If you're providing professional services, because let's face it, we're talking about B2B business to business stuff here. You know, if I'm a buyer and I need a service, I've got a business challenge that needs to be solved. I'm not buying that off Pepsi or Coca Cola or Adidas or a brand that people care about. I'm buying it off a brand I've never heard of before and a brand I don't care about. All I really care about is how it can help me.
Actually, I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head in an interesting way, though inadvertently. Nobody cares about your website at first, and chances are they'll leave not caring to unless you can persuade them to care. And I guess that's the job. That's effectively what we're talking about, isn't it? If you have a vanishingly small amount of time to kind of grab somebody's interest, they are coming to your website under the assumption that they're not going to care about what they see. You've got to persuade them very quickly on that one page that it's worth sticking around, that it's worth getting to know your brand and understanding what you do.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Today we're going to be talking about Alex.
Oh, it was my idea. Um, so basically mistakes that people make with their landing pages or website content, um, that kills their conversions. I guess we could probably think of a snappier title than that.
I think pretty much.
Pretty.
Much anybody.
Would be better than pretty.
Much anything would be better than that.
Okay. So I guess for a little background, um, we were talking to a client earlier today who has a website that is, I think we both agree a little bit dated. Um, but that's not the main problem. They're kind of obsessing over getting.
Basically, you're just telling everybody that we build dated websites.
We built a dated website a long time ago.
We built when we built it. It was dated a long time ago.
When we built it, it was brand spanking new and very shiny. Now it's looking a little bit.
Can I clarify?
Well, I suppose you better.
A better add. Yeah. So we have a client who um is a very small business, tends to want to do pretty much everything himself on the website. We built the website many, many years ago. Still going strong, still brings in business, but it could definitely do with a professional eye casting over it, which we've been doing and giving him some guidance and some help because that's how we roll. Um, and therefore, what we did is we kind of looked at it together, didn't we, and went through it and recorded a little video for him, um, which we're happy to do for anybody, by the way, whether you're a client or not, if you want us to review your website, just go to red evolution dot com. Fill, fill in the forms. I think there's a blue link at the top of the page.
Yeah. And we'll only make fun of you a little bit.
Yeah. We won't ever mention you by name in one of our podcasts, uh, or anything like that. Honest. Um, but anyway, this website is kind of all over the place because what he's done is concentrate on the content, trying to get search rankings focused so much on that. He's got so much content, great content, some of it on his website, and he's kind of lost his way a little bit. Yeah. And I might suggest that what he's not doing now is telling a very good story. What do you think?
Yeah. And I think it's interesting because when we were, um, talking about this episode, I immediately remembered that I'd been having a conversation very similar to this with somebody on Reddit, where I spent a lot of time in some of the SEO subreddits, sort of helping people out and also talking shop. And there was a freelancer in there kind of decrying the fact that he'd tripled his client's organic traffic in three months, but the client had still binned him. Um, and I think it kind of speaks to the same problem, right? Which is this idea that you can obsess over traffic and getting people onto your website and how you're going to rank things in search engines. But ultimately, you know, the job of your website isn't actually to rank well or to get lots of visits. It's to sell things normally a product or a service, or to convince people to get in touch with you or whatever it is you're doing with your website. And yeah, there's a huge element to that, which is the kind of the storytelling you do on the page or the things that you do to persuade people, um, that a lot of people just sort of overlook really, certainly in this case, the client we were talking to earlier, that is exactly what's happened. I think he's got very kind of, you know, down this rabbit hole of getting more traffic. Um, and that will mean in his eyes more leads in the long run. But really, if your web pages aren't doing the job, then that won't ever happen.
Are you saying that he's focused on SEO optimisation?
I think I might be, yeah, SEO optimisation.
Tell all the boys and girls why that's a rubbish thing to say, a stupid thing to say.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. So SEO optimisation is literally search engine optimisation optimisation. And it makes you sound silly when you say it.
I tell you what, there's a lot of people in agency land will still say it.
Yeah, I see it on people's websites, like on the actual website. I'm like.
