So Your Website's Rubbish, Here's How To Fix It – Episode 64

What would be one thing that you would be looking at to try and decide whether a website's working?

Well, the first thing is, is the phone ringing? Are you getting email enquiries? Are you getting the the forms and the the questions? And people ring you up and saying, I want to book you. I want to buy this service off you. Um, and if that's not there and you're not getting the enquiries through, then the next question is, are you actually getting visitors to the website? And then the other thing I'd be looking for, I guess, is if you are getting traffic but no enquiries, what are people doing on the site? Are they finding it confusing? Are they finding it difficult to work their way around? Are you seeing a lot of people dropping off pages, that sort of thing?

Okay, so the interesting thing there is not once did you mention what the thing looks like. A website can actually look quite smart and quite polished.

E and do really.

Isn't the definition. Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And, um, I came up with today's subject. Um, you know, I find a kind of circuitous route to get to it. And then just before we decided to record, I kind of got cold feet and thought, no, this isn't going to be a good subject. It's going to be a bit rubbish.

So if you're listening, prepare to be bored.

But um, Alex persuaded me, uh, he actually got on his knees and begged and said, no, this is a fantastic subject. It'll be great. So in advance, if it turns out that this is one of our rubbish podcasts, I hope there's not many. This turns out to be rubbish. Um, it's Alex's fault. So. So the kind of working title for this is. So your website's rubbish. Here's how to fix it. Um, and the reason that I came up with the title of this was a recent experience with a potential customer who shall remain nameless. But to be fair, this has happened quite a lot. So it's not just about this one customer, but they'd they'd made an investment not too long ago in a website. Uh, and I should say that it's a beautiful day here in Aboyne in northeast Scotland, just in Royal Deeside near the Queen's House. So I've left the door.

Open though, is it.

So I've left the door open. Um, so we might get a little bit of background noise, although hopefully not with these fantastic mics that we use. Um, so they've made an investment, a company's made an investment in a website and therefore they are reluctant to do anything about it. So I mean this, this particular instance, um, the website they've got was invested in, they spent money on it, they paid for a brand new website roughly two years ago. It's a bit rubbish. It really doesn't do what they need it to do. They know it doesn't do what they need it to do. But at the same time, they're kind of saying to us, look, you know, we want to work with you. We want you to help us generate business from our website. But by the way, the website's only two years old, so we're not prepared to build another website now. I would say we never go into engagements hoping to get a website built. If we can start an engagement and the platform that the website's built on and the foundation, if you like, of the platform of the sorry, of the website is great.

Then for us.

It makes our lives easier. We can get straight on with the hard graft of trying to turn that website into a website that generates leads. But you know, more often than not, the website that they've got is absolutely not fit for purpose. Yeah. I think you've been bursting to say something, so I'll let you say something.

I was just gonna say, it's very like the thing that always puts me in mind of because they're expensive, right? Websites. It's not like a couple of grand. You've not you've not kind of emptied a few. Don't get.

Me started. You can build a fantastic website for no money at all. You can now use HubSpot, HubSpot, CMS and build a twenty five page website completely free of charge. Pick a template. Put your content in. You don't even pay for the hosting. It is totally free.

But- well, and that kind of leads on to what I was going to say. Technically, of course you can. And you know, you know, by the same token, you can pay somebody thirty grand for a website that isn't right. But I think the thing that's interesting about this is that for the majority of business people, they're not really sure why it's not. Right, right. That's the whole thing. It's like you buy a brand new car, a brand new BMW. You think this is going to be the shit? It's gonna be amazing. We love driving it. You sit in it, you turn the engine on, you drive down the road and you're like, ah, I think I might have made a mistake here, and you can't quite put your finger on why. I think that's like a really common thing that everyone will be able to relate to, right? It's like there's something wrong with the website. There's something wrong with the new car I've bought, but I don't really know why. I don't know enough about it to know what I'm doing wrong or whether actually the website's okay and I'm just doing stuff badly or what. I can see why it's very stressful and very frightening for people to be in that situation where they've got this expensive kind of weight around their neck now, and they don't really know what to do with it.

Okay, we like a car analogy, don't we? So a good few years ago, um, I decided I wanted to buy a Honda Civic. Odd looking car.

Yeah.

You know, the one that you can't see out the back window? Very space age.

