
How Website Design and SEO Intersect to Improve Your Business
In this episode, Jesse talks with Elisabeth Samuels as she shares her knowledge on how website design and SEO are interconnected and how they impact each other. She explains the importance of having a website design that is both visually appealing and optimized for search engines. Elisabeth provides actionable tips and strategies for businesses and individuals looking to improve their online presence and search engine rankings. This episode is perfect for business owners, marketers, and website developers who want to learn more about how to effectively combine website design and SEO for maximum impact.
What You'll Learn
- How website design and SEO are interconnected and how they impact each other
- What strategies can improve your website's design to increase search engine visibility
- Why combining website design and SEO can maximize impact on your online presence and business growth
Tune into the Local SEO Tactics Podcast to learn more about web design and SEO! Questions? Ask us at localseotactics.com/questions for a chance to have it answered on the show!
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Jesse Dolan: If you have to work for things or think about where to go or where to find the thing, your website's not "working". And I think people miss a lot of times, from an SEO standpoint, just like a bad user experience, people are going to go back, they're going to leave your website and go back to Google, right?
Elisabeth Samuels: And so I want to make sure that when I'm directing traffic, navigating a website, that I give people the path of least resistance because if it's too hard to find an answer, they're going to dip.
Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan, joined here today with Elisabeth Samuels. Thanks for coming on, Elisabeth. Good to see you.
Elisabeth Samuels: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Jesse Dolan: So Elisabeth, we've known each other for a while, this is the first time we've been on here recording. Thanks for coming on the show. I'm excited for everybody to learn some stuff from you. Got to get this out of the way on the front side, Elisabeth Samuels, people have heard the Samuels name on our show here a few times. You have the fortunate or misfortune, depending on the day maybe, title of being married to Terry Samuels, also with Salterra, our favorite schema and overall SEO guru that we have on the show here. So what's that like? I'm sure we're all super curious being married. Do you guys ever talk about anything not SEO related? That's just got to be-
Elisabeth Samuels: Just a little tiny bit. Yeah, so Terry and I have been married over 20 years. We have five kids and we're just really good friends. I know that that's kind of a little anomaly for a lot of married couples. We've been self-employed in three different businesses and we just work better together.
Jesse Dolan: That's great.
Elisabeth Samuels: We really enjoy being around each other. We have fun. I think he's a great guy. I think he's incredibly talented, smart as hell, and I have a lot of great things to say about him, but of course I'm biased. So, I know that he's gotten a lot of traction from your podcast and he absolutely loves interacting with you. We've had a great relationship with you in the industry for several years. Terry and I started out, crazy, crazy story, he was recovering from shoulder surgery and our church asked us to help them out and help with their website and because Terry had a background of 20 years of coding and tech stuff back then, had a computer repair business back in the day, this is how old it was.
So he started helping out and then just everybody jumped in and said, "Well, can you help me with my website? Can you help me with my website?" And that just evolved into a business. He brought me on because I have an art background, very visual. And so I'm like, okay, well we'll just figure it out, and we did. We're obviously both self-taught in the industry and it's something that I really pushed myself to learn graphics as well as web design because I felt that that better served our customer and our client. So I do have a portion of our business where I will do business cards and flyers and newsletters and all of the really fun creative stuff online.
And it seemed to mix well with web design because many years ago there was a lot of things that you couldn't always do with web design. I try to tell people, "Think of it like Lego blocks, they stack on top of each other and they don't always overlap." Well, back in the day, I would like fake things out with graphics to give it that unique look, whereas now things are a little more fluid, it has evolved into what it is today to where you have a little bit more creativity allowed. But I've always found that the marriage and the relationship between web design and SEO overlaps so well because you really can't have one without the other. I think if you have the most beautiful, fantastic, gorgeous website, that's great and wonderful, but what value is it if it doesn't rank? If people can't find you? Or if they see it, but they don't convert to your business? And so for us, it just makes sense that web design and SEO should be in-house and it should be very interconnected.
