, they're based in Birmingham and they provide a professional service maybe in the financial sector, or maybe it's some other professional service and engineering consultancy or, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Professional services they're based in, say, Birmingham, but you know, they pick up work around the country. They go into, you know, competitive tenders and they get work in various places and they can get, um, you worried about that cup of tea?

I'm putting it down very carefully. Yeah. So don't interrupt your flow.

Oh no it's.

Fine.

You did anyway. Fidgeting, said the master, fidgeting. Um, okay. So yes, where do we start? So let's just let's just say, right, this company, they've been on the go for ten years. They're doing really well. They get referral business, they network a lot. Things are going well. So first of all, yeah, great. Don't stop doing that. It works great. But what they've come to us and they've said something like, look, we do okay, but we recognise if we need to grow, then we need to get in front of more people. We need to speak to people who don't know we exist. Right, right. That's a starting point. Okay.

So that's fantastic.

Okay, so they've got a website because they've had a website since forever. Yep. Um, it's maybe built with WordPress. It's got thirty, forty pages of content, a sort of half assed attempt at a blog, which wasn't really a blog. It was just a bit of news about what was going on inside the business. Uh, there's lots of, uh, we central, we, we centered, um, uh, messaging. We do this, we do that. We're great. Buy stuff from us. Um, going on as you might expect. Um, it's passable. It's, it's a, it's a perfectly passable website.

Every other B2B website. Yeah.

That's right. And, and the, the visual, you know, so their, their brand messaging maybe ain't the best. It's, it's a bit centered around them, their brand representations, their, their color schemes, the fonts they use the logo and all that kind of stuff is it's okay. Yeah.

I'm not saying the world on fire though.

Yeah. You know, it's all right. Um, so that's where we are. And when we start, you know, just what would we do? What, what's like the first thing we would do with respect to starting a conversation, maybe before we have a conversation with them, we would ask for access to.

Things like search Console, things like analytics. Absolutely.

Why are we doing that? What are we trying to establish?

Well, it's like you said yourself, you know, they want to get in front of more people. The first question is, where are those people? What are they searching for? What are they doing? What are they interested in?

Who are you currently getting in front of?

Right. Exactly. Because until you know that until you know roughly kind of where your audience are and how to get in front of them, there's no point in starting with the tactics, is there? There's no point in saying, oh, we're going to do SEO, we're going to do PPC. It's all kind of noise and nonsense. At that point, you have to actually sit down normally search consoles the best way, right? I think personally of finding out what, what, you know, what, where are people already finding you? What kind of searches are they using? What kind of languages are they using? And then how can you start kind of building on that to, to build a picture of where you could go out there and kind of put your website in front of people?

Okay, then. So, um, uh, what's the search console?

So Google search console is free software from Google. Um, you put a little bit of code in the header tag of your website. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. You can tell a developer to do it and they will understand all of that means good answer. I don't even know if I understand what it means. I say it a lot. I might just put this code in the header tag of your website. Where's the header tag? I don't know.

I mean, but basically all that is is by by being able to put that in there or one of your developers or somebody, you know, Z mate's son puts it in there for you. It shows Google that you do own that web property because, hey, you managed to go on the server where that website is hosted and put something in there which shows Google, well, you must have access to the website then. So we'll give you this information.

Yeah. And then what Search console then tells you is what search terms you're appearing in Google for, where your website ranks for those search terms.

So whether it tells you everything that you're on page one for.

Uh, no, it tells you everything that you're ranking for full stop.

Ah.

So even if you're way down at the bottom of page nineteen for a search, it'll still tell you, you know.

Why would we want to know that? That's all use. Because if you're on page nineteen, you're not going to get any clicks.

Let's say in our let's say our fictitious engineering consultancy is ranking on page nineteen for engineering consultancy. We can look at that and we can say, okay, why are you all the way down on page nineteen for that, when that's what you do for a living? We can have a look and see if there's actually a page on their website that uses that terminology, that uses that language. And then those are the kind of gaps and opportunities where you can say, well, you know, now we know that you're on page nineteen for this. If you are on page one, you'd be getting however many thousands of visits and potentially some leads, and then you can start working towards how you're going to put them on page one for that.

You know what? I've lost count of the number of times I've had conversations in the early stages with potential customers, and we've looked at the data that's in the search console, and we find a search phrase and they say, well, yeah, that's exactly what we do. Why do we not? Why do we not rank for that?

Do you say you do it anywhere on your website?

That's the point I'm making. So we do a quick, um, a quick sort of advanced search in Google, just in the normal in the Google everybody uses, you can, you can actually use some search operators and things. And we ask Google to look for that exact search phrase on their website. And guess what, although it's exactly what they do. They don't actually have that phrase anywhere on any single page of their website.

Yeah. And like often it's a yeah. And like, not to oversimplify, it's not like you can just say, okay, just, just make a page called engineering consultants on your website and suddenly you'll be ranking on page one for it. Often it's really tough, right? And often those search terms are really competitive. But what that exercise does is starts you thinking about, okay, you know, maybe it's going to take six months to rank us organically, naturally on Google for engineering consultants, but at least that tells us that people are out there searching for things like engineering consultants. And then you can start looking at, you know, are there longer tail phrases that people are looking for, like really clever engineering consultants near me that you could start optimising for to rank earlier? Are there opportunities to pay for the traffic using something like paid advertising? The point is, you've kind of got the ball rolling. You're now thinking, okay, this is what my audience wants to see. And now we're trying to find a solution. How do we put our website in front of them while they're searching for that thing? And that's still miles ahead of just, I want more, more traffic to my website, right?

