How Can Your Website Work Harder For You In 2021 – 90

Here is the Transcript for Episode 90:

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer, Caleb Baumgartner. With this episode, Jesse Dolan and Sue Ginsburg discuss the importance of making your website work for you. You may not know how to maximize your ROI on your website, but Sue and Jesse are here to provide useful tips for maximizing engagement, to turn more clicks into clients.

If you have a question for our team, we’re here to help. If you leave a voicemail question we use on the show, you could receive a free Intrycks’ t-shirt. Thanks for listening and enjoy this episode.

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, here with Sue Ginsburg. Sue, we’ve been doing this for a regular series now. Sue is our client success specialist here, really being an advocate for our clients. Fielding questions from listeners, questions that come up, Sue engaging with clients on a day-to-day basis, and just to reset the spirit. What we’re trying to do here with you on the show is again, ask those questions that people are asking out there.

Anybody listening in the audience, even if you’re not a current client of ours, you can ask a question. It’ll come through Sue. We’ll use it on the show, help yourself out, help everybody else out. If you have a question that you want us to talk about, go on out to localSEOtactics.com, go down to the bottom, click the link for asking a question, and there’s two stages. If you just want to submit your question, send it over to us and we’ll read it on the show and talk about it. That’s great.

If you want to take it to the next level, we’re going to bribe you with a free t-shirt. You can actually call in and leave a voicemail with your question, and then we’ll play the audio. So not only give you a shout out on the show, but actually play the audio, so you can be on it and say it in your own words. We’d love to do that. If your game for it, same thing. Just go to localSEOtactics.com. Go down to the bottom, click on the submit a question, and it’ll walk you through those options.
So that being said, Sue’s got a good topic for us here on this episode, geographic background area. Sue, we’re looking at what? Austin there again?

Sue Ginsburg: Austin, Texas.

Jesse Dolan: Nice.

Sue Ginsburg: Let’s keep it weird. That’s what they say. Keep Austin weird.

Jesse Dolan: I like that slogan. I like it. What are we talking about today?

Sue Ginsburg: Okay. Today we are going to be talking about how can you make your website work harder in 2021. As the new year starts, these are the types of questions and discussions that I get into with clients. I think that in the beginning of the year or anytime, it’s on a lot of business owners minds. So my quote of the day today is a quote from the Cheshire Cat, I had to say that, from Alice in Wonderland and that is, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice and the cat said, “then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” The point is, if you know where you want to go, then state that, be intentional about that. In this context incorporate into your website strategy. So the intent of this topic today is to help our listeners and clients know how can you website work harder for you and your business this year?

And what I would say is whatever that means to you. It could be making your website more user-friendly, it could be making your website more engaging, could be making your website a better sales tool for your business. All of those things, any one of those things or more, the bottom line is it all depends on what you want to get from your website. Obstacles to this happening. You’re unaware that your website can work harder for you.

You’re unaware that your website can act as a sales tool. Your unaware that it can act as a resource for your clients, et cetera, et cetera. It may just be that it’s an outdated website. It may be you’re missing call to action. Any of these things could happen. A business owner has thousands of things to think about and the website is one of them. The plan is think strategically about your website, think intentionally about it, so that you can make it work harder for you. Does not happen on its own.

The result is your website will be more effective as a sales and marketing tool for you. It will be better engaging and interacting with your clients and your prospects. In the end, you will get a better ROI for your website and the investment that you have put into it. So start with a story, really close to home here. Talk about Intryks going through, as we speak, a website redo slowly but surely. Why are we doing this? We’ve added services as clients have demanded them.

And we’re expanding our service offerings based on the things that we’re doing more regularly, more frequently, and getting requests from more clients. What that means is what we’re delivering is not accurately and completely reflected by the website that we have right now. That’s triggering us to redo the website, to add services, make it more engaging, and a resource for those services on the website, which are not on there now. While most listeners know that we do local SEO for GMBs and for websites, what you may not know is that we also build websites.

We do digital marketing, we create content and more. You may or may not know that now, but with the new website that we’re working on, that will be made clear on there and better communicated to you. With that, Jesse, I will pop the question to you. What are some of the common fixes that you see most websites need, with or without, the website owner, even knowing that they can make these fixes and make it work harder for them?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. It’s always timely towards the beginning of the year type to think of these things and set the stage, but really this is evergreen. This is something, it doesn’t matter what time of the year or the frequency. Always be wondering, what can my website be doing better? You’re saying for us, it’s really born out of communication with our clients.

