Interview with James Holden: SEO

James has been a web developer and designer for over 20 years. He creates results-driven websites at his company Wolf Productions and is an SEO Expert.

James' Links:

Wolf Productions
LinkedIn

 

Transcript:

Samantha Tonge: Hello, Samantha Tonge here from Labrakita Marketing again. I am talking to another expert in the marketing sphere. This time it is James Holden, a web developer. He is an expert in SEO, and I'm going to be speaking to him about this, as that is the subject of this particular interview. So over to you James, can you introduce yourself, please?

James Holden: Hi, Samantha. Well, firstly, thank you very much for asking me to come on your vlog/podcasty doobry. That's a technical term, "doobry". My name is James Holden from Wolf Productions. As Samantha hinted, I'm a web developer. I've been going since 2001 and I specialise in the design and development of websites, and also in getting results for people. Because ultimately, that's what a website's for, you know, there's no point having a pretty website... How many people have gone on a website, and think: "Oh, it looks stunning, but I have no idea what they do." That’s a bit pointless. So yeah, that's what I do, results-orientated websites, and seeing how we can connect eyeballs to that website, the eyeballs of those who actually want to buy stuff.

Samantha: Yes. And there’s also not much point in having a website, even if it does look amazing, and tell you everything about what you do, if no one can find it. That is why we're talking about SEO today. So for any of you guys who aren't aware of what SEO is, it's search engine optimization. Basically, it's how easily people find you on the likes of Google. So, people have all sorts of websites, a lot of people have created their own. What are the first basic things that people need to think about when they're putting a website together?

James: Putting themselves in the shoes of their customer. So, what's really interesting when I'm talking to potential clients that happen to want a website built, is quite often they'll go: "Oh, I don't like that. And I don't like that, and I don't like that colour." And I've got to the stage in my business where I'm quite frank and go: "I don't really care whether you like it, because it's not relevant. What matters is whether your target market likes it." And it's about stepping away from, you know, yes, it's your business, yes, it's your brand, yes, you've got to like it. But there's also got to be that overriding principle, putting yourself in the shoes of a customer and saying: “If I were a customer, and I'd never met me before, and me as a person can't have any influence over the nurturing of this relationship, will my website, at the very least get someone to give me their information, in order for me to get to that stage?” And if your website doesn't do that, you're killing the potential relationship with your customer right at the get go. So it's just really important that it's compelling, it's engaging, it does what it says on the tin and actually serves the need of the customer, because it needs to be about them, not about you. So saying that I don't care is a bit frank, but I'm trying to make a point. I think certainly that point came across.

Samantha: The phrase I often end up saying when meeting with my clients, not just with websites, but in relation to other things as well is: "You are not your customer."

James: Yeah.

Samantha: And it's getting that through with all their communications. Yeah. And you see things, especially on websites, even on some big firms’ websites as well. So, I work with a lot of engineering firms, tech firms, that kind of thing, and they could really use part numbers as their navigation and search function. If you don't already know the part you need, you can't navigate to the relevant part of the website. Which is pointless.

James: It's crazy. I built a site for a lovely lady called Rachel Windsor Knott from My Animal Matters. She is a zoo pharmacologist, and she provides sort of self-healing, holistic remedies and things for pets that want to self-select and help themselves if they're feeling poorly, etc. And there are different oils and things. And when we explored the bespoke search functionality of the site, what we focused on was conditions rather than the name of the product, because at the end of the day, someone's not going to go on there and think: "Oh, I need some ginger oil, because my cat's being sick", they're going to go: "My cat's being sick. What do I need?"

Samantha: Yes.

James: So it's exactly the same principle. And it's just about making that user experience really, really simple. And seeing as we're supposed to be talking about SEO, I'll segue into SEO in relation to that. The same thing from a Google, and from a search engine point of view is absolutely relevant in a sense that when you're doing keyword research, when you're creating that content, yes, you want it to be found on Google, but ultimately, and this is a really, really strong point, if anybody watching this, takes nothing else from it, please take this away: Google is not going to buy from you, your customer is. So if you create keywords to get traffic from Google and then get traffic from Google, but it's the wrong traffic, the wrong people, you're either going to create a lot of irrelevant inquiries, which is going to take up half of your day with you saying: "Oh, no, that's not what we do", to the people that contact you, or they're not going to contact you, and they're going to go away and not buy anything, because it's not relevant. So always when you're doing search engine optimization, whether it's offline or on-page, focus on the customer, and what the customer wants. Yes, give Google what it wants, to a point, but Google isn't going to be your customer.

