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In this episode, I share some of my conversation with Chris Richards about our landing page review process. It was taken from Club Webinar #16: Improve landing page SEO.

We talk about what ‘On-page’ SEO is, what we look for during a review and of course some tips to improve your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position).

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

A very insightful chat with SEO Manager for Argos, Claudia Higgins over on the evolving SEO podcast.

Really interesting to go behind the scenes on how SEO is justified within a large company, what key factors work for them and the importance of clear reporting and regular communication with other teams.

How to use email marketing effectively

Notes

Uses for email marketing

• Regular newsletter
• Sales promotions
• Nudge down the funnel

What is a good open rate?

20% seems to be about right
(via mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing- benchmarks/)

Selmach case study

More focused emails Increased customer calls

Plan

• Set out the goals
• Who emails where aimed at Sketch or Wireframe
• Plan ahead

From 18% to 21% open rate
From 14% to 30% click rate (7% to recipients) Above average 😀

Witley Jones case study

• Tricky audience
• Customers mention email content
• Interesting content or video most clicked

Communion Case study

• Use email to follow-up downloads
• communionarchitects.com/resources/
• Worth watching my interview with Michelle L Evans on developing sold out marketing funnels

Email Tools

• mailchimp.com – Bulk email sending (free plan)
• campaignmonitor.com – Bulk email sending 
• autopilothq.com – Marketing automation tool 
• mail-tester.com – Email deliverability testing site (free)
• litmus.com – Email testing and deliverability
• Gif Brewery – Video to GIF converter

Email marketing tips

• Streamline
• Clean your list, remove the duds
• Segment your list. Send only to those who want/need it

Personalise

• If possible use their name Can help visibility in the inbox Can increase open rates
• Use a named email rather than a generic one to increase open rates
• Interesting or challenging subject line
• Ask a question Intrigue
• Tell the reader exactly what your email contains

What is the goal?

• Why are you doing this?
• Have purpose
• Include a still or animated GIF
• Including a person seems to get more clicks
• Use video
• Ask for action
• Include a call to action
• Link out to your website Include a phone number
• Draw people to the action

Built trust

• Aim to create an unmissable email
• Make it easy to unsubscribe
• Make it clear why you are contacting them Send consistently

Run experiments

Test out different subject lines or content to find out what works best

Understanding YouTube analytics and getting more engagement from your channel.

Notes

Why use video

Easy for visitors to watch Helps with SEO

YouTube stats

Worlds 2nd largest search engine 63 million daily viewers Average CPV $0.044 (3p)

businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

Selmach Case study
Reduced dropout Increase subscribers Get more goals

Plan

• YouTube delivered most visits and often goals
• Review stats and optimise engagement
• Want to increase subscribers to get more website visits and goals
• Most visits from YouTube
• Traffic source

High drop off during static title image

Subscriptions increase

YouTube Optimisation tips

• Optimise keywords
• Research what people are looking for Similar rules as on page SEO
• Add keywords into the title
• Videos indexed faster than web pages
• Get to the action within the first five seconds Remove boring bits to keep the pace
• Don’t be boring
• Know your audience
• Watch other videos your audience might like
• Check your retention stats to see where people drop out
• Ask for action
• Include a call to action
• Link to your website in the first two lines of the description

inventivepeople.co.uk/collections/video- production

Announced in Apple’s developer conference keynote a couple of weeks ago was an interesting feature for new apps that enables a small functional portion of your app to be downloaded when triggered by a QR code or NFC tag. Apple’s developer guidelines explain more.

‘Consider creating an app clip if your app provides an in-the-moment experience that helps people perform a task over a finite amount of time. For example:

– A rental bike could come with an NFC tag that people scan to launch an app clip that lets them rent the bike.

– A coffee shop could offer an app clip for fast advance orders that customers launch from a Smart App Banner on the coffee shop’s website. Customers could share a link to the website from the Messages app, which recipients then tap to launch the app clip from within Messages.