Absolutely. So, um, yesterday, uh, Julie and I did a discovery session with a potential client who became, before the end of discovery session, a client, you know.

A discovery session.

Can we just stop you there, guys? We'd just like to say we definitely want to work with you, which was lovely. Uh, and that's exactly what we did. We looked at this data and we started uncovering, uh, search phrases that they ranked really well for. Great. Then they're certainly not starting this process from, um, from the zero position, but we think, you know, we'll help them get to hero. I mean.

People rarely do those.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. They certainly certainly have a website that's got plenty of content that's getting lots of traffic. So this is a slightly different gig. Anyway, we digress. The point we're trying to make with this little preamble, if you like. It's quite the long preamble. Um, what we're trying to say is we start to try and understand what's happening right now. But what, what if um, engineering company B come along to us engineering consulting. Hey, we're brand new. We. We haven't even got a website. Where do we start, then?

Uh, well, I mean, to be fair, in the same place, right? I mean, there are plenty of.

In the search console for a website.

That.

Doesn't.

Exist, but there are. Uh, I walked straight into that one, didn't I? You did. Leslie should dub in a sound effect, man walking into. Um. Yeah. I mean, there are plenty of other ways of doing keyword research. We like Search Console.

I like what we were doing in the search console. You would call keyword research, I think.

So, yeah. You're searching disagree.

Don't worried.

I'm always worried when you ask me leading questions.

Um, but if we haven't got data that for that specific website, the search console data, yeah. Then we'll use some of the other tools out there to find out what their ideal customers are typing into search engines and start to build a picture from there.

Yeah, absolutely.

What their website content might look like.

And the other thing we often do is competitor research, right? And that's not to say we'll go and like crib what your competitors are doing, but it's just useful because a lot of the time, people who are more established in the field that you're in have already done that kind of, you know, keyword research, that legacy work, and you can go and have a look at their website. And if they're optimising for really specific searches, you can say, okay, you know, chances are they know that a decent proportion of their customers are using that sort of language. And we can kind of take some inspiration from that and steal it.

You know, it often is surprising to me in a nice way. I don't mean in a, in a, in a, in a high handed, cynical way, but that people don't realise that you can interrogate a website using a tool like SEMrush and it will give you loads of information. This is where they get all the traffic. These are the keywords they rank for in Google that sends them all the traffic, which generates all their business, which has helped them grow fifty percent year on year for the last ten years.

It goes a step beyond that, doesn't it? Like it'll tell you exactly which pieces of content drive the most traffic to their website. And from there it is literally just a case of saying, okay, well, if they can do that, you know, we can do better. Yeah, we can do something more interesting or more engaging. So yeah, I don't think there's yeah, I don't know. It feels a little bit shady to say it out loud, doesn't it? But I think competitor research is just such a valuable source of insights really.

So okay, so we've done, we've, we've, we're doing some research. We're starting to understand the landscape, the market that they're operating in. You've mentioned briefly competitors. So we can interrogate competitors. What we're trying to do is build up a picture of, first of all, are people out there looking for what they do? Usually the answer is yes. Um, then we're trying to understand how difficult or otherwise it's going to be to get our engineering consultancy appearing in search results that their ideal customers are making. So we're starting to build that picture. So at some point, we now understand the job in hand if you like. Yeah, absolutely. And it's time then to think about the website. So two scenarios we talked about. One is the company has got a website that's doing quite well. Um and the other is the company have got no website at all. But in either instance, the website of the company that already exists isn't delivering leads because that's why they came to us in the first place. And the other one is not delivering leads because it doesn't exist. So what about the actual website? Because this is I mean, people often focus on the website. They don't think about the stuff we've just talked about. They jump straight into the website and they think of their website as a almost like a magazine. So it's gonna have sixty pages, it's got a beginning, it's got an end, and we're going to start it. Then how much is it going to cost to build it and when will it be ready?

Well, we had a yeah. Not.

And what my question is, is that the right way to go about it.

Absolutely not. I mean, you know not kind of dropping anybody in it. But we had another call yesterday a bit like that didn't we. With somebody who was saying, you know, we've got bags of content and now we need someone to optimise it. As in we've gone out and we've built our magazine, our brochure, and now we want to start ranking in search. But that's entirely the wrong way to go about these things, right? It's not build a website and then make it work. It's build a website that is designed to work from the word go. Yeah.

Okay. And what do we call that? There's an industry term which you know and I know and what do we call it?

I feel like this is a trap.

No it's not. It isn't. No it isn't. I'm not trying to trap you, honestly.

Um, what do we call it?

Growth driven design. Right. So we're trying to grow a business using digital marketing. Sure. We're going to try and build them a website that generates business for them. And at this stage we're still at the beginning. We have no real idea what that looks like.

Mhm.