Well, maybe they've been really clever because if people are actually searching for SEO optimisation, then that's why they're.
Saying.
SEO optimisation on their website so that they get the rankings and get those people to come in. So, um, okay, so we might really be talking about more about storytelling, more about trying to get that emotional connection rather than focusing in on writing content. What search engines like, so you get some sort of search rankings, and then you get traffic on your website only to find that you still don't generate business because it looks a bit rubbish. The story isn't good. It's confusing. I mean, I think in this particular case, um what, what's happening is it's, it's a bit like the Morecambe and Wise, all the right notes, not necessarily in the right order. He's got tons of content all over his website, but he's expecting his audience. He's his customers to kind of join the dots and figure everything out for themselves.
Well, critically, and I think it's important to note we're using this client as an example because it's a really good example. Um, you know, if you are listening to this, it's not meant to be. We're not, they're having a dig for fun. Um, critically, I think one of the things that's really interesting is in the conversation that we had with him when we sent him the video and he emailed back, can.
I just stop you there?
Yes. Well I'm stopped.
Thank you. Slow down.
Okay. When, uh. Well, there goes that train of thought. When we emailed him, he responded to say, oh, I'd never looked at it like that before. And I think that's sort of the crux of it. A lot of people go out to build the website that, you know, the way they want to read it or they want to see it, and they kind of think in terms of like, okay, well, I know this information is here on this page, and I know that if somebody looks on this page, they'll find the rest of the information they need to work out X, Y, and Z. So I'm telling a good story and they don't ever look at it as, you know, as if they were a brand new customer coming to a specific page on their website. And to be fair, you know, we were talking last week about a couple of pages on our website where we've been guilty of exactly the same thing, which is.
Stop reading my notes.
I can't read, I can't read, your handwriting is illegible. What is that? It looks like a spider's died on the page. Um, no. You know, it's about making sure that, you know, if if somebody who knew nothing about your business at all landed on this page of the website, and they were only going to look at this one page of your website, could they find everything they need to persuade them that you are, in fact, the best person possible for whatever problem they're trying to solve? Mhm.
Yeah. And we use in business, just like in lots of other areas of our human existence. We use stories and storytelling as part of that. I mean, if you want a storytelling masterclass, then if you go into the Digital Marketing From The Coalface back catalogue and find the episode where we have a chat with Bob Keeler, which is the most popular episode of our podcast, according to the stats.
With good reason.
With good reason. It's an hour and a half, um, masterclass in business storytelling because he is the business storytelling guru. Um, well, one of the gurus, he's very, very, very good at it. And it was a great podcast. So it's worth sort of digging back into that. Um, so I'm not going to go kind of off too deeply into this idea of storytelling, but it is about, um, it is about explaining what your product or service does in an engaging way, which is, you know, broadly speaking, as humans, we like to hear stories. And so that's what, that's what he's missing, isn't it?
Well, it's the critical thing about stories that they'll teach you in any creative writing class is that stories have a specific order. The beats have to be arranged properly. You know, You'll hear about people talking about the beginning, the middle and the end and stuff like that. Right? But I think the same is true of web pages. You have to lay the information out in the right order. And so often we come across web pages where, you know, the headline stuff, the stuff you need to know, what is it? What does it do? You know, how much is it going to cost me? What sort of investment of time am I looking at here? All of that information is kind of hidden underneath a load of waffle. And I think, you know, in a way, I think it's getting worse as well, because often you see people kind of peddling this really bad advice about storytelling online where it's sort of like, oh, talk about the benefits and, you know, frame things properly and agitate and, you know, all the steps that people teach and the models that they use. And I think a lot of the time, it just sort of buries really useful information really far down the page. I mean, this website in particular, it was really hard to find out what was actually on offer and how long it, you know, it took to deliver and what it was going to deliver and what was actually involved. And it was just sort of a load of waffle about why you'd want it. And that's I see that a lot and it does annoy me.
