In Episode 191 we talked Making Your Own Career With Duane Forrester and covered a ton. There was something that came out of the conversation that we wanted to dive a bit deeper into and thus this episode does just that.
In our daily work lives we get focused on some project, report, deliverable, request, launch, product, and so on. Or something new comes out and suddenly everyone just cares about Schema, Canonical Tags, some new social media network, a new type of PPC ad type or maybe site speed.
Sometime ago we did a show about When Best Practices Aren’t Best Practices and while we aren’t saying that again here – we are saying that you need to be doing all of the things for the business that make sense all the time.
If you are an SEO and suddenly care about site speed have you never looked at conversion rates? Why didn’t how fast or slow a site load matter 3 years ago, 5 years ago or even 10 years ago?
If you do PPC and suddenly care about some social network why? What changed? Is your budget stretched already? Why aren’t you looking at the landing pages and creative?
Now go give a listen to the episode and as you do think of these things:
- What will move the needle for the business.
- What low hanging fruit is out there in my channel?
- How can I work with other teams/channels and help raise all of them?
- What will generate the most revenue for the business?
Full Transcript
Mat Siltala: Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt and Dave roar. Hey, you guys excited to have you join us on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. And, uh, today we’re going to kind of, I guess you would say piggyback off of an earlier topic that we had discussed, discussed disclosed with Mr.
Dwayne us. And, um, we’re going to talk about digital marketers and what they need to stop ignoring. And this got me thinking day when I, you know, I’ll let you do your little, um, you know, your little thought process on this and the direction that you want to go. But, um, this got me thinking about how you remember the fight forever.
Like the old school . Um, I remember we used to have to fight to get like, uh, businesses to even take SEO seriously. Now it seems like most of them are actually, you know, they have it mark, you know, they have it budgeted in and it’s not, not a final. No, not at all. No, I know. Not all, but you have to use much better.
Yes, it is much better. And that’s my point. And so like with that, You know, there’s always new things that are coming up. There’s always new techniques. There’s always new tools that can be used. There’s new things that Google are being, or whoever offers us. And so anyway, I just thought that this was an interesting, you know, way to lead into it, but, uh, you know, why don’t you share with us kind of your direction of what you wanted us to, to talk about with this, but, uh, I just, don’t, that’s just a random thought that I had as all.
Well,
[00:01:42] Dave Rohrer: and I don’t remember I’ll link to it. Um, cause it was a good long conversation with Dwayne, but one of the things he was just like, I think the example and I, in my notes, it was something about, you know, SEO is fixating on certain things or over and suddenly. And like, I think, you know, like core, core web metrics and site speed and that kind of stuff right now is like, that’s all everyone cares.
Um, where were you five years ago? 10 years ago. Like why, why didn’t if your host was slow 10, 15 years ago, matter if your page, you know, loaded really slow, especially then when everyone had slower internet and it took, you know, longer to download that MP or that MP3, that PDF that had those ridiculous images that, you know, no one should ever forget.
That was a bad user experience that you could hurt your conversions. It mattered to SEO. It mattered to the business. Then why suddenly in 20 21, 20 20, does everyone suddenly care about how fast their site is? You’ve should have always cared to a point. I think there’s diminishing returns for small sites versus, um, and I saw someone quoting, you know, why people care and it’s, uh, that Amazon study, they did a long time ago where each 0.1 second, they shaved equals right.
Wait, but that’s Amazon. They scale that across how many millions of URLs for a small business, with a 10 page WordPress site, having a developer spend 30 hours to cut 0.5 seconds off your page is the worst ROI probably period. And so it’s like to fixate on that. Doesn’t make sense. Well, you’re ignoring all of those things for the last time.
Where you’re ignoring the fact that there is no CTA on that page.
[00:03:32] Mat Siltala: Well,
[00:03:36] Dave Rohrer: social people are also guilty. I’m just picking on SEOs. Cause I do that more.
[00:03:41] Mat Siltala: So, so that would be, you know, that would beg the question of what, what are the things that you’re seeing lately that digital marketers need to stop ignoring?
Whether it be in the PPC space, SEO, social media, or all of the above, like what are those areas that, uh, that you’re seeing. Just the
[00:03:57] Dave Rohrer: basics, like, look at your page titles, look at your meta descriptions, which ones are missing them. Like go into Google search console, look at pages that have traffic that don’t have good CTR look at pages that get traffic that don’t convert.