Samantha: Yes, yeah. So it's not a case of: "Oh, 40,000 people search for this a day," because if they're the wrong 40,000 people, it doesn't matter.

James: Yeah, yeah. If you sell ice cubes, and you're targeting Eskimos, you're not going to sell many.

Samantha: Yeah, yeah. Fair. Good point. What are the starting points in thinking about what your customers' language is, how they think, and what their actual problem is, before you jump to: "I do this"?

James: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you were talking about language. It's using language like how we help rather than services, and engaging with a customer in a chatty way. You can be professional and chatty at the same time. And I think a lot of people feel they need to be sort of über-corporate on a website. But that's actually the worst thing you can do, including on websites for corporations. Because as you read it, it's just jargon. It's boring, quite frankly. It doesn't engage. And if you're a very chatty person, and you talk in a certain way, that is how you should be talking to your potential customer on your website. And the same with social media. If you wouldn't say something offline in a certain way, why are you saying it online? You are the same person, just because you're behind a computer, and you're typing something, it's still you, and it's not going to be congruent. If somebody then meets you, and you're completely different to the persona you put out online.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: You need to be consistent. And, you know, one of the most effective things that works from both an SEO point of view, and from a website point of view, is just being authentic. If you are authentic, then you will attract the people that want to be attracted to who you are as a person, who you are as a business, what you stand for, your integrity, your values, etc. And if there's a disconnect between the two, it's going to be a difficult relationship before it has even started. That is, if a relationship even starts. Because people will be looking at how you're presenting yourself online, they'll be looking at how they found you, and if there's a complete disconnect, when they then contact you, they're going to think: "Oh, that wasn't what I was expecting." And just like it is with most things, it's about managing expectations.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: Yeah. This is a very broad, you know...

Samantha: Yeah, I mean, there are so many things that are true for marketing as a whole, but I imagine they also have an essential impact on your SEO. So it's about getting your brand right, understanding who you really are, and what you represent, what the core of your brand is then?

James: Yes.

Samantha: If you communicate in that way, you will really help every aspect of marketing, including your SEO.

James: Absolutely. And talking about broad, don't go broad when it comes to keyword research. When it comes to trying to rank for something, because at the end of the day, if you've got 40,000 people searching for something, and you've got 100,000 websites competing, and there's 10 listings on Google, 10 places on page one...

Samantha: Yeah.

James: I don't even know what the maths of that are, but do the maths and it's not good in terms of trying to rank. So, focus on long tail phrases, focus on really specific things that have a much smaller search volume. The key is that if they've got a search volume, and they're relevant, and they're low competition, as an aggregate, you can get in front of the volume of people you need, in a much easier way. For example, by doing a blog on a particular subject that's very specific. And if you only have 40 websites competing for that phrase, while there's a hundred people a month searching for that, you're putting the law of averages in your favour, massively. But it's about the compound effect. There is no magic bullet to this, there's no: "I want to do one article, then sit back on the beach."

Samantha: That'd be nice.

James: Yeah, it's not going to happen. So you need to have a compound mindset where you're thinking more about “little and often”. These habitual things that you're doing have that knock-on effect, and you're putting things in your favour. Because if you focus on very broad things, and you've got three pages, with: "absolutely need to be on page one, otherwise, you have no business", you're setting yourself up to fail. If you're doing a blog a week, around a long tail phrase that has 50-100 people searching for it, but there's a very low competition, and it's very relevant to what you do. A) you're going to get more targeted people. You'll get hits less often, but the compound effect of less of them from 10 different articles instead of more of them from one article that's broad. A) will be easier to do and B) it's got far more longevity. So that's a really big tip: "Think small to think big."

Samantha: Yes. And talking of blogs... I think a lot of people think: you get a website, you put it up, you're done.