What we need is we need a minimum minimal minimum viable product minimum. We need an m, v p website that's got the essential information on there and tells people what they do. It's got good messaging. It's got maybe an embryonic blog in there, because we've already started to understand the sort of things that people are typing into search engines when they're looking for the products and services or services, in this case, this company offer. So rather than think of your website as like, well, you know, it's going to have a beginning and end. It's got fifty pages. Just get a fantastic MVP website up as soon as possible so that you are then starting on the journey of securing rankings, securing traffic, and securing enquiries.

It's a journey, isn't it? It's interesting that you say that. I think one of the things you said earlier, that people kind of go into this with the impression that you can have like the perfect version of your website or the best website and get it up there and it'll just do this thing for you. You can leave it be. I mean, we're constantly tinkering with our own website, right? We add pages all the time. We try different CTAs, we move stuff around. We add links to things. Calls to action.

A call to action is something on your website which you want people to click, because it makes them do something like go to a page or get.

In.

Touch with you or something.

Yeah. Um, you can't look at these things. I don't think with the website, it's like a finished product. It's never going to be finished. It's never going to be perfect. It's always iterative. And that is, I think key isn't it to, to kind of getting started on the right foot. Because I think when people go into this with the, the impression that they can write a hundred pages and then stop. That's. It's never gonna work.

Mhm. That's right. I guess, um, I mean, some people. I'd love to write a book. I don't know if you ever have. I think you did say you haven't. Haven't you written a book or tried to write a book or something? I mean, you did study books. Surely you've written.

Books. Surely I've written books and never like a.

Proper bestseller or something. Um, I.

Want to write a novel.

But that's a story for what authors do. Um, I mean, some authors might just start and see where it takes them. Others will actually have the beginning, the middle, the end. They'll have it all mapped out. So they know exactly. And it's almost like, like there's my book. It's, and they might even go to a publisher and say, this is, this is what I'm going to write about. Do you think it's got a market? You know, they haven't gone to all the trouble of creating like a, you know, a thousand word book, uh, or a thousand word. No, a ten thousand word book or whatever. I don't know, one hundred thousand, one hundred thousand word book and then go. And then for the publisher to say, well, this is, this is nobody will be interested in this.

Yeah. It's like gardeners versus architects thing that we talk about a lot in writing. So it's like some people go out with a plan and this is this is the book I'm going to write. And some people come to you with the kernel of an idea, and they want to just see how it grows. Right. And that's yeah, I think that's the better approach with websites, isn't it? Start small. See where it grows. Don't try and kind of plan.

And it's almost like this, you know, a capability Brown esque vision of what it's going to look like in a hundred years time.

Yeah.

It's obviously we're not talking about one hundred years in website terms, but we're talking about, you know, having an idea of where it's going, but but not focusing so much on that, that you don't actually get the thing live and working for you, which is why growth driven design is so powerful because you can literally have an embryonic website, you know, a minimum viable product website live in a matter of weeks. Yeah. And a lot of people think if it's a website project for any sort of decent sized business, well, you know, it's going to take us six months.

Yeah.

But it's not the way to do it.

No it's not. And you know, it's fair to say I mean, going back to the example where we have a business coming to us who don't have a pre-existing website, right? There is in general in digital marketing, a kind of time delay between getting started and getting results. And the older your website is, the longer it's been up, the more likely it is to be successful. So the faster you can get something, anything live, the better and people will delay for months and years trying to get this like, perfect website in position to launch, and then they've lost a year's worth of progress. That's time you could have spent trying to rank different pages, trying to build your authority, trying to get people to talk about your website. And it's just kind of gone really.

Many years ago, we worked with a great company, and it took us over twelve months to do a website redesign and redevelopment. Yeah. So, you know, for twelve months, there was a ton of fantastic content on their site that was in development, that wasn't.

Being.

Consumed by search engines and found by their customers, which is crazy.

It's a real.

Way to.

Do it. No.

Right. Okay. So this is all pretty big picture stuff. We've we've understood like our market, we kind of understand in quite a lot of detail, actually, what our ideal customers are searching for. We look we've looked at what our competitors are doing. We've figured out what we need to do to get in amongst the mix. You briefly mentioned we might use paid search. So if we realise, for example, you know, it's going to take three, four, five months to get in front of people with our content. In normal search results, we might use paid search to get there a bit quicker.

Yeah, absolutely.

It can be expensive, but can be really powerful and can generate leads quickly.

Absolutely. It's also worth pointing out, I think, as well with paid search, that depending on the industry and the vertical you're in, like how saturated it is, sometimes it's absolutely impossible to rank organically for a search term and actually be visible because for whatever reason, Google has decided to fill the entire top of the page for whatever search term you're trying to rank for with paid advertising. So we've had instances in the past where we've had clients who rank quite well organically for a search phrase, but they don't actually get any traffic for it because all the traffic is going to the six paid paid ads at the top of the page. And if you're in those ads.

We keep getting told, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Nobody clicks. I don't know anybody who clicks those adverts.

Can I use my swear. No.

No swearing.

Um, yeah. I mean obviously people click the adverts don't they. Otherwise it wouldn't exist. And sometimes it is literally impossible to rank organically for a search phrase and get any traffic, in which case you have to pay. But by and large, yeah, I think paid searches for like skipping the queue, isn't it? While you're waiting for content to start ranking organically.