Like look at pages that are ranking or look at pages that you’ve created that don’t drive traffic and call, call that tr you know, call that content, um, you know, worrying about. The newest, shiny thing that Google has come out with or, you know, something like that. Or, uh, it it’s just shiny object. It’s like, oh, that’s new.
Like, like I heard someone talking about schema the other day about how they’ve been looking at steam. I’m like, why aren’t you doing that a long time ago? Like, that’s an easy thing to do. Why, why did you just find that?
[00:04:48] Mat Siltala: It just makes me laugh because of a conversation I had just the other day. Um, the people.
Were telling me like, look, we have all these ideas for, for articles. And like, we need to put these up. And like, I think that that’s where like, you know, any of our budget that we need to spend time on. And, you know, we don’t really, like, we think our site’s fine, but we want to like, just create all this content.
Like we heard that we just need to create content. Like they were, they must have listened to. An episode somewhere or not ours, but like he must’ve listened to something or saw a presentation or whatever.
[00:05:22] Dave Rohrer: When SCO said, please, can I have some content on these pages, please, please, can we have a blog post once a month, once a quarter, please, can we actually put content on these e-commerce category pages and give context, or this video page that just has a video or this infographic where there’s like, Three words on it.
And it’s the title like? Yeah. Yeah. It
[00:05:43] Mat Siltala: was 10 years ago. People. Yeah, it was, but here’s the kicker. So they’re wanting to like chase this shiny new stuff. Yes. Or, you know, what they think is shiny new. Uh, but you look at the website and we don’t, and we have like home for the title or home to, or page three or page four for like different pages of the website.
We have literally no, You know, uh, any kind of tags, any kind of markedly, anything like there’s basically, if, if Google, you know, and you could do a, do a site colon on it and show them what Google sees. And you’re basically looking at all these kinds of duplicate pages, because like nothing, nothing is unique, nothing is different.
Like you’ve got some major technical stuff that you’ve got to look through buddy, and you’re wanting to just start creating all kinds of content. And so I think that’s kind of like, um, the point of view. Getting out or at least, you know, with a, at least as far as I can tell.
[00:06:39] Dave Rohrer: Well, I think some of us, at least an SEO isn’t even, you know, for social people, you, you, the answer is always, well, it’s the Facebook and Instagram.
Like if you’re a PPC person, you’re like, well, the answer is Google. Cause I do Google PPC and I know it works for these people and that’s th that’s, that is what your business needs, because I know it and I’ve seen it work. So therefore it is what makes sense for you, or I know Instagram and I know Facebook advertising.
And that is what will work. And I know what I can re it’ll work for you without thinking about the business, without thinking about anything else. And then within SEO, it’s like, well, we need links because w we don’t have as many links as our competitors, or we need content because we don’t have as much content as our competitors.
But then to your point, like, what you just said is like, yeah, but you haven’t even done the most basic stuff right yet. So why, why are you ignoring this most basic thing that we need to be doing and should have been doing and should be done, but you’re off here. Shiny objects. You know, you’re ignoring the most basic thing and getting completely, just, you know, shooting yourself in the foot and you don’t even know it.
[00:07:40] Mat Siltala: Yeah. Well, it, it, uh, it makes me think of like this experience that I had. So recently I went to, I did a, uh, an anniversary trip to Sedona. Well, I did a bunch of research of course, on Google. And so
[00:07:53] Dave Rohrer: if you follow Matt, I was really hungry cause he just kept posting more. Really good. Mexican,
[00:08:00] Mat Siltala: thank you.
You’re welcome. But, uh, uh, but basically, um, you know, I, I did the research on Google and so the, the website, they, they needed, it needed to be at a point that it could be found that it could be picked up that it could be one of those ones that comes up. And so this is where I’m. You know, like, I, I think it’s a good reminder to not ignore certain things or focus or spend certain times on just air, just specific areas because you have the number one funnel.
Like I need to be founded. I need to be able to book it. But then this business also realized that some of their true bedroom, you know, bread and butter was when people leave reviews for them. And so, you know, they were very good at following up and hated everything. Go according to plan. Did you like it?
If, if. If it did please, or if it didn’t let us know what we can do, if you had a good experience, you know, let others know about it. And this is where you could find a lot of great information from other people and blah, blah, blah, and TripAdvisor. And so like, they kind of like, you know, it is, it is, that is what helps them continue to be found, but they also need to do those basic things because that’s, what’s going to get me to find them initially.