I feel that tech is an art in itself and a lot of people don't always give it that credit just because they're used to visual arts and graphics and painting and sculpture, but I can tell you, I mean I know people that will see a line of code that is absolutely gorgeous and totally makes sense. And so I give it that value where not everyone else does, but I think-
Jesse Dolan: You can have an elegant or an ugly source code. That's a thing, if you ever look behind the curtain on a website. Absolutely.
Elisabeth Samuels: Oh my gosh, yeah.
Jesse Dolan: You got to know what you're looking at. But well, hey, I'd like to go back a little bit and I love hearing you talk and you've started to not just design, but actually be out there teaching these things to people now. And I love hearing you talk about this space and that's why I was excited to get you on today to talk about this, that intersection of where design and SEO meets. And I joked a little bit early about being married to an SEO nerd like Terry, you're just going to get some of this through osmosis, but obviously you understand it all yourself and you know how these things compliment each other and we deal with clients all the time that come on board that maybe they'll come at you right away like, "I need a new website and I need SEO."
And sometimes we pump the brakes a little like, "Well, you don't need a new website. Maybe there's some things that you need to revamp," but some of this is kind of part of our SEO process, whether it be images or things, and we'll dive into some of that. I want to scooch back though a touch. I was looking on your guys' website a while back in advance of this interview, and I might have it slightly wrong, but I know I read something about your artistic background and you had a blurb in there about drawing while in detention. So, this artistic bend that you have in the creative side of your brain, sounds like it goes back there quite a way. Tell us how you've been artistic, why are you drawn to that side of things?
Elisabeth Samuels: Yeah, so true story. In first grade I got detention because I wasn't paying attention in class, I was drawing pictures of Snoopy. Yeah.
Jesse Dolan: Nice.
Elisabeth Samuels: My dad had always encouraged my creativity. That was never anything that was in question. I would draw. Any art class that was offered. I was always taking it. You know when you get your electives in school, you always have something that's non-negotiable? Well, for me that was art and I'm not saying that I'm super spectacular and I'm not winning awards, but it's something that I feel a way to communicate with and it's something I just love.
Back in high school, I had a college that wanted to talk to me about scholarships. They wanted to see my portfolio and my pride got in the way of my common sense and I said no. I'm like, "I don't want to be a starving artist for the rest of my life. Nobody's going to do art on the computer." And obviously this was back in the 80s before computers were so big and I really got my pride handed to me because graphic design exploded in the 90s. I kind of wrote my ticket at that point, but it's just something like I've always had to have some form of art in my life and having little kids in the house, there's always paint and markers and whatever. I mean it really doesn't matter, just do something, have fun with it. I don't believe in a whole lot of structure because I feel like people get too caught up in the rules and following a certain guideline and I'm like, "No, just play. Just have fun." And that's what I encourage.
Jesse Dolan: I like people that have that slant towards artistic things, whether it be music, actual art, right? Just because I think there's always a lot of creativity there then in your mind, and especially for this industry, for SEO, web design, digital marketing, I think that people have to have that for kind of what you just said. You don't get caught into what's the recipe or what's the exact things I need to do, because A, there isn't that, as you know, right? There's nothing that's just completely repeatable when it comes to SEO websites, things like that. So you have to be creative, you have to have some problem solving in you.
But then the other part I really like, and some of the things you're saying I think it shows through too, is that you understand emotion and how some of that comes through with art and just presentation and all those things, and you translate that into web design. I mean you just have to have a little bit of built-in understanding on how this will look, what kind of empathy has come out of this. Is it matching with what we want to be found for, for ranking a website and then people land on a page, is it speaking the same thing? Are we drawing a connection here? And I think you're in a good space to bring all that in together.
So, wanted to give you those kudos and kind of set the stage for everybody too, a little bit on, like you said, maybe you're not having paintings at the museum here, that level of artists, you're creative, you get it, and you've been translating that professionally to great websites. Let's go back then. I kind of took us back a little bit to get a little of your background on there, but let's talk about where this stuff, where the rubber meets the road here, where your discipline and your craft, the design part merges with SEO, which is what our show is, Local SEO Tactics. Everybody's listening and watching here to learn SEO-related tidbits.