Yeah. Right. So we've done our research. We've got a good idea. Um, we've, in the case of the, the business that we wanted to talk about, we've redeveloped their website, maybe the same platform. We're not, we're not hell bent on building them a brand new website like the customer yesterday. We're going to adapt and adjust and develop and grow their existing website because because that's what we should be doing.

I think it's fair to say you shouldn't really be. I think a lot of people, again, go into these things, these projects with like the idea that our current website isn't working. It must be broken. We must have a brand new one. We must have it on a shiny new platform. And that's often not the case.

Well, they'd already been told that. They'd already been told they need to rebuild their website from scratch.

And some will never work. Yeah, it's it's very rarely true.

We've we've heard other thirty Bob SEO agencies speaking to, you know, we've had feedback from clients when they've been approached by a thirty Bob SEO agency from somewhere else. And of course, the first thing we're going to need to do is rebuild your website because it's not built in WordPress. Yeah, because that's the only system they understand. You know.

It also comes from the other side too, doesn't it? I mean, there are plenty of marketing managers out there who, you know, that they want their first big project to be a completely new website so they can put their stamp on it and they can start from the ground up. But often, I think, again, you know, legacy sites, age domains, they have a real value, right? Having been around for a long time is really powerful in terms of getting you up the rankings, getting your site more authority. So yeah, it's often a real mistake just to go for the shiny new thing rather than trying to fix what you've got.

One thing I would say is this idea of getting the m, v, p website live as quickly as possible is not a good idea. If your existing website has got a ton of content and it's got good rankings. So again, going back to the customer we were talking to yesterday, the client yesterday, they'd been told we're going to rebuild your website in HubSpot. It's currently in WordPress. We're going to rebuild it in HubSpot, and it'll just be the minimum website that we can get away with. So we can then start growing it. And when I looked at it, well, your, your current website has got over five hundred pages and a ton of great rankings. If you reduce that down to a fifteen, twenty page starter for ten website, you're just going to kill your organic traffic. So in that situation, that wasn't really a viable way forward. Now, that isn't to say that you might have a five hundred page website that ranks for nothing, generates no business, and most of the content is utter nonsense and rubbish. So yeah, by all means, rip that apart and start again. But this one wasn't like that. So. So be careful. This advice is like, if you've got a really ordinary ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty page website that generates no business and has just got a load of content on it that says we do stuff, buy it from us, then don't worry too much about rebuilding it. But if you've got a powerhouse of a website that isn't maybe performing as well as it could, but it is. It has got a footprint. Don't go and destroy it.

Yeah, definitely. Weirdly, interestingly, we see the same thing in PPC all the time. Sometimes you take on like a paid search account and the temptation or what a lot of people would do is like, tear it all up and throw it in the bin and start again, because it's not structured how they like it. But there's useful data. There's always useful data from past activities.

So it's an often overlooked asset, if you like, of PPC is the fantastic data. It can give you real live useful data. Right. Okay, so we've got our minimum viable product website live. Okay. We've, we've improved the look and feel. We've got the, the, the, the brand is now much better. The messaging is much better. We've, we've gone through an exercise to figure all that out with them. So we've now got this new website that's got, again, ten or fifteen pages and it's got a couple of blogs on it. You were going to say something.

I was just gonna say it's probably worth it's probably worth talking a little bit about that whole kind of branding thing, isn't it? Because that's something that I think it's fair to say we're trying to do a lot more of now. That's something that we kind of feel a lot more strongly about, is that there's a real value in kind of sitting down and getting the brand right. It's not just a case of slap a logo and a tagline on a website. It's a case of make sure that everything you're saying is kind of linked up. Joined up, has a personality and gives you a brand, a kind of persona that is going to resonate with your target audience. I think that's something.

I think we're going to touch on that with. I'm speaking next week with Cliff Collier from international.

Well, then I shall leave it to Cliff.

Yeah. And I think Cliff and I and mainly Cliff are going to have a good, good chat around the value of brand and how we've moved away into this kind of transactional world of keyword research and SEO and everything else, and lost touch with the importance of brands. So that'll be, I think that'll be an interesting conversation. But yes, you know, we are certainly. working with customers to try and get them to think about their brand and buy brand. We don't mean logo. We mean, you know, what do people say about your business when you're not in the room? That's the simplest explanation I've ever heard of what a brand is. And I like that. I think it's pretty.

Good, and it should feed through to everything that you do, right? Because I think what we're about to go and talk about is things like the tactics that you'll use. But the point is, when you start using those tactics, you should always be doing it with an eye to like how you're going to carry your brand voice through that, how you're going to make it distinctly you and not somebody else. And I think that's quite a yeah.

Okay. So moving away from or moving on from the initial excitement we've had, the discovery, we've we've had lots of conversations, we've looked at the brand, we've looked at the messaging, we've improved everything. We've created this new website or we've adapted the current website. So it's a true representation of who the business really are. We've tidied up the content. We've maybe moved the messaging away from, we do this to, uh, more talking about from the client's perspective and the new website's live. It's got a couple of blogs in there and we can start to see things happening. There's a bit of we start to acquire some new data around, you know, because we've got much better, better optimised and the right kind of content where what's the next stage? What are we moving on to now?