Now the reviews might make me decide, okay, now that I’ve found. I am definitely going to book this place. And so it’s just one of those things. They were like you, again, these are all parts of the air, you know, all of it that you just can’t ignore. Like it’s a part of the whole plan. And so like, if I was to just focus on reviews, like if you heard someone, you know, in a speech or at a conference or whatever, say like reviews are king and like, that’s all you need to do, but you didn’t focus on all the other stuff.
You know, you’re missing out, shooting yourself in the foot. In my opinion
[00:09:44] Dave Rohrer: happens is people will just do reviews just on Yelp or just on Google or just on some third-party. And it’s like, and then like, I, whenever I do like local audits, I always look at depending on the industry, if you’re in, like, if you’re a bed and breakfast or something, you know, we we’d be looking at Expedia and TripAdvisor and you know, all these other, these other third-party sites where you might have listings.
And, you know, or even if you’re on it, you know, also in do an Airbnb or something like that, like we would want to look at all of your listings and be like, and compare you to all of your competitors and say, okay, if someone ends up on one of these sites, how do you compare? How does it look? Do you have rain ratings?
Do you, do you compete with them? Are they positive? Are they negative? Like, you know, we need to take care of your website, but we also need all of these other channels, digital. That you’re ignoring because you think no one cares, but really right there lost opportunities for you and you just don’t realize it.
Or, you know, I don’t know, but you know, they’re, you’re, you’re listed there. We need to make sure that you have a good showing.
[00:10:50] Mat Siltala: Well, and think about what you had just told me, you know, what you had mentioned, just, just in our talking about this, or you’re like, you should check out his Instagram page because like all the food that he was posting was making me jealous.
Well, what’s funny that you say about that is I actually had multiple people. Reach out to me because of some stuff that I posted, you know, there was one of the ones, the stories that I did talking about the one-on-one dinner. And we basically had two personal chefs that were cooking is probably one of the most amazing meals that I’ve ever had in my life.
But people were like, DM-ing me and texting me, like, where is this? Like, I want to get in on this. Like, what’s that place? Would you recommend it? Like how much did it cost? Like all kinds of stuff. And so like, these guys knew how important it was because they reached out to me, you know, this, uh, this better.
And they were like, Hey, we love that you posted that. And like our shift didn’t take forgot to take a picture of this one mil that you did take a picture of him post. Like, can we have permission to use that picture and give you credit and blah, blah, blah. And so like they know like they were on top of it and that’s the kind of stuff that I think businesses need to stop ignoring.
They need to stop ignoring like the power of that kind of stuff. And even reaching out because like it made me know that, Hey, they’re, they’re grateful. And like they went above and beyond. And they did more for me than probably I think they would have, if you know, I didn’t do that kind of stuff. I mean, maybe not, maybe they’re just a great, but like they’re on top of it is my point.
And that’s how everyone has to start thinking.
[00:12:15] Dave Rohrer: They monitor this stuff, they saw it and they were like, oh, this is a F I mean, I don’t want to say it’s a free, but it’s a free opportunity for content that was created showing us in a good light. Why aren’t we reaching out? Yeah. I don’t know. It’s just like, low-hanging fruit, like, is this maybe that’s the title of this call?
Like, Hey, digital marketers stop missing low hanging fruit.
[00:12:36] Mat Siltala: Right. Well, and something else to that, that I thought about, and I don’t know, like, hopefully this doesn’t take it too off subject, but something else that I thought something I, I thought it was super interesting with the whole process is as I was looking through all this, you know, like we, you and I have always talked about.
Don’t get fixated so much on like needing to have perfect, you know, 500 star, 500, five star reviews and stuff like that. Like learn from the ones that don’t have good experiences. For example, like I read a couple of them and they had mentioned a few things about some booking problems with like massages or this or that.
Like just little errors that I think could have been fixed if, uh, you know, more attention was. And so like, I read those reviews and they actually came in helpful because it got to a certain point where I hadn’t heard from someone and I didn’t want to be in their position. And so I just was kind of proactive and I called them up and I’m like, Hey, can I, you know, can we make sure, like, this is taken care of?
And they’re like, oh yeah. Like someone should have contacted you and you know, we’ll take care of it. And then, then they got back with me and was like, Hey, it’s booked taken care of this is done, but had I not done that? I wonder if I would have been one of those ones that was in that kind of a scenario.