– A restaurant could let diners launch an app clip from the Maps app or a suggestion from Siri Suggestions, or scan an NFC tag at their table to pay for a meal.

– A museum could have visitors scan visual codes on labels next to displayed works to launch an app clip that reveals augmented reality content or provides audio commentary.’

This is perfect for all those parking meter apps that require far too much information to signup when all you want to do is pay and run.

‘How many times do you follow up?’ A great question from Dan Barker on LinkedIn. It’s a good thread to read and a great example of how to get engagement on social.

For those who want to know, here’s my proposal follow-up process:

• Follow-up 1 (+2 days) – Make sure they have the proposal, offer to answer questions and link to an article on our site that relates to their need.
• Follow-up 2 (+7-14 days) – When I follow-up depends on the known timescale. Invite to an event or webinar I’m running or another link to a relevant article.
• Follow-up 3 (+30 days) – If I’ve not heard back from FU 1 or 2 then I send https://themagicemail.com this gets 100% response although not always a sale. If I have had follow-up but no commitment. I’ll ask what help they need to move the project along.

In the LinkedIn thread I also learnt the term AHSTIPTO (Always Have Something to Invite People to Offer), apparently I’ve been doing that already.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired

‘In macOS Big Sur, Safari will include a specific “Privacy Report” to break down what specifically Safari is blocking and give you more insight into which trackers are cropping up in your daily browsing.’

This means that any tracking pixels and code, including Google Analytics, will be clearly listed for all Safari users when they upgrade to macOS Big Sur later this year.

Shaming websites into reducing or removing all trackers on their site is the best way to improve the tracking and data leeching situation. Cookie policies and popups do nothing but confuse the situation and, like many agreements and terms of service online, people quickly click through to get to the information they want.

Using Ghostery in Chrome to test on our site for trackers, it shows we have two trackers. Google Analytics and DoubleClick. The Double click tracker is used by YouTube when we have embedded videos and can be removed by making sure you embed the videos with ‘Privacy-enhanced mode‘, I must admit I thought all our videos were set to use this, it appears a few weren’t. I’ve added a script to fix all videos on our site

Google Analytics will stay for now but I am looking at a way of compiling basic tracking reports locally on the server and not sending this data to Google.

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica

‘Researchers from Kaspersky Lab on Monday said that they have recently observed about two dozen infected sites that found a novel way to achieve this. Instead of sending it to attacker-controlled servers, the attackers send it to Google Analytics accounts they control. Since the Google service is so widely used, ecommerce site security policies generally fully trust it to receive data.’

Clever but very creepy. Check you don’t have an extra Google Analytics profile in your sites source.

Here’s another (deep dive) article on card skimming via embedded image data.

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This episode is taken from an interview with my colleague Chris Richards on how he ranked his own website utilitysavingexpert.com to compete against the big comparison sites in the pursuit of Google search traffic Chris shares some of the strategies and tools he uses for local SEO, on-page optimisation, keyword research and his in-depth SEO site audit.

I really enjoy talking with Chris about SEO and I know you’ll take away a lot from this conversation.

PS Longtime listeners will hear an appearance from Al Osmond my co-host in the original run of the Something Inventive Podcast.

Episode Notes

My notes from the online version of WordCamp Europe back on the 5th June 2020. As I watch the videos and add my notes I’ll update the content on this page.

Friday – Track One

Sustainable freelancing – Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld (2:15:23)

• Take care of yourself – Look after yourself like you would look after a child
• Set healthy boundaries – One example Wendie gave was asking for all website content to be provided upfront before she begins a project, this helps her build websites on time.
• Make things easy on yourself – Remove or delegate jobs you don’t like, automate what you can, systemise what you have to do
• Give yourself permission to make mistakes – Write permissions down, it’s a helpful reminder
• Get support with other people – Have people you can talk to and that will hold you accountable
• Make time to have fun
• Make changes in small steps

WordPress performance – Hristo Panjarov (2:58:58)