Well, I guess we iterate, right? We just keep kind of taking those insights and turning it into more content for the website more. It's, it's, yeah, I mean, it's more resource, isn't it really? At the end of the day, if you've got that data and you're starting to get those insights into how people are finding you, what they're searching for, and you can also start looking at things like how long they're spending on your pages, whether they're engaging with your content, that sort of thing. And then I guess from there, it is a case of kind of continually improving, isn't it?

Yeah. Right. So talking about continually improving, um, we, let's say we've, we've decided that there's a particular subject and there are some search terms within that subject that we know our ideal customers are typing into Google. They're not. They're not really finding us at the moment. So we've got our new website and it's everything's set up now. We're actually on a platform, you know, might might be the same website, but we've maybe plugged in some marketing automation tools and we've got CRM in there as well. Probably HubSpot if we're doing it. We've got all that stuff in place. What, how can we help people understand how they would then go about trying to capture leads from people who are typing search certain search terms into Google? What do we have to do in order to do that? And I'm thinking clusters.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, what you've got to then think about, I guess, is in an ideal scenario for every search term that somebody is typing into Google, you'd have a page, right, that is designed to rank for it.

In a perfect world.

In a perfect.

World, in a, in practical terms.

Not really.

Pages are ranking for lots of different search terms.

Yeah. So what you want to try and start doing is building out a kind of a map of, I guess, the collection or cluster of search terms that you want to rank content for, and then start thinking about how you can address them with interlinked bits of content, right? So the idea is, I don't know, maybe I'm trying to think of an example now, maybe your engineering consultancy does some work for shipyards, right? You'd start thinking about how to build a cluster of content around shipyards, a big page that says, you know, this is all the work we do for shipyards. And then little a blog posts kind of, or case studies or whatever coming off that, that detail, all the kind of specific work that you do. Um, that again, people are searching for maybe less frequently. Um, but you still want to try and put content out there that ranks for those search terms. So you're building that kind of interlinked web of content around a small group of search phrases, I guess.

Okay. And when we think about these search phrases, he said, being leading you in and pulling you in to get the answer he wants. Um, what type of search phrases are good for building content around.

You may as well say it.

Go on.

I'm drawing a blank.

Okay.

Questions are. Well, yeah. That was a bit obvious, wasn't it?

Especially as I was drawing a question mark in mid air to try and in mid air to try and prompt you. But no, I mean your ideal customers are asking questions now there's a this as this podcast goes on, we might have to pause because I'm going into a Zoom call with Marcus Sheridan, who wrote the book. They ask that you answer, they ask, you answer. It's a great book. I keep going on about it. But if you're interested in like, well, why are we doing all this content stuff? Why do I have to produce all this content for my website? I don't it doesn't seem to make any sense. The book and I recommend the audiobook will make it make sense. And the good news is that we're speaking to Marcus today to have a quick chat with him about potentially coming on the podcast. I'm really hoping he's going to come on the podcast. I'm pretty sure he will because we asked him and we're having a conversation with him today, so we might have to break off from this one and come back to it, because I'm speaking with him at twelve o'clock. Um, but yeah, this idea of building content around the questions that your customers are asking is really at the heart of content marketing.

It is. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like it's really fundamental, so fundamental that I apparently missed it completely. But yeah, I mean, the idea is that if you provide people with useful information that answers their questions, that helps them in, you know, whatever they're doing, whether they're trying to work out how much it's going to cost to have somebody come in and look at their quality control or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to find out if you can be the person out there answering that question, that is gonna a get people onto your website. B it's going to win people over and teach them that they can trust you, that you know what you're talking about, that you're an authority on that subject and see hopefully generate leads.

Right. So I want my website to be found by people who type in stone screen cladding. So if I just write a blog post that's like three hundred words or something, just. And at least I've got the words on my website that'll do me. Yep.

Nope. You already knew that.

Tell me more.

People don't just type. Well, I mean, some people will just type in Stone rain. They do? What is it? Never mind. No it's not.

You know, like, you know, buildings that you see and they look like the.

They've got like.

Marble facade on them. It's often rain, rain screen cladding that's put up. So it's only thing it's like, it looks like, you know, it's got like two foot thick stone, but it's actually a steel building with, with some, you know, insulation behind it and then stone cladding on the outside. And it's like a rain screen. It's like the bit that keeps you warm and all the rest of it isn't necessarily the bit you see.

Interesting. So yeah, no, some people will just search for a product name. Uh, um, and, and some people, you know, and you'd probably want a page that did just say, you know, kind of like what, what is it? How much is it? Where do I buy it? That kind of thing. But the point is, at the longer tail, there are going to be people out there who type in really specific things, right? Like what type of stone rainscreen cladding do I need? Or, you know, where's what's the best type or what's the best brand or what's the most durable, what's its lifespan? And those questions where people have kind of already decided to buy the product and they're now doing really kind of detailed research into the specifics. Those are the people that you want to really kind of try and get your stuff in front of, which means not just writing one three hundred word page for the search term. It means writing content that answers all of those different questions. And you can kind of spread yourself out and try and get all of that traffic.

Okay. So if, if, if I, if you're telling me that a three hundred word blog post on the subject isn't going to be enough in order for my website to be number one in Google, when people type that in, how do we figure out what will be enough?