Is that because what a lot of people are doing with their website is they're working with an SEO consultant perhaps, and they're finding keywords. So these are search terms that lots of people use and variations of, and then just churning out content that uses those search terms in the hope that Google will then go, ah, somebody typed this search term into, into my search box. Therefore, I'm going to serve up this page on this website because they use that search term. So that's what they must be about. And just like we did, we had a massive cull. As we've previously, as we've mentioned previously in the podcast, we had a massive cull of content on our website because basically from sort of two thousand and seven ish to about twenty fifteen, you know, I'd be churning out blog posts, some of which were just little rants, some of which were Mindlessly chasing search terms, etc. I mean, yeah, we don't exempt ourselves from this advice we're offering now. I mean, this is this is, you know, the information is hard won. We've we've been there. Um, I'm not going to say we've got the t shirt. I'm not going to say that.
I think that's part. Yeah. Part of the issue is searching chasing rankings. I think the other problem is a long time ago people started peddling this very sort of tired, um, catchphrase content is king. And that volume was everything. And I see a lot of people who are out there, not even necessarily chasing keywords, just churning out content and trying to recycle assets and trying to reuse video across multiple pages of their website and trying to, you know, just, just as many landing pages as possible for as many search terms as possible and not taking care to craft the experience. You know, if somebody lands on a landing page of your website and they've searched for a specific search term, and you're going to show them a video at the top of the page, make sure it's a video about the service or catch or search phrase that you're actually trying to use, and not just a generic video about you or something. I mean, I see that all the time. I think, yeah, I think the problem is just thin or low quality content is very easy to churn out. And people have it in their heads that if they just do something that's better than doing nothing. And I think, yeah, the tide has turned on that really. People are a little bored of reading websites like that.
So if we're looking at creating a new page of content on our website, let's just think about that as opposed to a blog post. So so blog posts, thought leadership.
Useful.
Entertaining content that we know people are looking for. But if we're writing content in the hope of securing search rankings in the hope that that will lead to us getting enquiries for a particular product or a particular service. What process should we be going through for each and every page that we create?
Um, an open ended question. Uh, maybe maybe we should take an example. I guess if we were trying to sell something in particular.
Um, a professional service like um, an accounting service, we've used it. Excuse me, we've used accountants before. Let's use them again.
Yeah. I mean, well. I don't know actually thinking about it carefully. Um what, as in what process would we go through in order to come up with the content for the page or. Yeah. Well, I guess to start with, what's the problem that we're trying to solve? Um, specifically, what problem does the prospective reader of that page have? And how does what you're selling answer that? I think most pages nowadays, you know, the first thing you're going to see when you land is a headline that is going to sort of frame the reason that you should keep reading that page. Um, and then certainly a small block of text, no more than a paragraph that sort of neatly outlines everything that you'd hope to get out of reading it.
Yeah, perhaps. I mean, what about thinking, first of all? I mean, every time you create a web page, um, should you be thinking who, who is this information for?
Yeah.
So who's it for? What kind of format are they likely to want it in? Um, and if we can get them sticking with the content, what ultimately do we want them to do? Yeah. Because I think one of the things that that has been missed on the website, if you like that were that kind of got us thinking about this subject is, as you rightly said, when we did the, the little audit video, like there was nothing on that page other than what appeared to be a brain dump of information. Yeah. You were then left kind of high and dry. Um, not you were not asked if if this is this of interest, is this something you want to discuss with us? Would you like to buy this off us? Um, do you want to know what people are saying about this thing? Do you want to know who's bought it off us previously. You know, there was yeah, it was just kind of like this, this idea that you can just dump content on a web page and just expect your viewers, readers to do all the hard yards themselves.