• Keep your plugins and WP core undated. Many updates include speed enhancements
• Make sure using Opcache
• Preloading in PHP 7.4 brings further speed improvements
• PHP 8 due for release later this year which brings further speed improvements
• Use WebP formatted images, can be 2-3 times smaller than JPEG
• Load only critical CSS at the start of the page. Everything else should load as needed. Can be difficult to implement manually
• You should minify JS, CSS and HTML files if possible
• User server-side full page caching such as Varnish or NGINX

The art of building better websites with science – Ruth Raventós (3:44:03)

• What is the goal of your website? Get more visitors or increase conversions
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). Either blindly make changes and hope for the best or apply a process and make changes based on results
• In CRO: Your opinion doesn’t matter, and hacks and best practices don’t always work
• CRO process – Plan -> Measure -> Prioritise -> A/B test
• What is your customer funnel? How do they find your site? What do they do on your site? Do they take action? Are you measuring this?
• Assess your page against five criteria and how you can improve them: Relevancy, Clarity, Friction, Distraction, Value 
• Use Google Analytics to set up measurement and KPI tracking. Also, identify leaks, where do people who don’t buy go to
• Use scroll maps, click maps and pointer heat maps, customer surveys and user reviews are also really useful to see exactly how people use your site
• Look for easy wins and changes that will create the most value
• Review the issues and propose a hypothesis
• Decide on a change and split the traffic between the page variations
• Not all of your ideas will be successful. For example, tried adding banners and video to their pages and these were either ignored or did not increase clicks. So make changes but test the results.
• Run tests for a full business cycle. This depends on how long it takes people to make a decision so could be a week to a month.

In conversation with Matt Mullenweg (4:29:10)

• A short demo of some upcoming improvements to the block editor
• Then a Q&A

Planning your marketing strategy

Notes

Look back at the previous year

• What worked well?
• Do them again or ditch?
• Incorporate the good ideas back into plan
• Review social and blog efforts
• Which networks gave you most engagement? Check profiles are up to date
• What are your most popular blog posts?

 Review ad campaigns

• Are you getting the return you expect? How do you measure this?
• Review your marketing plan
• Vision / Objectives Mission
• Strategy
• Audience Competitors

 Vision / Objectives

How do we want to be thought of? Long term objectives, blue sky visions New products or more family time

Mission

Quantify the vision. What are the numbers? e.g. sell 10 tractors a week

Audience

What are their problems and how can we help them?

Competitors

Who are they? What do they do well? Where do they fall short?

Look ahead

What events can you get involved in? Partner with businesses who have same audience?

Review your website

Easy for a visitor to find out what you do? Is it clear how to buy from or contact you? Do you have reviews on your site? Has relevant structured data been added?

Design review

Design Branding
User Journey Visual Content Mobile

 Usability review

Content Site Layout Menu Forms Speed

Example review
Homepage layout Images

Website usability report

• Increase conversions – make it easier for customers to act (buy, call, or sign up)
• Improve brand perception – your website is your shop window for customers and prospective customers
• External opinion – Why? Objective review, experienced
• Website design and usability report

This afternoon a registration form for an upcoming webinar of mine was spammed with over 4100 email addresses from a spam bot. If you were one of that number then I’m really sorry that you just got an unsolicited email from Demio, the webinar software we use, booking you onto a webinar. Your email and details have been removed and Demio is working on a fix to prevent this in the very near future.

Here’s what I know

The first I knew about this was from an email at 14:11 from an ‘attendee’ asking, quite rightly, why they had been registered for this event and where had I got their details from – I didn’t immediately have an answer for them.

I jumped straight into Demio and confirmed that we did indeed have spam registrations. My first thought was to stop further registrations but there was no obvious way to do this except to reduce the number of attendees down to 1.

I then spoke to Demio to find out what was going on and to make sure that this wasn’t a data breach. They confirmed it was from a social media spam bot NOT a security breach or hacking, and removed all false registrations in 20 minutes. They are also set to release fixes to prevent this soon have also released fixes to stop this happening again*.