Car.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Anyway, I decided I wanted one. Found one on AutoTrader in Newcastle. So I jumped on the train. Agreed. You know, to meet the guy to potentially buy the car. Jumped on the train, drove to Newcastle, went to see the car. I kind of thought straight away. Um, something not quite right, but seemed like a nice guy. I'm an idiot. And long story short, I bought the car. It wasn't a fortune. It was to me at the time. Yeah, it was a good few years ago. I think I paid six grand for the car or something, which to me at the time was a lot of money. Paid him the money, got in the car, set off back. Oh, good. Nice. I'm really glad I bought this. A slight smell of cigarettes. I was like, oh, he told me it hadn't been smoked in, but I might be able to sort that out. I mean, straight away there was a nagging doubt. Anyway, I'm going up the A1. I'm well out of Newcastle by now. Put my foot down and the engine revved, but the car didn't move.

Oof!

Clutch. But in modern cars, it's not just the clutch. They have these dual what are they called, dual, um mass flywheels or something. Not a traditional anyway, but long story short, about three or four weeks later I spent another one thousand quid sorting it out and. But that sinking feeling as I was driving up the A1 and I should have been feeling great because I bought what I thought was a decent car at a decent price, and then put my foot down and the clutch slipped and it was horrible. So yes, it's not a nice feeling if you find out if you like that your website's rubbish and it's not actually going to do what you hoped it was going to do. Maybe because the whole website project was you came at it from the wrong angle, you didn't get good advice, etc. so maybe what we should be talking about here is instead of talking about your website's rubbish. Here's how to fix it. We should be talking about how to know that your website's rubbish might be a better starting point.

Yeah, potentially. Although I was just gonna, like, just to pick up on something there because I think, you know, with the analogy of giving there, like your car is, you know, your clutch is slipped, your flywheel's f*cked, whatever. Um, I'm allowed one swear.

I think I'm not gonna swear at all because I'm a goody two shoes.

Yeah. That's the rules on TV, at least. Um, you take it to the garage, you pay a thousand pounds, they fix the known problem, they give the car back to you, and it's probably okay. You can live with it for another six to seven years, maybe, or, you know, whatever. I don't know how long people keep cars for nowadays. Um, six months. Um, but with the website, it's a little bit different, right? Because a, there's no clear fix. You can't take it to a mechanic and say, just make this work now and they'll know exactly what to do. And B, you can't live with it because if it's not working, the business isn't making any money. It's not just you have to get the train or the bus occasionally, or you have to work from home for a couple of days. You literally your business will not function without a functioning website, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, there's a real pressure to fix it quickly. And also, I think a real difficulty in the actual fixing of it. But yeah, I mean, I guess you're right. The first thing is how do you actually know it's not working?

So kick us off on that subject. What do you what would be one thing that you would be looking at to try and decide whether a website's working?

Well, the first thing is, is the phone ringing? Are you getting email enquiries? Are people you know, are you getting the, the forms and the the questions? And people ring you up and saying, I want to book you, I want to buy this service off you. Um, and if that's not there and you're not getting the enquiries through, then the next question is, are you actually getting visitors to the website? And, you know, because one thing I think we see a lot of the time, especially with relaunches where people have bought a new website, it's been deployed by people who maybe don't know as much as they should, and they suddenly find that all their traffic dries up because the website's been structured badly, it's not indexed properly, whatever. There's one hundred and one different things that can go wrong there. And then the other thing I'd be looking for, I guess, is when. If you are getting traffic but no enquiries, what are people doing on the site? Are they finding it confusing? Are they finding it difficult to work their way around? Are you seeing a lot of people dropping off pages, not visiting the right bits, that sort of thing?

Okay, so the interesting thing there is not once did you mention what the thing looks like because that isn't really important. No, no, I wasn't, I wasn't.

I have a marketing brain.

I didn't like, I wasn't leading you into my trap or anything like that. What I meant was a website can actually look quite smart and quite polished.

Yeah. And do.

But that isn't the definition. I mean, I sometimes say to customers, potential customers, if they're speaking to us and other agencies, which is invariably the case. It's how people do things. And I often say to them, look, if you're speaking to, say, us and three or four other credible agencies, almost certainly you'll get a good outcome in terms of aesthetic. It'll almost certainly look the part right. And I would imagine.

That's not to diminish what designers do. It's just yeah, that's the kind of standard, isn't it? It'll look shiny, but just because it looks shiny and polished.

Well, that's the point. And that's why I'm saying, you know, how how to know if your website's rubbish. Because I think if you if you your analogy about the car mechanic and not, you know, there isn't an equivalent with the website is is somewhat true, but not strictly true because we have had situations, excuse me, we've had situations where um, a website we haven't had to rebuild a website. We've just, we've just got our spanners out and actually gone in and done what we needed to do in order to get the website doing what it needs to do, i.e. generate leads for the business.