There's two things at play there, isn't there? The first is like, don't make people think. So if you want somebody to read your page and then get in contact with you, sign up for something, download an ebook, whatever it is, and just make it really easy and keep prompting them. You know, I see a lot of people that do this thing where they'll sort of say at the very beginning of the page, download our e-book when it's way too early in the process and nobody cares yet. And then at the very bottom, and they miss the fact that people are going to scroll kind of fifty to sixty percent of the way down and then get bored and wander off or click a download link or whatever. So yeah, pepper your content with really obvious calls to action. Show people what you want them to do, lead them by the hand. And the other thing I think that's particularly important when you're doing the brain dump is to think about the sort of the issues and the objections that people are actually going to have. I mean, it's all good and well sitting there and talking about yourself for ten minutes or saying, oh, we're really trustworthy, really reliable. Another thing that the client in question had done was hidden all of the what we call trust signals, which is logos of the people who helped companies that he's working with, suppliers, all those things that people see and recognise and think, oh, okay, you know, if this person has worked for the NHS or whatever, then I can probably trust them. All of that was hidden at the bottom of the page, but that's the first objection people will have is like, why should I trust you? So get all that stuff up at the top of the page. Make it easy. Make it obvious.
Okay, so what we're kind of morphing into here is, is, is more like how to build a good landing page.
It's not. Yeah. Okay.
You know, maybe, maybe that's what we were seeing when we, when we were looking at his website and deciding what was wrong and how things could be improved, how it could be more effective, how it could generate more leads from the traffic it was getting, let alone how you could improve it. So he got actually got more traffic to the pages. Um, it was just like all of the things that you would expect to be there, weren't there? So it's hard. I'm trying to I'm trying to figure out what it is we're trying to share with people right now, because I don't think we're quite managing it yet.
I guess how to think about what your website is actually meant to be doing, rather than just how to land people on it. Because yeah, you're right. I mean, it does go to everything, doesn't it? It's every expectation. Because another thing that we did flag up in that video was the menu and whether or not the menu told a good story, whether you could see exactly where you were meant to go and tell exactly what was on offer. And again, it's, I guess it's just every element of a website has to be telling a story, doesn't it?
Um, yeah, I guess so. Um, so I mean, is another thing that people do that they should be wary of is, is that they're a bit cute. They kind of hide things or expect people to be more invested than they really are on a web page. Is that a mistake that people make?
Happens a lot, doesn't it? I mean, I'm thinking of clients of ours that have wanted to call their resource section something really cute and fancy and, you know, on brand. And then people don't use it because they don't know what's there. Um, I think, yeah, the assumption that people will engage with your website and give it the same consideration that you give, it is a huge mistake because ultimately people are in a rush. They're going to spend max a couple of minutes looking around and seeing if anything takes their fancy, and if not, they are going to bounce away. So.
So the, the, the premise that nobody cares about you or your brand, broadly speaking, maybe, maybe true, maybe isn't true. The whole point of building brands is to get people to care about them, isn't it? But ultimately, if you're providing professional services, because let's face it, we're talking about B2B business to business stuff here. You know, if I'm a buyer and I'm and I need a service, I've got a problem, a business challenge that needs to be solved. I'm not buying that off Pepsi or Coca Cola or Adidas, or a brand that people care about. I'm buying it off a brand I've never heard of before and and a brand I don't care about. All I really care about is how it can help me.
To begin with. Actually, I think you've sort of hit the nail on the head. And in an interesting way, though.
Inadvertently.
Nobody cares about your website at first. And I guess that's a critical point. The first time you ever saw a bottle of Coca Cola on the shelves, you didn't care about that either. You didn't know enough about it to contextualise it. And the same is true of websites. The first time somebody comes across your website, they do not care, and chances are they'll leave not caring to unless you can persuade them to care. And I guess that's the job. That's effectively what we're talking about, isn't it? You've got twenty, thirty. I mean, people say that your first impression of a website is formed in the first five seconds. Um.
You thought it was milliseconds.
I thought it was May it may even be quicker than that.
Yeah, I think it is.
Whatever. You have a vanishingly small amount of time to kind of grab somebody's interest. They are coming to your website on the. Under the assumption that they're not going to care about what they see. So I guess that's the point, isn't it? You've got to persuade them very quickly on that one page that it's worth sticking around, that it's worth getting to know your brand and understanding what you do. And I mean, I think people do eventually care even about B2B brands, you know, unless you're incredibly boring, um, people will eventually, you know, buy into what you're talking about on social media, what you're doing on your blog, whatever. People can learn to care about you. They're just coming with the assumption that you're not worth their time.