Well, the easiest thing to do is go to the search itself. The search results page as in type in stone Rainscreen cladding. I'll get it. I'll get it done one day. You'll see. I'll go away and practice after this and see what ranks right. And what you want to look at is specifically the current number one ranking or number two ranking kind of articles for that search term. How many words are on the page? What are they talking about? Do they answer lots of peripheral questions in the post, or do they link out to lots of other resources? Are there videos? Is there kind of audio content? Is there a downloadable.

So what we're talking about is benchmarking. You know, what sort of content is already hoovering up that that.

What does Google want search traffic. Yeah, yeah. And then the idea being is that will give you a clear picture of, okay, so Google, I mean, you know, Google's not alive. It hasn't got a personality, but it does definitely.

It's not an evil genius with a white cat.

Might be, but it does definitely have preferences. And if it's decided that for a search term, like how much does should stone wrinkling?

He nearly said it cladding cost.

Um and it's decided that the best kind of content to answer that is an FAQ page with thirty different questions and answers about the product. That's what you need to produce. If instead, they've decided that the best thing to rank for is a video, that's what you need to produce. It's not rocket science, is it? It's just look at what Google wants to rank and then do something better.

So if I figure out that the number one page is a two thousand word page, that's got some video on it, fantastic photography, some case study links, it's got some lovely images of rainscreen cladding, etc.. See, I said it then that's it. I've nailed it. I will, you know, because I'm paying you a lot of money. Dave. Alex. So if we're going to write this content and then we'll be number one, right?

There are no guarantees as we've found ourselves, right? Because we were doing this exercise recently and we ranked her, we went away, we found a search term, we wrote a really long blog post about it with video and pictures and everything. We. It ranked at the very top of the first page for a few days and then dropped off. We did. It happens all the time. There's no kind of guarantees. A lot of the time. There are a lot of other factors at play, like how many other web pages around the internet are linking to that page? How many times is it, you know, referenced on social media? How often do people comment on it? Google looks at a lot of different metrics. So there's no surefire way to say, okay, this content is going to rank number one for this. You just have to try and try and try again.

Yeah. That's right. So we're talking about website and web page authority. So it's an easy way. An easy way to think about it is, you know, if you read some something in the times, yep, you might be inclined to believe it.

You shouldn't.

If you.

Read.

A comment on Twitter.

Yeah, you dismiss it.

You probably shouldn't be as inclined to believe it without doing a lot more research. Now, that might be horseshit. I mean, you know, there's the mainstream media is more than capable of of printing stuff. That's not true. Right? But broadly speaking, most people would trust the times. And it's this idea that it's been around for a long time. It's a trusted resource. Google's doing that with search. It's looking at websites and it's looking at a ton of different metrics and trying to decide whether a website and a web page is authoritative, trustworthy, etc.. So one of the things that when we talk about benchmarking, we need to understand has engineering company consultancy in Birmingham got a website that's got good authority or not? So if say for example, page one for a search is full of sites that are full of pages that are on sites that have got good authority, the pages have got good authority, and they've got plenty of content on them. And our client has got a newish website or a website that's been around for a while but has never done anything. So it's got low authority and it that feeds into this, this puzzle about how we start to generate business from organic search. Yeah. It's complicated.

It's very complicated. And again, just going back to the point I made earlier, you know, Google's not actually a person and it's not always very clever at that point. You make about the times versus Twitter is a really good one because Google is often capable of making these huge mistakes, right? It thinks a website that is old and linked to often is the best resource, even when what they've written is really thin crap, or sometimes even wrong. Right? And you can write brilliant content, but because your website's not old enough, Google says, oh, well, I don't trust this, so I'm not going to rank it. And that is, is like I say, it's an iterative process. You have to try and work out how to do it. But I mean, there are things you can do, aren't there? I mean, were I listening to this podcast, I might ask, well, okay then Dave, how do I make my website more authoritative?

Yeah. And that's a really good question. So what we're going to do is we're going to pause this podcast just now. I mean, anyone listening to it, we're just going to carry straight on, obviously, but we are going to pause because I've got to go and make, make, have a Zoom call. Uh, and we'll refresh our cups. And then we'll start with, what was it you said again.

Uh, increasing the authority of your website.

Right? We'll start with that. We'll have a little chat around that, and then we'll start to think about winding it up. Right. So great call with Marcus. And he's going to come on the show in mid-March. So I'm looking forward to that. Reiterate for me, um, what we were going to talk about because we've just had obviously the half hour break.

We were discussing the fact that you sometimes can't rank a web page in search unless you have good site authority. And then I was posing the question to you that many of our listeners might like to know how to improve their site authority.

Yeah. Okay. So the way that Google is deciding whether your website is trustworthy, whether it's got authority, is a closely kept secret, you might imagine, why would they keep that a secret?

Is it because that's what all of their income depends on? It kind.