But it's significantly harder to do that, right? You have to unpick all sorts of problems to work out why a website isn't working. It's not as simple as, oh, your flywheel's gone. Or like, you know, I put the put my foot down on the floor and nothing happens and the mechanic can work from there and say, okay, it's this problem. I think our job, well, it's not, I don't know, maybe it's not. Maybe it just seems that way to me. I think our job is a little bit more complex, but I don't know. Don't quote me on that.

Have you seen under the bonnet of a modern car? I mean, you can't even see the engine, so. Yeah, I think it is pretty complex.

It's. Yeah. I was going to make another point before you said that. I'll come. It'll come back to me.

Okay. That's fine. I think the bottom line is here that, you know, look away from what your website looks like in terms of figuring out if it's any good and revert back to some of the things that you were saying, Alex, and primarily connect it up to the Google Search console, find out what, how people are finding it, find out if they're finding it, and if they are, what words are they typing into Google in order to find it. And from there, you can start to paint a pretty clear picture pretty quickly as to whether or not in a business context, your website is delivering what's needed, i.e. the right eyeballs.

Yeah. And, and you, you know, you'll have to use several tools to kind of piece this together. But you can, you know, just kind of map the whole journey, can't you, from like, where are my visitors coming from? Where are they going on the site? What do they do on my site? I mean, we use Hotjar, Google Analytics, that kind of thing. And you can get quite in-depth. You can see, you know, what, what people are actually doing and where the kind of problems are and where the issues that are running into are. And that process is key to it really.

Just for the uninitiated, tell us what Hotjar is.

Uh, it's, um, a jar that gets hot. No, it's it's a stupid name for a tool. All right.

I think it's, I think it's a safe bet if with these podcasts that I do the jokes, right? Because your jokes are shit.

You're mean. You're in a mean mood today. Um, no, hotjar is, um, so it's like a heat mapping tool. It tells you exactly where people have been on your page.

Heat mapping.

Yeah, I well, look, okay, one of the things that Hotjar does is it records people moving around on your website. So from the moment they taps.

Into their webcam, so you can see them in their living room, in their pants looking at your website, right?

Shows you what's on the screen.

Kicking and screaming into a sensible explanation.

There we go. Right. It records people's screens. It's a.

Screen recorder.

Okay. Do you want to do the jokes and the explanations?

I probably.

Should. Yeah, it records your screen. It shows you exactly where people move their mouse, where they click, what they look at, how long they spend on different bits of the page. And it also kind of aggregates data from multiple screen recordings to show you on average, where do people look on a page? Where do they spend time? Where do they move their mice around that kind of thing? So if you don't want to sit and watch hundreds of recordings, you can just see here's a problem area on a page or here's a button that people aren't ever clicking.

They move their mice around. I think it's they move their mouse around.

I have a degree in English as well.

Um, yeah. That's right. So one of the things that you can do is, is plug in hotjar and you can plug in a free version of it. As I already mentioned, the Google Search Console, another free tool. It'll give you lots of great information about how people are finding, if they're finding your website and how they're finding your website. And, and importantly, you know, the, the things that they're typing into Google that if they did find your website would be a good thing. But in fact, because you're on page six for that particular search, they're not finding your website. So it provides a wealth of information. And this is what we mean by, you know, how to find out if your website's a bit rubbish. It's not about the look and feel, although quite often the two things go hand in hand.

Yeah. Although yeah, definitely one thing I was just going to say about Google Search Console as well, a really interesting and useful exercise to do if you have just had a website relaunched. So you had an old website, you've had it replaced with a shiny new product and that new product isn't working is you can look in Google Search Console and you can see if you look at data from when the old website was live, and the keywords are very different to the keywords that are bringing you traffic. Now, I think that's a really useful and interesting thing to unpick, right? Because often when people launch sites that are not structured properly, where the content's really thin, where they've ditched loads of really good content, you'll suddenly see that loads of keywords are used to that used to deliver traffic to you suddenly aren't. And that's you can then go back and say, okay, right, this is where we've gone wrong. This is where we've lost ground. You know, these are the things that used to send enquiries and visitors to the site and now aren't. And why is that? And that kind of helps, I think sometimes to get your head around things.

So another way that you can know that your website's a bit rubbish is if it has this thing that Alex just referred to as thin.

Yeah.

Content just if you can, I mean, I'm, I'm worried about asking you to do it, given what you just said about Hotjar, but I'll try and explain what thin content is. Alex.

It's just content that's not very detailed.

I thought you were honestly going to thought your content isn't very thick. I honestly thought you were going to say that then.