So. That’s why I’m saying at some point, you know, like it’s good for yeah, exactly. Yeah. So just a random thought that I had.
[00:13:57] Dave Rohrer: No, no. And I think just like going back, circling back just to like the SEO thing, because that’s what I do mostly. Um, I think like if you were to talk to, depending on who it is in the industry, you know, they’ll say contents team links are keen technical SEO is king reviews, reviews are king, like, you know, And it’s like, yeah, it depends on the site.
Not to say it depends, but it depends. It depends on the site. It depends on the industry. Depends on the state of the website and the digital marketing and the offline marketing and what they’re doing, like what the business is doing, what the business is caring about, has the business pivoted like all of that content that was created for five years now that the business has pivoted from one to the.
Could be driving lots of traffic that has nothing to do with anything you even remotely do now because the business pivoted. Yeah. So it’s like great. We had SEO. We rank well for stuff that no one cares about anymore. So now we need to rethink everything.
[00:14:57] Mat Siltala: Here’s something else to your point of like, just, you know, when you talked about the basics, I remember when I was booking this trip and I was looking at other, other places.
The reason that I didn’t look at some of these other places, Dave is because when I was going through their website and I would click on site. Like a gallery or learn more about a room or whatever. And I click on it and it would take me to a dead link. I’m like, Ugh, like the website’s not updated. So like, is any of this, this information up to date?
Like
[00:15:25] Dave Rohrer: yeah. What does it really look like inside? Like have they not updated anything in eight years? Because these pictures are from 2015 and the website’s
[00:15:32] Mat Siltala: not working until like, do they care?
Yeah, exactly. No, that was my thought. And guess what? Get guests, the one that I booked at and the one that I didn’t. So
[00:15:44] Dave Rohrer: it’s just the, yeah, you got to do the basics and yeah, the, just the like, you know, going back to the whole, like what Dwayne talked about, like why, why suddenly does the site speed matter?
And it’s it’s for everything like for an SEO. It’s like, why suddenly, how many pages rank matter and well, how, why do you suddenly care about certain things? Why have you not always cared about. The page titles, the
[00:16:09] Mat Siltala: meta-description. Why have you not cared about how your website on
[00:16:12] Dave Rohrer: mobile? And I, I just noticed something for an audit.
I was just doing like the last couple of weeks. It was like a weird, um, they had a, it was like a pop-up and another pop-up and if you’re on desktop, it’s fine. But I’m like, did anyone look at what happens when you’re on your, on your, uh, mobile? And we actually look, I was actually looking at conversion.
And was noticing that, um, click to call cause they track it for mobile was actually really, really bad. And I was like, wait, we have clicked to call tracking and we’re actually doing better on desktop. Why that makes absolutely no sense. When I looked at that data metric or that data point, I was like, how in the world.
And so then when you look at the site and, um, desktop, there’s a little click to call and there’s some other stuff, but when the, when the mobile, when it shrinks down to the hamburger, it goes away. So there is no phone number alert. There is no phone number button. And on mobile, you actually have to click more times to get to a phone number to call you do on desktop.
I mean, it’s like, this is a major conversion issue. Like, it’s not SEO, but it is cause it’s impacting the traffic. I’m driving to not convert. And like, I’m like, this is a major issue we need to fix this. I’m like, I care about conversions more than I care about rankings. Honestly, I will, I will say that all day because rankings don’t make money.
[00:17:51] Mat Siltala: Conversions do. Absolutely. So I think that’s a great note to end it on. I don’t know if you had any other final thoughts, but yeah, that’s a, that’s a great note.
[00:18:01] Dave Rohrer: I think, just think outside your little daily box of wherever you work in, whether it’s PPC, SEO, social media, paid organic, whatever, and try to think more about the business and other things that impact it long and short term.
And not just that thing you’re working on today. Like what does this impact today? No. How will it impact things in the next six months? Three months, three years.
[00:18:29] Mat Siltala: All right. Perfect. I’ll stop ranting. Well, it’s all good. So, well, thank you as always a reminder for our listeners, please make sure you go to iTunes and give us a five star review.
Speaking of those reviews, uh, we love them. So hopefully we can keep bringing these to you and that you keep learning. So for Dave roar with Northside metrics, I met SILTA Lou with avalanche media and thank you guys for joining us.