Of is. Yeah. So if everybody knew exactly what Google was looking at in order to decide what the what was trustworthy or not, um, then it would mean quite probably that people would then be able to easily game the search engine. There's plenty of people out there who can game the search engines and and sell their services as search engine gamers. They don't call themselves that, but it's the whole kind of black hat side of search, marketing and etc. is, is basically based around, um, gaming and, and cheating the search engines, which some people in business might say, well, that's fine if it gets me found and gets my business growing, I don't care. Um, but um, we are not really interested in that side of things. And the idea behind this, this authority thing, uh, comes back to the essence of what, you know, uh, the web, if you like, around linking to information that enhances what you're talking about, adds value to what you're talking about. And Tim Berners-Lee created it. So, you know, I've said this before, if you're, if you're reading an academic paper and he wants to reference something, you don't have to then go off to the library and find that academic paper, you just click a link and bam, there's the academic paper. So Google used this to sort of help in. One of the ways it uses is, is that is to try and decide whether a, a website is trustworthy. How many other websites, how many other web pages are linking to this website or this web page. And it'll use that as one of the measures of authority. So the question is, how do we get those links? And that's really hard.

Yeah, it is definitely not easy. Is it this this whole idea of, I guess, earning links. Um, so producing content that's so good. People kind of naturally want to talk about it and share it with their friends. And that's fine, but probably not very practical. I think we can both agree. Um, one of the ways we build links for clients is digital PR, right? So you wait until journalists are writing a feature about something or looking for some input from an expert, and they reach out using the various channels that they use to try and get sources.

Or response source and journal requests on Twitter, that kind of thing.

Yeah. Haro. And you just make sure you're there and you make sure that when the requests come in, you're well, in our case, it's our client. But you know, if you're running a business, you're subject matter expert or whatever is on hand to kind of answer their questions. And more often than not, they will kind of link back to your website and their article. And that's a really good way of building really high value links because as David was saying before, you know, websites like the times or, you know, big magazine websites or, you know, anything that is kind of well known and authoritative, those links tend to have a lot of value, right? So like an inbound link from somewhere like the Guardian can propel a page straight to the top of page one pretty much overnight. Mhm. Um, so there's a real value in that. Um, other people I guess use like less savory tactics, right. So like paid link building. There's, you know, people go out and build links on blog networks, which are just kind of big.

Private blog networks.

Yeah. Big spammy kind of networks of blogs that are designed to kind of dupe Google into thinking, oh, hundreds of people are linking to this article, when in reality it's one webmaster that owns a hundred different websites. Um, so yeah, lots of ways to do it. Very few of them sustainable, very few of them effective.

But Yeah, I mean, the best links to get the best links to help you grow your authority are the links that are hard to get. So if you get a link from, as you said, an article in the Guardian, then never knew you were a Guardian reader. You do look like a guardian. I like the Guardian as well. Not not not casting aspersions. Um, if you can get that link, you're getting it because you've provided something of real value and you've managed to get a link as a result of it. No amount of begging is going to persuade a journalist at the Guardian just to randomly link to your website to help you rank better in Google.

No, and that's the thing. I guess in the early days of the web, when the idea of link building wasn't so kind of oversaturated and boring, you could kind of trick journalists into doing that. I know somebody that used to build links by offering to send journalists shoes that they really liked and things like that. That would work. Yeah, you can bribe people sometimes, but but by and large, you actually have to put the work and the effort into earning those links. And that is tough. Okay. But worthwhile.

So we started out looking at the challenge of getting traffic and business from your website, getting traffic to your website and getting business from your website. As a result of that traffic. We've looked at this idea of keyword research, competitor research, finding out what you're up against, establishing what your ideal customers are looking for, and then building out a content plan around those search terms so that your website is full of the kind of things that people are looking for, right? Okay. We then talked about a growth driven design approach to creating your website. Don't like work on it for twelve months and then press a button and it goes live. Guess what? You can live as soon as possible. If you've got a massive website that's doing okay. That approach isn't quite as practical, so you have to take a slightly different approach, which is fine. And once the website's up, you're starting then to gather data, you're starting to understand what's working, what isn't working, and you're starting to build out more and more content around what we've loosely called content clusters. So meaty, chunky content that's way better than the pages that are currently being served up in a Google search for a particular search term. You're building those out. Um, before we wind this up, what about the area of business growth related to websites that you're particularly interested in? And I'm not talking about PPC.

Are you talking about, in fact conversion rate?

I am indeed talking about conversion rates. What, how, how would how do we use that? And especially our new, uh, consultancy with their new website and they're starting to move forward. What sort of things might help them with conversion rate optimisation?

Well, it goes back to the idea of iteration, doesn't it, that we were talking about earlier, that growth driven design thing. It's like constantly on your website, you're, you're getting or gathering data about how people are interacting with your content. You know, how long do they spend looking at an article? How deep do they scroll? What are they clicking? And if you take those insights and use them to try and experiment scientifically with changing some of the elements on your page to see if you can get people to stick around longer, or click more buttons or download more things. The idea here with conversion rate optimisation is just to again, be constantly tweaking and iterating on your site. You know, come up with a hypothesis. Maybe you say, oh, you know, if we add more, more calls to action, that is more buttons for people to get in touch with us to our pages, on our pages, people are more likely to get in touch with us and then test it. So run an A B test where you serve up one version of the page with one button and one version of the page with three buttons. And if the version with three buttons does indeed get more clicks, then you make that the kind of live, real version of the page, and then you pick something else to experiment with. And that kind of ongoing process of constantly trying to refine your pages and find the best possible. And again, we're not looking for perfect. We're just looking for better than the last experiment. That idea of working towards a kind of better page is something that is an ongoing process. I guess it never really ends, does it?