Tempting. But no. Um, I learned my lessons. Um, no. Yeah, it's just content that's not very detailed. So we talk about thin in the sense that, you know, it looks thin on the page, but also when Google or a search engine tries to grapple with your content and say, okay, what's this page about? It's not going to get very much information. There's nothing really for it to dig into and learn about.

Yeah. And you know, the thing is, a lot of people, when they talk about revamping their website, they often talk about like redacting it. They often talk about getting rid of redacting is the wrong word, but getting rid of thinning out the content. I mean, there you go, thin content content that's been thinned out or maybe was never anything other than thin in the first place. So how, how can we help people understand that? Um, simply having a web page that's about a particular subject isn't enough. If all that's on there is a couple of hundred words.

And this is a huge problem. I think, particularly when people go and find very design forward agencies to build them websites, and they make very slick looking designs that simply do not have enough space on the page for any text. And then they say, well, this looks really nice, but it doesn't work with our current content. So we'll cut our current content. And it's such a huge mistake and we see it all the time, I think, don't we? I think it's fair to say. Um, yeah. No, it's it's, it's massively problematic. You need detail on a page. It is not enough to say this is a page about a BMW three series. This is not a you know, this is a page about titanium widgets. Okay. There you go Google. That's enough. You actually have to tell a story. You actually have to have some interesting information on there. You have to have something on there that is different, substantially different from all the other pages that are trying to rank for that same keyword.

Yeah. One thing you can do, I can't remember the name of it, but you might be able to, you could do a particular search that say, for example, you can just, if you were looking for the thing that you sell, this is what you might search for. I mean, that's just a guess. But you type it in and, you know, you kind of know that your website doesn't appear anywhere, but what you can do is you could grab the or visit the website. That's number one in the organic, not the paid search, not the adverts. Click that website and grab the web address, the URL. Um, and then there's a tool which will compare two web pages.

SEO Ninja I.

Think. Yeah. So we could, we could maybe find out and put it in the show notes. Or if you just put, uh, SEO page comparison tool as a search into Google, you should find it and it will look at the page that's number one. And the page on your website that you hope would have got that traffic, would have got that search would have appeared in search. And it'll tell you the differences between the two.

Yeah. It tells you things like how many words exactly? Yeah. How many words on each page, how many times you've mentioned the target keyword, all of that.

Inbound links and things like that, all that stuff.

How many headings you've got, all of that stuff that is kind of useful. Um, and yeah, most of the time what it'll tell you is that your, your page does not have anywhere near enough information. And I think there's another element of this as well, actually, just to pick up on something, because a lot of the time when we're, when we talk about, um, what should be on a web page, we're talking about it from the The point of view of Google, right? How to rank the page. How to make sure the page performs well in search. The other thing to consider whenever you've had a new website redesigned and somebody has substantially altered the text on the page, is that that will also have a huge knock on effect on conversions. If you're not providing visitors with enough information to to kind of qualify the purchase, if people aren't landing on your site and thinking, okay, here's everything I need to know about this company. They're obviously credible. I'm going to buy this right now. Then, you know, sometimes you can see websites that, you know, it looks shiny. It has all the right content for Google, but it still doesn't actually generate any leads. And that's why it's because somebody got in there and said, right, let's design a page and write a page that ranks well, but let's not bother thinking about what the customer needs to know or what they need to find on the page.

Okay. Which sort of website would you rather work on?

Um.

The one that's getting the traffic but isn't converting it or the one that isn't getting the traffic at all.

Like now the latter I think, but, but yeah, it's, it's a tricky one for sure. I think we do both quite regularly, don't we?

So I guess that's right. Okay. So the comparison tool might help here. So just going back just to recap, uh, you know, so your website's rubbish. How do you fix it? Or put another way, how to know that your website's rubbish and first and foremost, and you said it right at the start, if it's not generating enquiries, then from a business perspective it's rubbish.

Yeah.

But how would somebody know that that website can't be knocked into shape and turned into a website that does generate enquiries as opposed to like agreeing with a web agency, for example, or a digital marketing agency like us that okay, then I agree, the website's rubbish. Let's rebuild it.

So like from a CRM perspective, from a conversion rate optimisation perspective, the the answer, I think lies in the second part of what we were saying earlier. If the website isn't converting, but it is getting plenty of traffic, You can probably knock it back into shape because there are people landing on the website. There are people visiting the page and all you need to do now is work out why those people are not converting. As long as they're the right kind of people, as long as they're coming from the right kind of keywords and it's not something completely irrelevant. Um, you can probably tweak and move things around to the point where people actually start finding the information they want and converting. If, however, you're not getting any conversions, and then you dig a bit deeper and you find that you're not getting any traffic either, uh, probably barking up the wrong tree, like there's something fundamentally wrong there that probably can't be rescued, I would say.