There’re certain services, maybe they’re asking questions, “Can you clarify this? Can you give me more information about that? I didn’t even know you offered blank.” Yeah, so that stuff has to get out on the website if that’s happening to you. Broadly, something that we’re seeing as a trend right now, and something that we’re recommending to everybody to get behind is leveraging video. Your website, your web pages need to have text, and images, and things like that, too.

But let’s face it. We would much rather watch a 15 or 30 second video than to read three, or four, or five minutes on a website, or even scan through it. If your video is attractive, that’s actually not only a time-saver or something we as humans, not everybody, but a lot of us gravitate towards. It’s also like a much more engaging piece of content, right, to play that video. Specifically, what we’re talking to people about is having, let’s say the video is towards the top of your page.
The video really is the door opener for the rest of the page. Your page, if it has SEO applied, it’s targeting certain keywords, or a certain theme, or a certain niche, but you may go into topics. Some topics have different channels or segments for people to click for the next thing, or learn more, read more, open up a new tab, whatever. A video is going to really set the stage like, okay, I’m paraphrasing, for an example here, but underneath me, there’s a bunch of content.

Here’s what it’s about. Here’s why you should check it out. If you want a shortcut to just contact us, hit the red button right below, and just submit a form. It’s just like an overview and introduction of this page, or of this service, or this product, whatever the page may be about. Leveraging video, leveraging quick videos on that format right there, because you can make those really quick. People a couple of years ago, if you’re talking about putting a video on your website.

We’d want to have this late night news, or Primetime News type production. You’d thought it would have to be really, really good and high quality. One of the silver linings for the whole COVID pandemic and working from home, Zoom meetings and everything else is we’re all used to more of this type of quality, right? So don’t get me wrong, if all things being equal. If you have a high end production video versus your competitor, that’s probably going to help you out.

If you have nothing right now, doing your own videos. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone that’s within the last couple of years, it’s going to have a pretty stellar camera on it. You can capture that video. If you’re talking a 15 or 30 second little intro video, you can probably do that in one or two takes without a lot of editing or redoing. The longer you talk, the more mistakes you’re going to make, right? Just these short videos, you can do them yourself.

You can create it, you can put it up on YouTube. You can do some minor editing with graphics and stuff, and you can have yourself a video that really enhances your webpage, your website, and that content. In an addition to it just being an effective piece of content and engagement, now you’re also from the eyes of Google for SEO, you’ve got a page that has multimedia. You’ve got a page with video. Again, all things being equal.

If it’s up to you and a competitor, if your page has an embedded YouTube video let’s say, you’re going to score some points, and you’re probably going to get a better ranking over the long term for that engagement and those other signals. by doing that, last but not least, it’s now directly on the website. I know your question is what can your website do for you or what do you want it to do, right? But if you’re leveraging video, if you’re embedding a YouTube video into your webpage, that means you’ve also put this video on YouTube.

You’re creating a video in YouTube. You’re leveraging YouTube at the same time. YouTube and Google are usually the top two most popular search engines, maybe in the world, for sure. The US, either case, massive opportunity to start getting yourself out there on YouTube as well, almost as a by-product at least in this kind of a pitch. That’s something that we’re encouraging people to do a lot. It’s so much more accessible than it was, even a year or two ago for the type of quality you can put out there.

The type of quality people are used to seeing. It’s so easy to just pick a topic, enhance your webpage with a quick intro video, or an explainer video, or if it’s a product or a service, a demonstration video. Even in a case like this, if it’s FAQs, just some quick answers to videos that people are, I’m sorry. Quick video answer to questions people are usually asking, and just having that be part of your website.

Wherever you have a video, you can also have text, right? So it’s not like it’s a one or the other. If you put a video up on your page, you could say the same thing, almost verbatim, word for word, and type it out and now you got people that can read it, people that can watch it, and you just really can’t go wrong by doing it. The only danger in the video is if you overdo it with too many videos on your page, and that takes your page longer to load.