There's a good book called Golf Is Not a Game of perfect, which is a good read. I can't remember the guy's name. I've got a copy of it somewhere. Um, and because it isn't, you know, golf is an interesting game. It's a game I love. And, you know, you get some people that are not particularly good to watch, but they'll get around a golf course pretty effectively and beat you. Yeah. Um, so, you know, content marketing isn't a game of perfect either. It's a game of trial and error figuring out what works. Um, there was something I was going to say, you know, in conversation when you're, when you're working on your website, you might have disagreement, for example, over what the main message on the homepage should be, you know, the hero text, the thing that sets your stall out. Well, what you're talking about conversion rate optimisation, a, B testing, as we did with our own website. And we found the message that we're currently using had got way more engagement than the kind of arty farty version that we were using previously.

Yeah. Because like, ultimately, I guess what it comes down to is the reason there is no kind of best practice in web design. The reason is there is no like kind of best way of laying out a landing page. It's very much dependent on your audience, isn't it? And you don't know. You can guess at what your audience want to see what kind of messaging will resonate with them. More often than not, you're going to be wrong. And I say this, you know, like I say this because I'm wrong more often than not to I think this is fantastic. It's always going to work. People will definitely click this button now and people don't. You have to be kind of constantly accepting that you know nothing and trying to learn more. I think.

Yeah, I would agree. And, you know, one of the things that you can think about is you can think about your company in order to really leverage digital marketing to really have a website that's a powerhouse that generates loads of enquiries for your business, etc., you're really starting to become a producer, a media producer, a publishing house. You're starting to become a bit Netflix y.

Yeah.

I would say.

I think that's a nice analogy.

Yeah, because you're looking at content like maybe downloadable content, ebooks and stuff like that, whether it's gated or not. We could talk all day about that Yeah, we're talking about blogs, opinion pieces, thought leadership pieces, and we're talking about videos. Increasingly, videos and people love videos. They engage with it. There's all kinds of psychological reasons why videos are so effective. If you're not using video, consider using video. Yeah. And then this medium podcasting. Yeah. Which is now, you know, it's not difficult to get all the tech and get everything in place to do it. And it's a great way of sharing expertise and helping people understand, um, not so much understand your business, but understand the subject that your business serves or the subject that your business is in the market that you're in and position you as a thought leader in that space, you know, giving them content that they consume while they're out for a run or out for a drive or whatever.

Yeah, I think that's the thing, isn't it? It's, it's giving people content in a variety of different forms so that they can choose how to consume it. And you're not kind of blocking anybody out or barring access to your content because somebody doesn't like watching video or doesn't want to download an e-book and doesn't want to part with your email address. You know, it's just like, make this stuff readily available. Make sure that as many people as possible can access it in a way that they like. And yeah, just keep doing it. Really.

That's right. Yeah. We've got like a thing we're doing now with some of our blog posts, which we mentioned, I think in the previous podcast where we're actually putting a, a video short three, four minute video alongside the, uh, the blog post so that people that don't want to read a blog post, just watch a quick video. And in fact, as you mentioned earlier in this podcast, the actual blog post doesn't seem to rank. Yeah.

But the video does. Yeah.

It's interesting.

But but had we not produced the video, we just wouldn't have any content ranking for that search term. So it just goes to show doesn't it. You know, the more you kind of I guess you're hedging really, aren't you? The more you kind of spread yourself out, the more different avenues you have for possibly gaining traction and gaining an audience, the more likely you are to get visitors.

That's right. Okay. Um, so we've been through the full kind of range of like from zero to hero. Mhm. Uh, it's a slog. Uh, it's a hackneyed phrase, but it's a marathon, not a sprint. Yep. Um, it's well worth doing. Obviously you can augment all of this stuff using Google ads, using radio ads, using magazine ads. There's a.

Whole social media.

Of things you can do and social media, which we've spoken about and, you know, we'll speak about again.

We gloss over because it scares us a little bit. And that's Julie's field.

You know, we know that if you create a powerhouse of a website, it really does bring in great enquiries. I mean, you know, we're things have gone like ballistic this week in terms of enquiries for us. And this is businesses all over the place, all over the country and further afield, all because we've, we're really, you know, eating our own dog food and producing great content and, and looking at the questions that our ideal customers are asking and trying to provide great answers and entertain and educate them with our content. And it's, and it works.

It does work.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So this is Digital Marketing From The Coalface. You've been listening to Alex and Dave. Um, if you want to come on the show, we'd love to hear from you. We have got some fantastic guests. We do the show now. Um, but, uh, you know, we're always happy to have people on who want to talk about any aspect of, um, business development, digital marketing. Tell us your story. But if you want to just ask a question. Yeah, you know, fire it in redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com. In the meantime, I am looking forward to the weekend. There's some Six Nations rugby on this weekend, which is good. I'm looking forward to that. Um, as we are closing this one out, I think we've got the podcast with Bob Keeler going, the master storyteller going live around about now, actually, interestingly, in about two or three minutes. Uh, so I'm really looking forward to that. It's a long one. It's an hour and a half, but it was just well worth. It was great. So if you, if you haven't caught that one, then go back and, and take a look at the business storytelling with Bob Keeler podcast. I think you'll enjoy it. In the meantime, that's all from us and we'll speak to you next time.

Indeed.