Let's just kick it off. What is something that people usually maybe don't look at for their website or are unaware of if you're a business owner or a marketing manager listening, Elisabeth, they have a website, what are some things that you've noticed over the years that maybe they're invisible to, don't understand right now that from a design or web development end of things is going to benefit their SEO or make it play nice together?
Elisabeth Samuels: That's a very valuable piece of information that I really like to jump into. People don't realize that conversion is just transferred emotion. So, if I have a website that I'm looking at and you're wanting me to convert, you're wanting me to buy your product or call you for a service, I have to see, based on your website, that you understand me, that you're going to solve my problems, that you're going to be the solution for me. And so finding a way to transfer that emotion, a lot of it is through images. I am super big on consistency and branding.
So if you have specific colors in your logo, I think those colors should be the exact same color throughout your website, not two or three different shades of blue, I want your exact hex code of blue to be in different places in your website to resonate. I want imagery, pictures that match the same colors of your logo as well. There's nothing, it's jarring when it's disjointed. And so I absolutely look for a cohesive look.
I want a little bit of space. I want the images to breathe. I don't want them all stacked on top of each other. I want to be able to see a flow from the top of the page through the middle, down to the bottom of the page. I don't want it to be just super chunky of this is one look and feel, this is another look and feel. No, I want it to be cohesive. And so I want your content to share a story, I want it to provide information, and I want to be able to give enough information for the customer to make a decision. And I think all of that resonates, whether it's web design or SEO or whatever, for absolutely every business, you can look at those things.
I have the ability to look at a site and instantly I can tell you, "Nope, this doesn't feel right." And I don't know if it's just years of doing this or what it is, but no, I can't always articulate to my team, which I know gets a little frustrating, but I'm like, "Let's talk about this. Let's work it over." And so businesses, there's so many checklists of, "Okay, well I need the phone number in this many places. I need a form right up at the top, so people can make a decision." Well, I think that's great and that's awesome for SEO, but if they're going to fill out a form, you need to know why they're filling out a form. Is it just because it's in front of their face or because you're solving their problems? Give them enough information to make a decision or take the next step.
And so those are some of the things I like to look at. But again, colors and pictures. If you have a very branded business that is visual, like if you're a plumber or a roofer or somebody that's going to come to my house, I like to see pictures of your vehicles on your website. I like to see pictures of real people, not just stock people. And I know that for a small business, sometimes that's hard because you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, I have to hire a film crew. I have to hire professional photographers." And I really don't believe that you do. One tiny little secret people don't realize is a lot of these new iPhone's cameras are fantastic, and you can take pictures with your cell phone that can be good web quality. The key is making sure that the settings are right and that you send them over to your developer or your web person full size, as large as you possibly can with as high of a DPI or resolution. And then I can absolutely use them on a website.
And that will be a way that's approachable to just every business. When you're taking pictures, look at the background. What do you have behind you that is going to distract somebody? Different things like that. There's hundreds of tutorials online on how to take really great pictures, spend a little bit of time researching that. And a lot of it can be DIY. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars on photographers and camera crews because they're not going to probably get your business the way you get your business, and that's the biggest value, I say, because you know your clientele, you know your customers, you know your demographic, what would appeal to them?
Jesse Dolan: And we always talk about on our show and at our company this crawl, walk, run philosophy. You don't have to immediately be running on these things. Hey, if you think ultimately you need some professional photography or videos done, you can do that, but to your point, right now today, if you know want to get better images on your website, run out, take some, and get them to your web person. And your photographer, whatever, next year that you're going to hire can have an idea at least of what your brand and what they want to capture, and they're not going off on their own. If you think that your photos you take with your iPhone aren't going to be good enough, they're good enough for now. You can always step into that later.