But should you even be? I do know the answer to this. It's kind of a, um, playing devil's advocate here, but do we have to try and make people care?
Well, I think if you want them to buy off you, you do.
But people who don't care will still buy off you if you solve a problem for them.
Um, yes, but.
You might be wrong. I don't know.
You still, but that's the thing. If you to persuade somebody that you can solve their problem for you, you still have to get a level of buy in that most websites aren't capable of creating. And I think that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? Like if you can persuade someone, you can solve their problem, you've done the job. But that is actually hard. It's not. They're not going to yes, people are going to buy off you if they think you can solve their problem. They're not going to buy off you because you stick a website up and say, I can solve your problem. That's. Those are two very different things.
Okay. So if you start with the premise, nobody cares and use that to help and guide the way you put together your web, your website. Um, and the other favorite is.
Oh, you want me to read your writing now? So what? Yeah.
So everything, everything you put in a web page, is it, can somebody look at what you've written or look at what you've done on that page and go, so what?
Mhm.
Because again, that's back to this idea that they don't care. Yeah. And so what I mean, I think, you know, I've said it before in previous podcasts, it's a great test of anything you do in a marketing context is to how open to the retort. So what is that thing that you just did?
Yeah. And if you can say so what? To any element of a page you've not you've not done a good job of developing that story enough. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think what's happening with him is, is you would look at any of the pages on that site and think, well, so what can you actually help me? Do you actually sell something that I could buy that would solve this problem for me? Yeah. And that is sadly missing. If you look hard enough, you you can find prices on his website. So he's not hiding what, what.
But he's also not putting them.
Up front where.
People can see them. Yeah.
So I.
Don't.
Know. I don't really know. Well, that was what our conclusion was that we we were he was investing in the, you know, in content and trying to improve rankings, etc., landing people on pages where they weren't being asked to. Well, there won't be enough.
They weren't being told. They weren't being told. That's right.
They weren't being told what they really wanted to know, and they weren't being asked to do something else in order to get to the point where they would be told what they needed to know.
Yeah, and I hear a lot of people spinning some strange mental gymnastics around this where they'll say things like, oh, but you know, a good customer will put the time in or like, oh, well, the kind of person I want to talk to will go through the, you know, jump through the hoops and you just don't realise how wrong that is. Like, I mean, but you should because if you think about the way you use the web, I mean, I'm guilty of this too. You know, I'm very kind of flighty, fickle, whatever word you want to use to describe it. When I come across a website, if it's not showing me what I want to see, within a few seconds, I'm gone. I'll find it somewhere else. And everybody is like that now. So you can't sort of get cute with it and say, oh, well, I've put all these barriers to entry up, but it's okay, because the kind of customer I want to deal with will jump through those hoops and they won't mind. It's that's just not, not true.
Okay. so without revealing, um, the, the person we're talking about and the, and the business we're talking about and the website, um, what sort of things did we agree he needed to do to turn things around? So this is, this is, you know, the purpose of our podcast is generally to help business owners and marketing execs and managers do stuff that's going to have a positive impact on their efforts. Sorry, it's going to have a positive impact on the business that that they're working for.
So I guess there were a few sort of action points. I guess the first and most obvious one was redesign the pages so that they flowed better. So they had all the information on them that needed to be there so that they had they were prioritised properly.
So are we saying to anybody whose website is looking a bit dated? And that is kind of subjective.
Well, I thought you were gonna say like seventy percent of the internet. And I was like, yeah, probably. Yeah. Subjective, I guess it's most people's websites. Let's be honest. Especially in B2B. Does that mean I don't know?
Yeah, I don't know. Um.
You can complain at us if you if you think that's me.
I mean, by all means, uh, you know, tell us pointers at your dreadful website, which is killing it.
Yeah.
Um, Ling's cars, for example.
Right. Yeah. So there are a few examples, but I feel like they're the exceptions that prove the rule. Right. It's like a joke.