James: Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to be laughing at that one, 'cause I see it every day, but...

Samantha: Yeah. And that's some really good advice as well, isn't it? Making sure that it's kept up-to-date, you're doing things like making sure that you're blogging on a regular basis, or you're putting your news up, you're making sure that you tweet it as well from time to time?

James: Yes, yeah. And talking about the regularity of blogging... what Google will do from a search engine point of view is, they will recrawl your site based on a pattern. So if you decide to blog once a week, blog once a week. If blogging once a week is too much to keep up, then don't. Because if you blog once a week for a month, and then have a month off, what will happen is, Google will come back a week after the fourth blog and they'll go: "Oh, there's no fresh content, and then they'll do it another week: "Oh, there's no fresh content." And before you know it, you've gone right down the crawling list of websites to be recrawled for new content. Whereas, if you did it once a month, you'd get recrawled roughly once a month, because Google will think: "Oh, okay, there's a pattern here, we'll follow the pattern." If your pattern is very sporadic, it will do you no favours whatsoever. So it's better off to start with fewer posts, if you think that timewise, you can't commit to one a week, well then do one a fortnight, one a month. But stick to the pattern, it is very important, because it's the pattern that will get regular crawling. And the bottom line is, if you don't get regular crawling, then those articles won't get ranked. If they don't get ranked, you won't get traffic. So the whole thing goes hand in hand. If no one knows it's there, no one's going to look at it. No one's going to find it, no one's going to search for it. And that starts with the crawling process from Google. Hopefully that makes sense.

Samantha: It's important as well to say that... I mean, when you start off a business, you tend to have a lot of time to do all these things. It's how much time you have, once you've got work coming in. So, if you've got time to do, you know, a blog a week to start off with but you won't in the future. I think, for me, what I would, in fact, what I did was to start off with… I actually had quite a few blogs sitting there in a Word document ready to go. And then I just uploaded them once a month, so I wouldn't run out.

James: Yeah, get them ready, and if you don't want blogging to become a chore, where you are thinking: "Oh, what am I going to write about this week...?", you know, where it all becomes a bit tedious, then do your keyword research in advance and have a list, let's say, based on relevance, based on low competition, based on low hanging fruit in terms of ranking. And just have a list of subjects that you want to talk about. Put together 52 long tail phrases, and you go: "Right, there are my blogs for the next year. And I'm going to either write them once a week, or I'm just going to make sure they get posted once a week or once a fortnight. And every now and again, I'm going to set aside a couple of days or a day or whatever, to focus on just writing a load of blogs in advance." So as you're saying Samantha, you know, you don't have to write them the day they get published.

Samantha: No.

James: And in fact, with a lot of content management systems, you can schedule them to publish on a certain date, at a certain time.

Samantha: Yep.

James: Great. And Google will love that. Google will absolutely love that pattern in terms of ranking, so, you know, make it fun. And, you know, have your tone. Know who you are trying to attract, and that's how the voice and the tone of your blog should come across. Otherwise you're going to simply attract the voice and tone of however you've written it. It's that simple. And if you don't want to attract those people, and we've all done it, you know, in the early days of my business it was all like: "Oh my God, somebody wants to pay me some money. Oh my God, I take on the customer.” And there's no gel, it doesn't fit. You're the wrong personality type. There's nothing wrong with their personality type, there's nothing wrong with yours. It's just not a good fit.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: That is hard work.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: And what happens is, if you then deliver because you've got integrity, you want to make it work, they’ll go and refer someone the same as them to you. And then you're like: "Oh my God, I'm feeding a monster." Don't do it.

Your voice and tone on your website, on your social media, on your, you know, everything you do in business should be authentic, and should be towards the people that you want to attract. Who's your ideal customer, that is your voice. And if you do that, your business will grow organically, because your ideal customers will refer more ideal customers. And it took me a long time to realise this. So I'm just trying to fast track that for you. For anybody watching this, I didn't wake up this morning and thought: "Oh, I've been doing it..." No, it's taken me a long time to come to that realisation. And sometimes people need to go through it, to then go: "Oh yeah." Sometimes people go and ask about you and then they steer straight away. But ultimately, whichever way you spin it, that's what you need to do.