Elisabeth Samuels: Absolutely, and there's a lot of things that if you have a good web developer that can be creative with it, maybe they can enhance it in Photoshop a little bit for you or crop it a certain way so that it looks better. There's a lot of DIY stuff out there, so don't get hung up on what you can't do right now. And I know that so many people are like, ready, fire, aim. Well, no, let's aim, let's figure out what our goals are, what we're trying to accomplish, and then just take steps towards that because you're right, maybe next year you can bring on a photographer. Maybe if right now you get some pictures that resonate with who you are and who you're trying to connect with, and then that bumps up your business a little bit so that you have the extra funds to take the next step and go to the next level.
Blogging, everybody knows that content is the biggest thing that gives the best return on investment for your business. If you're a roofer, blog about your business, blog about roofs. What is the value of having a slate roof over a metal roof or whatever? How often should you have your roof inspected? There's millions of things that you can do as a business owner that can help your website yourself.
seospringtraining.com is the website that you can go ahead and purchase your tickets on there. You can learn a little bit more of information of what we're doing. I am absolutely available. My contact information is on there. It's elisabeth@seospringtraining.com, so you're free to email me and ask questions. I absolutely don't mind. It is April 13th is the VIP, but 14th through the 16th is the regular marketing conference. It's in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have reserved an Embassy Suite.
Jesse Dolan: And it's not an event where it's just, this isn't like trade show where it's just sponsors all over tables, people throwing stuff around, and everything's brought to you by this and trying to sell you a package. It's actual people practicing SEO, doing it, that are up to date with what's happening.
Elisabeth Samuels: We bring quality value to people through our events. That's the whole purpose of it is just because, when we started out, we didn't know what we didn't know and if I can shorten the learning curve for other people, I'm absolutely happy too. Our speakers are coming from so many different areas. We've got people from social. We've got people from super tech technical, we've got people from sales, people from affiliates. It's any discipline within the SEO marketing realm.
Jesse Dolan: No, it's real people doing stuff, sharing, helping, and not just a one-off deal, yeah, not just a pitch fest to sell a bunch of stuff. You're going to come to the event, learn some stuff, get back, and actually make a difference in your business.
Elisabeth Samuels: We give a lot of real-world practical actionable things that as soon as you're behind the computer, you can actually utilize that information and make a difference for your clients or your business.
Jesse Dolan: I think businesses sometimes feel like it's mundane or they don't have anything to add because this is what they do every day and they don't realize, like roofing in your example, how often do we really get a new roof? I mean hopefully every 20 years, or it doesn't happen that often for us as homeowners. So you know what? I don't know anything about roofing. So when I go to your website and look at all your boring, mundane, everyday things that you've been blogging about, for me, that's all new information. You're an expert. So yeah, just creating that content and then capturing it.
What I was thinking is just saying that back to iPhone images. If you are writing a blog post or content for your website, social media, whatever, as consumers, we know when it's a business owner producing this stuff versus some fancy article that was written. And we know when we're seeing real photos from you too, and that's not a bad thing. I think people don't expect this. We always call it the 10 o'clock news level of production and all this really polished stuff. Last few years, especially with COVID and all of us being so remote and everything else, I think it's accelerated people just being fine with great, natural organic photos. And then you marry that, like you said, with iPhones nowadays, you're taking great quality to be on top of that from a clarity standpoint, we're fine with capturing our own images where it works for your website. I'm curious what you think about-
Elisabeth Samuels: Translate as authentic, okay? So we had a foundation repair company that, oh my God, this guy was so great about blogging. He would go out and foundation repair is not glamorous, it's not sexy, okay? It's fixing the foundation of your house, making sure that your house is level and stable so that your roof doesn't crack and then you need to replace your roof, right? It's super integral. And so he would take pictures, he would do little videos, and show what a cracked foundation that is something to be concerned over.
So, it's not glamorous at all, but the value in it was he was constantly putting new content, he was blogging about it, and you're right, it does not have to be five o'clock news polish and people are resonating with the authenticity that comes from the everyday information that, like you said, you're going to a website, you don't know how to replace a roof or what's valuable or what information is. And you're right, it may be mundane for the roofer that's doing it all the time, but Google doesn't know who you are and what you do until you tell it and the value of that information on the page or on the website is gold. It's absolute gold.