I even received our first ever negative feedback through SayHola. Rightly so, this person was pissed off.

The GDPR reference is from the signup form enabling me to communicate with the registrant outside of any marketing for the event.

To everyone effected, I’m sorry that our event spammed you. I hate spam and I hate that you got this.

*Update from Demio

We were able to put in a fix to prevent any of those bots from registering to any Demio event again, and we’ve also removed any bot registrations from your Event. You’re good to go for this event!

Also, in the next few days we have an update that will create more restrictions for registration (checking emails etc) that will further prevent bots!

Chris Herbert has collated opinions from 85 WordPress Professionals (ahem) on the page builder plugins they use to manage and layout content, and why it’s best for them.

Gutenberg, my new best friend when it comes to editing WordPress content, sadly didn’t make the top three. I’d say that for some, it’s too new and doesn’t have a full feature set, therefore too much work and not enough reward to change their development process.

I contribute the following.

‘Gutenberg – “Despite a few visual quirks that need ironing out, the built-in block editor (launched in December 2018) is by far the best way to layout content without reaching for any HTML or CSS.

It’s faster than other page builders such as WPBakery, my previous go-to for WordPress layout. And it represents more accurately what the final content will look like, especially compared with the layout plugin Divi.

But most importantly, it’s built directly into WordPress, so you know it will be supported for years to come, and with hundreds of contributors, it’s going to get a lot of attention.

On the downside, the built-in editor doesn’t yet include all the features you might want, such as fancy sectional divides or masonry style image galleries but with additional plugins the editor can be extended to do more, much more. My favourites are Stackable which has feature grids and popup videos that look great, and also Coblocks that has a collection of image galleries, layout containers and dividers that I use in most of my web sites.

I highly recommend testing it out for your next website build.”’

Paul D McGarrity step by step observation of a bot on twitter sowing the seeds for social division.

‘4) The trap is set. The tweet gets attention, a few retweets. Most are quote tweets with outraged reactions which do two things- they allow people to say ‘look at what THEY all think’ and it removes the casual viewer from the original account by one click. It ends here, unless…’

Look out for these bot accounts. There aren’t always easy to spot but if they have very strong views, low or no followers, check out their profile and see if makes any sense. If in doubt, don’t just retweet it.

I spent at least 15 minutes reading through Paul’s thread replies and checking out his profile before I was happy sharing this. Gosh, I hope he isn’t a bot!

A couple of tips from my last webinar with Heidi on how to look good and come across confidently when are presenting on zoom.

‘The most important thing you can do is have good lighting, particularly on your face.’

1. Use a window or lamp to light up your face
2. Use headphones to prevent echo
3. Talk to the camera so people feel you are talking to them
4. Write your talking points on a sticky note so you don’t have to look down and refer to your notes (thanks to Jonathan Mehan for this tip)
5. Mute if you are not talking. This prevents echo and allows you to type without disturbing others
6. Use dedicated Mic and Camera if you can. You will sound and look better.

Last week, I received lots of mildly misleading emails from Nominet, the UK’s domain registrar, as well as clients who also received these emails looking to me for help. The subject line leads people to believe that their domain is up for renewal but actually the email is just a reminder that their reserved .uk domain is going to be available for general registration soon.

Here’s a extract from the email.

‘If this domain is unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. Fasthosts reserved .UK domains on behalf of their customers as part of our .UK Rights of Registration scheme (https://registrars.nominet.uk/uk-namespace/dot-uk/rights-of-registration). This was to allow you to register the .UK domain name if needed, and you have not been charged for the reservation.’

And an article by Fasthosts that explains this further.

‘If you are the registered owner of a .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .plc.uk or .ltd.uk domain, the new .uk equivalent would have been automatically reserved for you when these domain extensions were initially launched on 10 June 2014. This reservation window lasts for 5 years and will end on 25th June 2019.’