Yeah, yeah. Again, another enquiry that we that I'm speaking with the guys at the business down in down in the Midlands in England, uh, just now. And they've got an absolute powerhouse of a website and they're on a mission to effectively double the number of keywords that they have in Google's top ten in quite a short space of time actually. Um, but that might be doable because they've got such a powerful website. Although when I've looked at it, it seems obvious to me that there's also some real opportunities around converting more of the traffic that is potentially already either visiting their website or could be visiting their website if their if their appearance, if the way they appeared in search results actually was a little bit more clickable and appealing. If you if you see what I mean. Okay.

I think that's a that's the kind of dream scenario, though, isn't it? You get a website project where, you know, there's loads of traffic, but there's something just wrong with the messaging, something wrong with the way they're trying to gather leads or something wrong with the way they're trying to convert people and you can just very quickly fix it. But I think otherwise you are kind of.

What can we tease out of this conversation that makes it absolutely firmly not about a couple of guys who work at a digital marketing agency trying to persuade people to rebuild their website that they spent a lot of money on in the last year or eighteen months or something. I mean, we know that we would never do that, but people who don't know us don't know that we would never do that. And I always want to have always do have really honest conversations with people. And I believe that they take what we say on face value. But again, it's I'm just trying to get to the point where, you know, people can make their own mind up, you know, in, in life, you know, you go to somebody and you say, well, what do you think? And they turn around and say, you know what? You know what you should do. You don't need me to tell you. And then you kind of think, yeah, they're absolutely right. I do know what I should have done or need to do in this situation.

So there's an element of that, isn't there, that kind of like gut instinct that you'll have. I guess the other thing I'd say if I was being one hundred and ten percent honest, is just going back to what you were saying earlier. If you're talking to somebody and they're advising you to just rebuild your website, pull the plug, start again. And they're talking mainly about, like you say, the appearance or the fact that it doesn't do something flashy or the fact that, you know, it doesn't look right for your brand or whatever. I would be suspicious. I would be much more confident if people are saying, you should rebuild this website, and here's the data to back it up. There is data to back it up. You know, you're not you're not making these decisions blind. You can look and see whether or not it's in need of a rebuild. And if it's not, and somebody saying to you, oh, it just doesn't look right for you, it's not a great fit. I just don't really think that matters as much as people think it does.

So the whole idea of how to know if your website's rubbish is primarily data driven, the decisions data driven, but the different sorts of data, it might be that nobody sees your website because they never find it. But the other kind of data is people are seeing your website, but you're not. You're still not getting the enquiries, the landing on your website, and they're not engaging with you. There's another red flag. But speaking about red flags, um, to give people some idea of the things to look out for if they're speaking to potential partners, digital agency partners who are getting them to rebuild their website for all the wrong reasons, right? So what might some of the wrong reasons be? What kind of things have we come across that people have told us?

Oh, there's one that always really stands out to me. Um, I don't know how to mention it without mentioning the name of it. It was a take a breath.

Calm down.

It was an engineering company.

Yeah.

Um, all our clients are engineering companies. Um, they made, um.

Careful.

Yeah. Something they made, something they made software for other engineering companies. And they'd been persuaded by a very shiny PR slash web design agency to build a website that that looked more attractive and appealing and made them look more modern as a business. Except the website didn't ever actually talk about the product. They provided just them as a company and everything.

All the problems that they solved.

Yeah.

And which meant that.

People just didn't actually know what they really did.

Well, they never found it in the first place.

Yeah, it's the whole thing. Just was just a kind of like, weird exercise in in self promotion. And it just. Yeah, it just didn't work. Um, anybody that's telling you that you should build a new website because it will make your brand look more credible or that it will make you, it'll make people take you more seriously because your current website looks out of date. I think that's rubbish largely, isn't it? Maybe, I don't know.

I, you know, I could have been really horrible and said absolutely not. But I'm not going to say that I do think that brand is incredibly important.

Yeah.

I'm not saying and I know you. I know you're not. I know you're not saying it's not important. Of course it is. Um, but it's not really getting into the realms of brand here. So, so I do agree with you.

I don't think it's a credible reason to rebuild your website. I think, you know, there's arguments to be made for like rebranding exercises and there's arguments to be made for modernising the look and the feel of a website for different reasons. But if the problem is performance and what you're trying to get out of the website is customers, then those aren't really useful reasons to rebuild.