Jesse Dolan: Something for everybody is kind of just reinforcing from a web design, SEO, where all this kind intersects is content. Whether you're blogging or adding new pages to your website for a product or service you have to offer, capturing your content yourself, writing it yourself, getting it out there, or at least doing some of it and then handing it off to your developers to make it look extra pretty and good, I think that's great stuff and people shouldn't be intimidated by it because you don't have to wait, to your point, for budget or for resources to come in and do some of this. And then kind of like I was [inaudible 00:22:32], crawl, walk, run. You can always do better later. That's the great part about a website, like we tell everybody is, you can change it, you can update it, but waiting to have the perfect thing or the perfect page-
Elisabeth Samuels: It never exists. Even in development for my new websites, it's never perfect. And so I tell people, "Let's get it 80%, 90% and then let's launch because we can always make updates, we can always make changes." And to pretty much any business owner out there, you should be refreshing your website about every two, three years because times change, the whole industry evolves. And so your business is evolving and we want to show that and we want to highlight that. So yeah, refreshing a website, it's never going to be perfect and done and finished and ready for prime time. Just let's get it out there. Let's promote you. Let's get you business.
Jesse Dolan: What people want to see is things they can trust, things that match with what they searched for. Again, the whole search for something, click on a website, it better match with what you're looking for, but then they want to see that you're actually updated, right? Styles change, to your point, every few years. If you go into wherever you live, you check out the new houses being built right now, they probably have a little bit different color scheme than the houses they were building two, three, four years ago. Styles change, our viewpoints change, and what we want to see changes. And if you're ranking high and you're a legitimate business, you should look like your website isn't 10 years old, you should look like you're one of the trend-setting businesses, so to speak.
Elisabeth, pulling back to get a little bit more technical or tricky, is there anything else you can share with everybody watching and listening, again that you as a web designer, from those goggles, when you're looking at websites, maybe you have some ideas that you're going to deploy and that you've now done over experience, you know there's a right and a wrong way from an SEO lens maybe, to either add these photos or to revamp it. Are there things clients come to you saying, "I'd like to do X, Y, and Z," and you're like, "Yeah, we could do that. That's going to completely kill some SEO?" Right? Or that's a big no-no for SEO. Any things to do or things to avoid from website that's going to relate to SEO?
Elisabeth Samuels: I say, if you're going to do your SEO yourself, find somebody, connect with somebody that knows the industry. It's super valuable to have those conversations. I do have people all the time, clients on a practically daily, weekly basis that say, "Well, I want to do this and I want to go in this direction," and I'm the type of person I will say, "Okay, I see what you're talking about. I understand what you want to do, but to be honest, I want to redirect you." And I don't really like saying no, but I have to say no because let's not do this because it's going to hurt your business.
I have a specific client that they were very well known for one specific thing, and they've got a board of directors that wants to go in a different direction. And I'm like, "You can't abandon your core service because this is what makes you money now, okay? I get you want to move into another direction, and we can absolutely do that, but do not abandon your core service or you're going to tank and it's going to hurt you. So let's just kind of keep it solid and strong, add in something else, and just kind of balance it out."
Design and what is trendy, it's very cyclical. Everything comes back, and I just recently discovered there's a new design out there that actually makes websites look like it's a 1997 website, and I'm a little horrified by that because from a design standpoint, that was just painful, right? So whatever you think is new and trendy, don't always jump on board to that because just like with fashion, just like with anything, the classics are the classics because they stand the test of time. Something that works, something that is elegant and quality will still stay. So don't always jump on the trends. They change. Fashion, retro, it's just recycled ideas. So there's not a whole lot new that's out there, so don't get too stuck on what's trendy.