Samantha: Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree. And same goes for all your marketing, really. If it's the wrong tone...

James: Yeah.

Samantha: You get the wrong customers. Yeah.

James: Yeah, exactly. Be professional, even if you're a one-man band. How many times have you had a leaflet through the door at home on a sort of, barely 60... I can't remember the actual name of it, but the thickness of paper, so the...

Samantha: gsm?

James: Yeah, that's it. Gsm. 60gsm, really thin, folded over, window cleaner advert with a Hotmail address. And you think: "mmm". And then you get like, a really nice card and you think: "You know what, they're going to be a bit more expensive, but I think they'll do a better job, because they've represented themselves better." Why would I invest in someone that doesn't invest in themselves? That's got nothing to do with SEO, but it's just a general business advice.

Samantha: Yeah, it's all connected though, isn't it? And I absolutely agree. Completely. And so, if someone's got a new website, they're putting it out there, or it's a new blog or whatever. What would you recommend in terms of putting it out there in order for people to find it? As well as in order to help Google find it, I guess?

James: Yeah. I mean, Google will likely crawl websites that they crawl very, very frequently. So the likes of Facebook, Twitter, descriptions in YouTube. YouTube is always a good idea. I’m not sure this is answering the question, but it is sending me off on a tangent. Ultimately, from an SEO point of view, you can give Google what they want, you can do all the right things, but sometimes there's this real anomaly where you just cannot understand why Google aren't ranking you in the way you'd like to be ranked. You're ticking every box, you're following every guideline, you're doing everything you're supposed to do, and you're still not there. And trying to get to the bottom of it can be hard work. But there is more than one way to skin a cat.

So a lot of people think with SEO it's all about their website. But actually, you can use SEO on another platform. So if you view YouTube as a search engine and not a video platform, just remember that Google owns YouTube. So Google will always give preference to YouTube from a search engine perspective, because they're taking someone back to their own, you know, online real estate, right? So if you do this long tail keyword research and you find the low hanging fruit, relevant search terms, create videos around that content as well and do a bit of a teaser video. SEO the video, because from an on-page SEO point of view, Google will give YouTube preference because they own it. And then have a link off to more information and a blog article that carries on what you're talking about in the video, in the description. So that A) Google will find your website via their own website, YouTube. But B) if you don't get traffic directly, because for whatever reason Google aren't ranking your website, they will rank the YouTube video and you'll get traffic indirectly. So there's a tip.

Samantha: Yes, yes, yes. So it's getting that visibility on other platforms as well.

James: Yeah, it is about keeping in mind that SEO isn't just about your website. It's about search engine optimization on what platform you view as a search engine. So if you view YouTube as a search engine, you can use a search engine to use a search engine to get traffic to your own website, whether you're ranking or not. But I'm not suggesting doing that, instead of ranking your own website.

Samantha: No, no, no.

James:  It's another channel.

Samantha: Yes.

James: You know, when you publish an article, push it out to Twitter. Then when Google is crawling Twitter it will pick up on your tweet. And also from a SEO point of view, although I don't like to make claims like dominating the search engines, because there is a lot of SEO gurus out there, that have less integrity in terms of their claims. But in terms of being found for a certain phrase, Google will rank sites like Twitter. They'll rank a tweet, alright? So, if you've done your long tail keyword research, you know what people are looking for on Google, and then you use the title of that blog as the tweet and then a link back to your website for someone to read the article, it will do two things. You'll get exposure on Twitter and indirect traffic from someone seeing it on Twitter, and clicking on it and going to your website, but you will also potentially get ranked on Google via Twitter for that phrase. Now you've got a situation here, where you've got around, you know, ten listings on Google of that particular phrase and you could rank on YouTube, Twitter and your own website on page one of Google for those phrases and every path leads to the same place. So it's just, you know, it's all worth more than the sum of its parts. There is no magic bullet and it's just doing what works for you, but that's some hints and tips in terms of what might help you.

Samantha: Yeah. I've got clients who have searched on Google and found my LinkedIn profile, because my LinkedIn profile is all optimised as well.

James: Yeah.

Samantha: So it's not just the website.