If you're. If if. Sorry, I'll start again. One of the reasons that you're not getting enquiries if you're getting traffic might be because you look like a thirty bob. That's fair accountant or a thirty bob firm of engineers because your brand's rubbish, your website's rubbish, and it's really turning people off. That's true. That might be it might be. One of the things I was thinking about is if somebody says to you, oh, of course your website won't rank. It's not built with WordPress, for example. So people and the driving force for people making statements like that is that they have in-house or they have.

Or they want to build that kind.

Of in-house expertise with, say, WordPress, for example, could be any content management system, or they have a freelancer who builds their websites, who only builds websites in WordPress. So what they're really saying is we can only do the job that we can do. If you build it in a platform that we know.

Yeah.

Now there is. It's not entirely incredible if that's the right word I can use in that context. Yeah. It isn't without credibility that they might say, um, that they need to rebuild the website because they need to do a ton of stuff. And the website is built in some really obscure system that they, that doesn't either give the flexibility or is so complex that there are only four or five agencies in the whole of Europe who can actually work with that particular system. So I wouldn't say entirely dismiss it. But if you've got a website that's built in WordPress, then it's unlikely that it would be credible to say, of course, if you don't change your website and rebuild it in HubSpot, it won't work properly. Or, you know, or if you've got a website built in Joomla, which is a system we particularly like open source content management system. Uh, if you don't dump Joomla and rebuild it in WordPress, your website will never rank because that's, that's horseshit.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, and in the context of having had your website built relatively recently, the chances are you've had it built on a platform that you know, everybody knows how to use and is perfectly credible in its own right, and there's no real reason to jump unless, like you say, you've picked something really weird. It does happen.

So again, to help people make sure that they're not getting the wool pulled over their eyes and getting told their websites rubbish, when in fact their website isn't rubbish. Um, basing the decision purely on how it's been built has some merit. If people are saying it, it's not going to be possible to to turn the website into the powerhouse that you need using the platform that it's currently built on. It has some credibility, but be careful. Be cautious. That's right. Um, the look and feel of it might be the reason that you're getting traffic because sometimes businesses have solid websites in terms of they've got loads of content, they're telling a great story. But the website was built when God was in short pants and it just looks awful. So they don't get good conversions purely for that reason.

But yeah, so okay, so I think that's the that's the way to frame it, isn't it? What we're essentially saying is if your website isn't converting because the look and feel is wrong, that is something you will be able to tell from the data because people will get to the website and then not convert. And if that's not the case and somebody's telling you, I just don't think it looks right, that's what's to be suspicious of. I think that's the.

Yeah.

That's the.

And going back. Yeah. Going back to what you said, going back. Sorry, going back to what you said about not WordPress Hotjar. Yeah. That, you know, you can see that in Hotjar. But you can also see that in, uh, Google analytics or clicky analytics where most people are only on your website for a few seconds and then they leave straight away. So that, that should, I mean, it could be something else that's causing that. It could be a technical glitch that's causing that. We've seen that before. Um, so okay, we so unpicking it, keeping sort of keeping the theme going without wanting to, um, flog a dead horse. What what else? Is a is a really strong signal. Do you think that your website is probably a bit rubbish? I mean, what about benchmarking it? What about looking at all your competition and just seeing what.

Like I guess, yeah. I guess if you pick people that are absolutely killing it, the people you know, in your industry or your vertical who are kind of always there, everybody knows about them. They're getting most of the customers. Yeah. Look at their website. Look at your website. Does it do the same things? Does it perform the same way? Benchmarking made me think of another thing though, which is probably another thing to be relatively cautious of, which is people telling you you need to rebuild your website because it's slow. That is another thing that I hear a lot of. It's like.

Yeah, are you saying that's not right?

Well, no, I'm just saying that it's something you should probably take with a pinch of salt because we come up against this quite a lot, don't we? Especially what some agencies, some digital marketing professionals like to do is put a website into something like Google site speed test and come back and say, oh, it's getting a really poor score on mobile. Look at it. It's forty out of one hundred. Your website's too slow. It's rubbish. It won't perform well. You need to rebuild it. But a lot of those tests, especially the ones where you just kind of slap a URL in and it tells you how fast your website is. They're very kind of they're very prone to being manipulated and massaged. A lot of them use like 3G, for example, Google's PageSpeed insight tool uses 3G to test. So it's always bad. It's always rubbish. So if somebody comes to you and says your website's really slow, you need to rebuild it. Just just check. Do you know what I mean? Like, just make sure that they're actually kind of telling the truth, that it does perform really badly. Sometimes they do in a really slow website will put people off, but you shouldn't always take that stuff at face value.