Fonts is something that I'm really particular about. Fonts are fun and I love fonts, I absolutely adore them. But for a business owner, let's keep it clean, let's keep it classic, let's keep it simple. You try to do something too handwritten or too cursive and people have a hard time reading it. And you have to understand your demographic. If your demographic is like 55 and older, there are very specific fonts, very specific sizes. You have to stay within that or you're going to lose your audience. And again, that's not appealing to who you're trying to sell to. So as a business owner, let's just keep it classy, keep it simple, and go from there.
Jesse Dolan: You saying that, it reminds me of something we always try to avoid, and definitely call out to clients if we ever see it. It's these websites where you go to a homepage and you're like, "Where is my menu? Or where is the thing?" Or, "Oh, I had to move my mouse and chase this animated thing that's running around to click on it to then expand the menu." If you have to work for things or think about where to go or where to find the thing, your website's not "working" in that regard.
And I think people miss a lot of times from an SEO standpoint, just a bad user experience, people are going to go back, they're going to leave your website and go back to Google, right? And so where none of these things, maybe I shouldn't say none of these things, things like that, your website is just kind of confusing, that's not an SEO factor from a ranking perspective, but it is from people using your website, liking it, engaging with it, and then over time, yeah, you're going to find yourself disappearing digitally if people can't work with you in that regard. So...
Elisabeth Samuels: Yeah, bounce rate is valid, and that's something that time on page is super critical from an SEO standpoint. And so I want to make sure that when I'm directing traffic, navigating a website, that I give people the path of least resistance because if it's too hard to find an answer, they're going to dip and that's going to hurt your rankings. And so I'm absolutely in sync with everything that Terry wants to do because the value in that is helping the client, helping their business. It's not my ego and, "Oh, did you look at my pretty webpage?" Because that's not where I'm at at all. I want to make sure that my clients are getting the traffic that they need, people are staying on their website, people are purchasing their services because it resonates with the problem they're trying to solve.
Jesse Dolan: Last question/kind of topic area I want to throw at you, Elisabeth, that I have is, what advice do you have to people out there, if people are listening and yeah, let's just say they have on one hand their design team, their development team, people working on their website, doing the updates, and then either they have separate people or persons doing the SEO or maybe nobody there even. Do you have any advice to those people? Do you say, you should have an agency or somebody that does it all in-house together? Or make sure they're talking to each other? Or it's dangerous keeping these people separated? What advice do you have for people that are in that situation where they are kind of detached or separated right now?
Elisabeth Samuels: I say communication is critical. Whether you have an in-house team or you are white labeling or if you have somebody like VAs out of the country. It's very valid in our industry, we have probably more VAs than most other industries, and we can outsource very quickly, very easily. But I feel that the communication is where everybody can be on the same page and be cohesive.
So, I know probably back in the day when we started, we were a little shy about sharing our knowledge and our secrets, everything with a developer because you know the fear is, "Oh, well, they're going to take it, they're going to run with it, they're going to do their own thing." And I don't feel that way anymore. I mean if somebody wants to steal my strategies or whatever, that's fine, that's on them, but the value in making sure that people are on the same team as far as communicating what the goals are, I'm absolutely happy to connect with, if somebody has somebody else running their social media team, I will always say, "Hey, can I connect with that person just so that I make sure that the visuals on social media match the website?"
I want that consistency because I think in advertising, it takes seven or eight times for somebody to see your logo or see your business and for it to connect and resonate. And the biggest thing, you look at Apple, you look at Coca-Cola, that consistency in branding is there, so their brand is instantly recognizable. And so whether it's somebody that is working on a social platform or if they're doing landing pages or if they're doing whatever, I'm a big team player. I think that the client will benefit with that in the long run and that's the right way to do business. So let's all communicate, what is our goal? How can we achieve this? I've had clients who have other advertising agencies and they're like, "Oh, well, we need a landing page." And I'm like, "How can I help you with that?"