That five years is almost up so it’s time to decide whether you want the .uk domain or not. My advice is to buy it if you want to protect your company name or brand and can afford to so – The cost is no more than a regular .co.uk domain – but realise that this is money for nothing. I won’t be registering the ratherinventive.uk domain as I haven’t for all the other domain extensions released over the years.

Seth Godin leaving no doubt.

‘The systemic, cruel and depersonalizing history of Black subjugation in my country has and continues to be a crime against humanity. It’s based on a desire to maintain power and false assumptions about how the world works and how it can work. It’s been amplified by systems that were often put in place with mal-intent, or sometimes simply because they felt expedient. It’s painful to look at and far more painful to be part of or to admit that exists in the things that we build.’

Also watch this if you missed it.

Suzanne Scacca writing for Smashing Magazine

‘I’d also look at where you naturally start to “fail” and lose focus. It’s the same thing that happens in workouts — when you reach your breaking point, your body just gives up. Unfortunately, some people try to push through it when it’s the brain screaming, “Stop!”’

My low activity times are just after lunch at 1pm and around 4pm. At these times, I aim to do easy tasks such as admin or tasks I particularly enjoy, such as a personal coding project.

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In this episode, I feature an extract from my club webinar last year where I share some background on what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is, why it’s important and some tips on getting started.

If you are new to SEO, this episode will be a good place to start. But if you are a little more experienced then I’ll be sharing more ideas and advanced techniques in future episodes.

So settle in and join me while I explain some SEO basics.

Episode Notes

Tip on rudrastyh.com which I wish I had known years ago.

1. Go to the Products > All Products in the sidebar
2. Click on the Sorting tab just above the list of products
3. Drag and drop your products into the order you want them

Also in the article is how to manage default product sorting in the WooCommerce settings.

Seth Godin on Applying effort.

‘Even if we don’t know precisely where to put the effort, a focus on the right categories pays off. Too often, we aim too wide (it feels more deniable). And sometimes, more rarely, we aim too narrowly.’

Seth is very much an advocate of marketing to a core audience, starting narrow and widening out as your reputation grows.

Marketing to a single person can be very effective at building a relationship, and over time that person may buy from you but what if they don’t. Building a relationship with a small group or community allows you to focus on their needs, test out ideas and hone your product while minimising the risk that they won’t buy.

An fun insight into the insane business model of big tech and pizza delivery by Ranjan Roy

‘If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You’d net a clean $8 profit per pizza.’

The business model of companies like Doordash, Uber and originally Facebook to dominate at all costs, seems crazy to me. I understand the logic but cannot help feel it is not sustainable, ethical or profitable for most people unless you are either the winner (Facebook has clearly won in the social space) or an investor as part of your spread bet. And even then it’s still not ethical. If you win, you win big but for most people, they lose.

Ranjan also mentions ZIRP (Zero-Interest-Rate Policy) and links out to another fascinating article on the topic. If I understand it correctly, it’s about risk and how risky ventures are more attractive when other rates of return are low. Given the extremely low-interest rates at the moment I expect we might see even more risk.

Observations on Tom Hanks in conversation, with advice you can use to be a better presenter on video, in a workshop or even chatting down the pub.

Here’s a few tips I noted from the video

• Create a story gap – Peak peoples interest with the promise of an exciting story.
• Pantomime what you are saying – Use hand gestures and movement to act our what you are saying.
• Be dynamic – Shift a story’s focus from sad to happy or move your voice from loud to quiet.
• Include everyone – Make good eye contact (three seconds or so) so that people feel what you are saying is relevant to them, that they are included.

The last point, on eye contact, I’ve found particularly helpful in boosting my confidence when talking to a large group of people.

I’ve always enjoyed films featuring Tom Hanks from Big (his earliest film that I remember watching), to Castaway, Saving Private Ryan and Forest Gump, which is on my rewatch list.

I’m taking my headphones out and will try to listen.