I was in an agency mastermind group earlier on today. Um, all the other agency owners are based over in the States. And one of the guys was talking about how they've put quite a lot of effort into trying to improve the performance of their websites. Their websites are full of great content. They generate lots of business, but they felt that they were being held back because the performance wasn't great. And and incidentally, both of the websites are HubSpot CMS websites. So they're a, a SaaS solution. They're hosted by HubSpot. So there's not an enormous amount you can do to actually speed them up. So while we were chatting, um, I kind of was fiddling around and I put the sites in, in, you know, separately, both of the guys, I put their sites into the PageSpeed insights tool. And they are so slow that Google, the Google PageSpeed insights tool just went, nah, it's failed. The test has failed. Now I put hours in and we've got our bloggers in HubSpot, but our main website, we use Joomla for our main website. And I put it in and I got a score of about thirty six thirty seven for mobile, which sounds rubbish and kind of is rubbish, but you'd be surprised how many really good websites are still struggling to score well on the mobile score. But when you look at the desktop versions, it tells you, yeah, it's like ninety five or something. It's ninety five out of one hundred green. All good. No problems at all. And so generally speaking, it would be very easy to be shown page speed insight data for the mobile version of your website. And then they'll say, you see, look, I mean, the thing to do is say while they're sat there is say, okay, just leave the tool up and put your website in there and show me how great your website is. Now, you know, some agencies pride themselves. They specialise in this stuff, and they pride themselves in making sure that their website absolutely flies. A lot of the time they do that by not using off the shelf software, not using content management systems that you can just download and use or just start using. If it's a SaaS tool and they handcraft every individual page because they've got the skills, if they need a new page to do that. Whereas most people want to use a content management system because it improves the workflow.

Do you think I mean, do you think if you did spend like an exorbitant amount of money getting a website that did that, that performed one hundred out of one hundred on mobile and PageSpeed insights or something like that? Like, do you think that would be money well spent, or do you think the performance gains are actually pretty negligible?

If you marry performance with fantastic content that you've researched, you, it's it's going after, you know, that's got to be a killer combination, hasn't it? It's got to be a good combination. You'd have thought um, you'd hope. Yeah, you'd hope so. That's right. Okay. So, uh, website speed could be a factor in your website not performing in search and not generating leads. The only thing I would say is that both of those websites I mentioned, which were so bad, they didn't even score when you put them into PageSpeed insights, I know for a fact they're getting good traffic and their websites are generating solid enquiries. So that's where it all gets a bit. See, the whole thing about everything that we do is it's so subjective. Yes, it really is. Because even when it comes to look and feel, you know, to one person it looks great. To another person, it's awful. Um, and there's no right or wrong. I mean, conversion rate optimisation, which I know you're interested in, particularly interested in, you know, that kind of does demystify it a little bit. That's a fantastic spider crawling down the wall. Um, that does demystify it a little bit because.

It looks like a garden spider a.

Little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Nice spider. Pretty cool. We've had owls. We've had magpies. Now we've had spiders podcast spider. Um, you know, so, um, I've kind of forgotten what I was saying now what was I saying?

Um.

Yeah, it's obviously really interesting.

Distracted by spider.

I think what we were talking broadly speaking about, about page speed and stuff like that.

Like just about the fact that you can still get perfectly good enquiries and visits and.

You can and then, and then I went on to talk about, you know, one man's meat is another man's poison sort of thing. So.

And Ciara does just to pick up on what you were saying.

Yeah, that's where I was going.

It does demystify it. But again, I think it's really important to remember that each audience, each industry has its own set of rules. You can't there's no kind of blanket application. You can't say this website looks good, or this website does all the things it needs to convert, because it is all entirely dependent on what your audience expects. And one of the things that, you know, in the past I've done a lot of is like user testing where you get people, random members of the public that sign up to these services to film themselves going through a website and completing tasks that you've set them and they'll narrate to like, that's the idea they get, they get paid a nominal fee to go through and narrate what they're doing and tell you what they think at every step of the way. And one of the things I always think is really interesting when you do those kind of user testing things is the things you hear people say. And because you can, you know, you send somebody to a website and ask them what their first impressions of it are. And most of the time they'll say something that you really don't think is true? Like, oh, this website looks really slick and modern. And I'm like, well, I think it looks terrible and clunky, but that's the thing, you can never actually tell how the public's gonna interpret things. And there's a real danger in kind of assuming that there's a right way for a website to look.

I think one thing you could do to figure out if your website's a bit rubbish. Another thing is you could say, for example, you're a firm of accountants in Dundee.

Yeah.

Or somewhere. So you could ask people that you know.

Yes.