Jesse Dolan: Well kind of push that the other way, what's your opinion and advice for everybody about if you're a web designer and you're making some changes to a page or maybe the business owner or manager's jumping and doing it themselves, when you make design changes, updates to a page, if you are not the one or the team doing the SEO, what's your opinion? Is 100% of the time that you touch your website, you should let your SEO team know that you update a design, updated a photo? Or are there major things you want to make sure, major changes that you would say is a threshold? Like, "Okay, if you're doing this, you can keep it quiet, but if you're doing this, let your SEO people know."
Elisabeth Samuels: Well, I definitely say if you're going to change a word here or there, just gosh, make sure it's not a linked keyword or something like that. So I feel like you got to have a little bit of information, a little bit of knowledge about SEO and how it works. I absolutely will say, do not take away chunks of content because you want an airy and minimalist site. That scares me because not everybody has schema in the back end to fix what you're trying to do. So it's just a communication and just saying, "Hey, I need to make some changes. Is this, this, and this okay?" It's not so much bugging the SEO person or the developer, but I'm sure you can attest to times where some dev has gone and butchered a site and you're like, "Oh my God, you just undid all of the things that I was trying to do. Why?"
A little communication goes a long way. "Hey, I want to do this. Is that all right? Do you mind?" I am a big proponent of teaching my clients how to update their site if they want to. If you want to go in and make changes, this is totally fine. Be careful of this, be careful of that. I'll do training videos for my clients if they want to edit it, that's totally fine, but understand, if you undo something big or major that's going to affect your rankings, I'm going to have to charge you to fix it because it was already set up in there but it's so fluid and it so depends on what kind of edits and what they're thinking and... Yeah.
Jesse Dolan: So when in doubt, I mean if you're not sure, if you're listening, when in doubt, check with your SEO team or SEO person about whatever changes are... Like you said, communicate, right? That's the A1 thing that you were enforcing there is just make sure that communication's there. And I don't think, hopefully I'm not trying to present it as your SEO people are controlling your site and you better check with them first, but it's more like you're saying just make them aware so that way if they did have some advice or some corrections they needed to do, doing it sooner than later, because we do know from an SEO perspective is these things are usually not fast moving. If you make a change, if Google saw it, it's going to take a while for you to undo it. So communication, not so much permission, but just communication is great advice.
Elisabeth Samuels: Yeah, and respect. If I'm paying somebody to manage my site and do the SEO and all of that and I go in and muck with it, that's kind of undermining the value that that SEO person has. And so, again, communication, respect goes a long way.
Jesse Dolan: Yep. Any other final thoughts or advice you want to share with people out there in this space?
Elisabeth Samuels: It's hard, but it's not. I know sometimes SEO and web development feels so intimidating, and especially for business owners that you know your business, you know how to do what you do and to add one more or two more or three more things on top of it can be very overwhelming, but I don't want it to be. I want it to be approachable and I want it to be open to where, ask me, I don't care if you have questions. I'm happy to support and help people. If we're a good fit to work together, absolutely, I would love that, but it's not critical for everybody. Just reach out. I'm happy to support people and you can do it yourself.
Jesse Dolan: Why don't you share your contact info, not necessarily the email, where people can find you and we'll link all this in the show notes for everybody listening to make it easy.
Elisabeth Samuels: Sure. Awesome. Our website is salterrasite, S-A-L-T-E-R-R-A-S-I-T-E.com. Fill out a form, reach out, give us a call, happy to help out.
Jesse Dolan: And ask for Elisabeth if you want to go straight to the top. Don't ask for that Terry guy. He's schema, different topic. If you really want the answers on web design and your website and your brand at large. Check him out. No, thanks for coming on, Elisabeth. I think everybody listening and watching definitely has got some pointers and if nothing else, helped them reframe where that space for web design, and it's not different than SEO, it's your brand, your digital marketing, and communication and these things you're sharing I think it's great advice for everybody. So thanks for coming on. Looking forward to seeing you guys in person when we get together for the SEO Spring Training coming up in a few months. And yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you next time.
Elisabeth Samuels: Thank you for having me. It's been great. Thanks.
Jesse Dolan: Take care.