You’re just going to impact your overall loading time. But for what we’re talking about here, just adding a video to the page, that’s really a non-issue I guess, last thing, just to fully round it out. Definitely here, at least in my example, for my answer for you, Sue, we’re talking about YouTube and leveraging YouTube to do this. This is within WordPress, too, that I guess is my context. If you’re using a different content management system or web builder, you can integrate Wistia, other video hosting platforms, or even just directly upload it to your website.

It doesn’t have to be YouTube, is my point. I think it’s great to leverage YouTube. It’s free, it’s accessible and again, you get the double dip by using YouTube as well at the same time. But just putting video on your website in general, even if you’re using some other built-in video host or platform to do that really doesn’t matter. Just having video on your website is going to be a great user engagement and a great thing to have on there. Yeah, I guess that’s my long answer to your short question.

Sue Ginsburg: Jesse, are there any particular industries that video works better or worse for, whether that’s manufacturing, retail, or even B2B B2C? What are your thoughts on that?

Jesse Dolan: On the surface, I’d say no, because my context would be is that it can work for everybody. This is a question that, this is not the first time I’ve had this. Now does a video work better? Well, you can hold a product and demonstrate it versus showing a manufacturing process? Yeah. There’s definitely going to be applications that are more suited towards it, especially if you’re talking in that short 20, 30 second type video, not a long tutorial.

Every industry can benefit from video. If you have a flyer or a page on your website that explains, promotes or showcases something, you can do that same thing with a video and enhance that page. Not as a direct of an answer maybe as you’re looking for there, but really I think that’s the truth.

Sue Ginsburg: Well, the truth is what we want. What I heard is doesn’t matter. Video helps every website.

Jesse Dolan: Absolutely.

Sue Ginsburg: Just as a consumer, as a visitor to websites, I know for me, I definitely am attracted more to the, or first to the video before I would read any copy.

Jesse Dolan: Yes.

Sue Ginsburg: Human nature, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Sue Ginsburg: It’s great, really great.

Jesse Dolan: Hopefully that ups helps everybody out. Sue, did you have a closing thought you wanted to share?

Sue Ginsburg: Yes. I would say on this topic, if you remember one thing and one thing only. Your website is most likely your biggest marketing investment. It is for most businesses. Have it be your best sales person too, or have it work hard for you. This does not happen on its own. It takes your attention, it takes your strategy. What are you wanting your website to do? Don’t ignore it, work on it, and make it work hard for you.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. I love that. Something we always tell people is you got to do it with intent. That takes away a lot of the mystery of SEO is, ah, what is it? How do you do it? It’s really all about just doing it with intent. If you type a word, if you save a photo, if you put a label on something, what was the keyword?

Everything is intentional. Like you’re saying, it doesn’t happen by itself. You have to be intentional on it, so that’s stellar.

Sue Ginsburg: I can also just say, I’ll also add, we can help you do that for anybody who doesn’t already know that. Yes, we have deep SEO expertise, but that means we know how to work on your website. If you want to need help with that, absolutely. We’re here to help you.

Jesse Dolan: On that too, I mean, even further, for embedding video, creating video, leveraging video, these things we’re talking about, of course we can help with that too. People who want working examples of us doing it, just go to localSEOtactics.com. Every single podcast episode that we launch is recorded on video. Sue and I are talking right now, it’s also a video recording.

That’s going to go on YouTube. We’re going to put this video on the podcast episode page for this episode. So not hard to do, not hard to do it all, and you can see a working model there, if you go check it out.

Sue Ginsburg: Jesse, you say not hard to do because you know how to do it, but-

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, good point.

Sue Ginsburg: … It may be hard for other people.

Jesse Dolan: Good point. It’s a lot easier than people may give it credit. The first one or two might be painful, but yeah, it’s really not any more difficult than anything else you’re dealing with. Creating a web page, an image, creating a word document and saving it really. It’s just knowing how to do it. You’re right. I think that wraps it up for this episode. Like I said, on the front side, anybody out there, if you’ve got a question or a topic you want to throw at us, just go on out to localSEOtactics.com.

Go down to the bottom, find the link for submit a question, and pick your route from there. We’d love to hear from you, and I’d love to help you out. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. We’ll catch you on the next episode.