To, to go and say like, could you go on to Google and look for an accountant? Yeah. And see if you can without typing out the name of our business into, into Google, see if you can find us. Yeah. See if you know, see if that works. I mean, that's, you can kind of do that yourself, but giving somebody else that task, going back to your user testing thing, you know, just say like, imagine you live in Dundee. imagine you need an accountant. Go and see if you can find us sort of thing. So you like Dundee accountants, accountants in Dundee and, you know, they might come back and say, yeah, yeah, I found you really easily. I went, I clicked the link that was in the search result, and then what I saw would have encouraged me to get in touch with you. Are they going to be impartial if they're a friend? I don't know, maybe.

Well, and I think that's the value of those user testing tools, to be honest. But I also think the other thing I would caveat that by is if you're going to ask people to do that sort of thing, make sure that those people are in your target demographic. Because if you ask your mum, for example, she'll say, oh, this website is so confusing. I was so lost. I didn't understand any of it. Luckily, you know, uh, our aged parents are not the kind of people that were necessarily trying to attract. But yeah, I mean, it's important to make sure that the people you're asking to do that kind of work are the kind of people that you're trying to appeal to, because otherwise they will give you feedback that is not particularly useful.

Okay, so wind this up. A simple question. Um, can rubbish websites be fixed?

Yeah. Is that a simple question. Yes. Yeah, probably.

Yeah.

Um, as to whether or not it's it's cost effective to do that. That's right. That's the real question.

That's the really tricky bit. Um, I mean it is worth getting a website audit. We, we offer website audits on a, on our site. If you go to red evolution dot com and just fill in any form on any page and ask us to audit your website, we'll do that for you and give you an honest appraisal of what we see and what we think the problems might be. Uh, lots of other agencies and credible organisations also offer to do that. Uh, what I would say about the one we do is we don't just put you through an automated tool that spews out a report. We actually sit down and look at it and send you a video recording of us looking at it and telling you what we think is wrong with it. People really quite like those things. Yeah. Um, that's one way of doing it. Um, don't be afraid to admit you got it wrong. And the website you've got that maybe you haven't had for very long is not the website you need. I mean, the example you gave about the client of ours, The. Their new website had literally been alive for three or four months, and they put their hands up and said, yeah, it was a painful exercise to create it. And we now fully accept that what we've got is absolutely not what we need.

That's probably another point, actually, although I don't really know how to articulate it properly, that if if the process of making the website is very painful and you feel like you're making a lot of compromises, there's probably something in that. Because I think if it if it all feels right, it's probably because the project's going in the right direction. And if it all feels like it's an uphill battle and that you're constantly making compromises or doing things you don't feel comfortable with, it's probably not going to be the right website at the end of the process. Sorry.

Yeah, you might be right. I think there's probably something in that. Yeah. I mean, they generally are kind of gnarly projects because there's lots of people involved. There's lots of opinions involved. Um, so that yeah, they kind of are sort of quite generally sort of tricky ish. Um, okay. I hope that was useful. I mean, the idea that your website is rubbish and how to fix it might be as simple as engaging with a great agency who can actually take what you've got and knock it into shape. And certainly that's what good agencies can do. Sometimes it might be the case that what you've invested in is, is pants, and you need to just ditch it and start again. Deciding whether or not the website's right in the first place is really quite simple. It's kind of data driven for the most part, whether that be data as in visits to the website or data as in visits to the website, not turning into enquiries. Yeah. And it's really as simple as that. It doesn't, it really comes down to the look and feel, although as I said, it often goes hand in hand that websites that don't perform also don't look great or are sometimes overdesigned. They're kind of tried to be clever. And that in itself is the reason they're not converting. Yeah, definitely. Anyway, if you've enjoyed this and even if you haven't, do you want to come on the show and talk about some aspects of digital marketing.

How much you hated it?

Yeah. I mean, really just reach out and tell us if you enjoy what we talk about and the way we do it. And or if you don't enjoy it, feel free to tell us that as well. We'll, we'll read out all reviews and all emails that we receive. Um, if you'd like to come on, get in touch. Red evolution dot com. Fill in any form, just say you know who you are and that you like to come on the podcast and what you'd like to talk about, uh, in the meantime, scorch your, I think we might need to just go home early today and go and enjoy that sunshine. Does that sound like a plan?

I would not complain about that.

No, I wouldn't complain about that either. The golf course is calling me. What about you? Stripping a floor, putting some wallpaper up, or just taking your daughter for a walk?

Yeah, we've been doing less actually, recently because, uh, my wife's gone back to work, so we've had less time, really, but. Okay, probably a walk.

Whatever next. Women working.

Well, there goes half our listeners.

Yeah.

That's it.

Just go. Okay. That's been great. Uh, goodbye from me.

And goodbye from me as well.