I don't think anybody would look at Ling's cars dot com. And if you haven't looked at it go and look at it. Um, I don't think anybody would look at that and truly believe it was a badly designed website. I think they get.
Yeah, it's it's a living joke.
It's done on purpose in order to get a reaction and like, um, irrespective of how awful the, the design of the site is, you'd see right through all that because the first thing you said to me when I sent it to you was like, how do they do cars at those prices? Yeah. You know, you didn't you didn't necessarily.
Say with any of the.
Is this website a joke? You know, so no.
Well, I mean, it's like the Hemingway thing, isn't it? You know, like you you can break the rules when you've mastered them, when you know exactly what you're doing, you can, you can do what you like with the English language or your web page design or whatever, you know, but, but you actually have to have mastered them first. You can't just ignore them completely. Um, and yeah, exactly. Most of the really kind of funny, deliberately bad websites are actually very cleverly designed. So you're not gonna accidentally do that.
So are we saying that really, um, without it sounding like we're trying to generate business? Um, if your website is looking dated and be honest with yourself about that, then that is probably going to hurt you, like really hurt you. Irrespective of people finding it. You'll find that most people will and, and go, oh no, not that and hit the back button.
Yeah, I think you can overcome slightly dated design if you do a very good job of telling the right story in the right order and having lots of, you know, I see websites out there that don't look particularly nice, but they have like a really engaging video right at the beginning. And then like you very quickly find all the information you want to find. And, you know, there's lots of plenty of trust signals. I mean, when I think about the number of websites I see that look really dated, but are plastered with logos for massive brands, you know, you think it can't actually be holding everybody back. I think it's just harder. You're just creating a barrier to entry really with dated design. But I think you can overcome it. Um, but, and I think interestingly as well, like one of the other things that we were doing for the client in question, or one of the other things that we decided needed to be done was just sort of like restructuring and reorganising the site and making it easier to find all of that critical information. So yeah, I mean, I guess you sort of, if your design looks dated, you do sort of have to be thinking, right, okay, I probably need to give my website a facelift, but I don't think it necessarily has to stop you from using your current site to generate business.
Okay, so the new look and feel might be a given if your website is looking dreadful. Um, is it also useful? And this is hard to try and imagine viewing your website as a stranger to try and imagine what a stranger Z experience is going to be like looking at your website. You know, we've done it ourselves with our own site. You know, we've, we've redesigned the homepage recently and we're testing that and, and playing around with some ideas on that because we recognised that we were doing something similar to the client in question, where we were kind of like, well, all the information's there. Go on, go on, go and sort of see if you can find it and use it all to jump through the hoops. And this is what we do for a living. And we're still getting, you know, cobbler's burns and all that. We were still getting it spectacularly wrong, I think.
Yeah, definitely. It's really hard to look at your website through fresh eyes. I mean, one of the things I will say, I've always been a big proponent, and I know you're not the world's biggest fan of it, of the idea of paying user testing agents to come and check three sites dunnit lots in the past. And one of the most interesting and common insights that people have when they feedback is like, oh, I've never thought to look at my site like that, or I've never realised that was a problem. And sometimes it's just really helpful. I mean, you don't have to go and pay for it, but getting somebody who isn't you, who isn't in your industry, who doesn't know your business to have a look at your website, I think is invaluable because you just don't realise how sort of in the trenches you are and how, you know, skewed what your expectations are. People come to websites and they'll just immediately say, oh, I hate, I hate this, this design looks horrible. And, you know, that's surprising because as far as you're concerned, you've been working on this design for days or weeks or months. And yeah, it's fresh, fresh pair of eyes for sure.
And then the obvious one to add on to that is, um, don't expect to get this right first time and, and experiment.
Yeah, it's a process. And I think actually also on that note, be really cautious of people kind of peddling. I mean, I think I said earlier about like these models for storytelling on websites where I can never remember what they're called, but, you know, the acronyms for like agitate, engage and, and solve and all of that nonsense. Just be really cautious of all that kind of thing. Because all of those truisms where people say this is the right way to design a web page, or this is the right way to tell a story is only true of a specific audience. Um, ultimately, the people who land on your website will have their own expectations and you have to design for that really.
Well, I mean, the pics are, um, kind of format for storytelling is, is s t o r I.
So you need to.
Create the setting. Um, then there's some sort of turning point. Um, at which point the, uh, you have to overcome adversity there then is a resolution and then there are implications. Um, is that so.
Is that true for all pixels?
Probably is, probably is, but, but it's this idea that, that you've, you've got a setting. Mhm. Um, I know when I did a course, uh, quite a few years ago now, um, and I was, I then used the information from that course because I was doing a kind of after dinner speech thing. And I was very specific. So I kind of said, I want you to imagine It's it's six o'clock in the morning. Sure. It's February the twenty seventh, nineteen ninety six. And you are in this, you know, this very specific location. It's dark, it's raining. And that was like setting the thing out. And I could see people. Yeah, getting drawn into that because it was very specific. It was very, very much kind of creating that setting. So I suppose in a business context, the setting is um, for example, if you go back to our idea for accounting, you see if I can think of something for accounting, you know, it's like the setting might be like is, is, is sending out invoices and chasing a late payment, like getting you down. Sure. It's like, you know, that that might be kind of the setting you kind of, you know, it's not just like by our accounting software. It's like, it's this empathy, isn't it? It's this idea that we understand this, you know, we've solved a problem. We've not just created some software.
But it's the, it's the specificity too, Eighty two, isn't it? It's showing that you empathise with and understand the exact problem your target audience is experiencing. And I guess this goes back to actually knowing your audience and doing your research and fully understanding who your prospective customer is. But when you read a web page that has clearly been written like that to appeal to a very specific person, you can feel it. You know, you'll start reading and you will find yourself drawn in. You'll think, yeah, that's me. That's the exact thing I've gone through. And when they don't get it quite right and it doesn't land, you just left thinking, well, you know, like you were saying earlier, so what? So yeah, one hundred percent. If you can sort of like you say, create that setting and make it a very specific setting, then.
Yeah. So we started out by basically saying that we've got a long standing client, albeit a small business that doesn't actually spend much money with us. Um, but we're always, he's a client and more than happy to chat through some of the challenges that he's got and he's kind of lost his way. Um, he maybe didn't realise he's lost his way. He asked us for some help. We. Sort of pointed the wrong things out. Um, at which point he one hundred percent got it. It was like, oh, you know, I've put I've put all this effort in and, and like, I'm really, I've missed, I've missed the kind of, um, the bigger picture here.
Yeah.
So.
Well, people talk about rabbit holes a lot. I think it's incredibly easy to do, especially when it's your website, you'll go down a very specific path and you will tie yourself in knots, and then somebody will come along and say, oh, why have you done? That's completely wrong. And you'll be like, oh, I think we've all had that moment many, many times. That's right. Yeah.
If your website isn't performing, um, it's always worth getting somebody else to look at it and kind of try and help you understand how they see it as, um, somebody that's not very close to it. You could, you know, you could do something very specific, like say, go and find this or go and buy this or tell me what you think. We do something very, very simple. Um, if you want a website audit where we not only look at the technical SEO and all that kind of thing, but we'll also look at what we think your website is actually saying to the outside world and to visitors from search, etc. we can do that. Just go to Red evolution dot com, click on the request and audit button at the top of every page, and we take it from there. In the meantime, anything else on this subject, Alex?
I think that's pretty much everything from me.
Okay. It's a bit of a dry one. This one. It really a bit dry. Is it a bit boring as well?
I don't know, I think we touched on some good things.
There's maybe one or two good things in there. Yeah, just I'd like to. I'd just like to apologise on behalf of myself and Alex. If this if this if this has been a poor investment of half an hour of your time. Because because I think for some people it might have been.
You sell it harder. Go on a date.
Okay. If you want to come on the show, let us know. redevolution.com or fromthecoalface.com. You've been listening to Alex and Dave on Digital Marketing From The Coalface.