James: Absolutely. Yeah, you should be thinking SEO for every platform that you've got. Having said all of that, with a website, something to bear in mind is that a website is your only online real estate, it's your freehold.

Samantha: Yes.

James: Okay? It's your freehold online.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: Everything else is leasehold. Your Twitter account. Who owns it? Twitter. Your YouTube account. Who owns it? Google. Your Facebook account. Who owns it? Facebook. Your website. Who owns it? You do, unless you use a DIY-builder like Wix or something and then you actually don't own it. So make sure when you do create your website, it is yours and do it properly. Because it's the only real estate online that's your freehold, that gives you pretty much a free reign to present yourself however you want to be presented. And the reality is, on other platforms, you're competing with other people. On your website, the only person letting you down is either your web developer or you, based on how you're presenting yourself.

Samantha: Yeah, yeah. And funnily enough, I wrote a blog not that long ago on that exact subject. It is so important to have your own website, your own real estate, as you say.

James: Yeah, your freehold. And it's so interesting, more so than ever, people saying: "Oh, do I really need a website?" Yes, you do. That is the short answer and the long answer. Some people watching this might think: "Well, he would say that, you know, websites, that's his industry." But the reality is, you don't own anything else on the internet.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: Simple as that. And from a control point of view, it's the only thing you've got to actually have full control over to represent yourself effectively. Putting SEO to one side for a second. I know that's the point of the vlog. But even if you think: "Okay, post-COVID, I want to grow my business organically. I want to grow through networking, nurturing relationships, you know, through meeting people, and I want to generate more leads through those channels, because ultimately someone will come to me." And all that stuff is great. People buy from people. Ultimately you want to get to that point. A website, social media all that jazz is only a tool anyway, to get to the point of nurturing and building relationships with somebody. But ultimately, even if you're thinking: “I'm not bothered about SEO, I'm not bothered about someone finding me.” Just make sure you do your website properly, because you will leave money on the table. If you meet someone at a networking event, and you think: "Oh, that went really well. And they're really nice. We get on with them", and then you'd follow it up and it goes a bit quiet, things get a bit busy. "I'll come back to you." – you think. And then they go, and then they fall out of the follow-up process. You think: "What happened there?" And 9 times out of 10 it's because of your website, which they will go and look at...

Samantha: Yeah, yeah.

James: And if it doesn't correlate with who they met. So it might have sounded all really positive when you met them. And then they went and looked at your website, and they were like: "Oh, okay, that doesn't tally. Oh, okay, I've got a doubt now. I've sown a seed of doubt." And then the relationship peters out because of that. And unfortunately, a lot of people won't tell you why.

Samantha: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they might not even know the reason why.

James: No, they might not even know why. Sometimes it can be really, really subconscious. They just look at something. And that's the trick of a really good website actually, when you go to something and you think: "Wow, it tells me what I need to know, I can find how to contact that person. That really resonates with me, I'm not quite sure why it resonates with me so well. But it does." That's the sign of a good website. And it's nailing that, so that the user experience is really effective. People can find what they are looking for really easily. It all works nice and fast. It represents that person, but more importantly, it tells you how they can help you and how you can benefit from what they do. And anything less than that will take away from the conversion in the customer sale process.

Samantha: Okay. And how do people... I think one of the things that's really overwhelming for people is how to measure things. How do they know they're doing the right things? How do they know it's really working? What should they be looking at?

James: First of all, you should always have analytics on the back end of your site. So you can see how people are coming through to your website. And quite simply find what works and do more of it. Again, I know that sounds really simple. But if you're spending a load of time on a certain platform to drive traffic to a blog, to a particular page about something that you do, and it's not working, and then something else you're doing that you're spending 50% of your time doing is working really, really well, stop doing that thing and double down on what you're doing over here. So it's just monitoring what's going on.

There's a really good tool called Hotjar, which heat maps sessions on a website. So you can literally see what people are doing. For example, just because you think a button should go over here, doesn't mean that's where people expect to see it. There are certain principles about having a call to action above the fold. What I mean by fold is the scroll bar, right? So you can have like a drop off of 30% of people that don't scroll down, therefore, they never see the button, therefore they never fill out the form, therefore they never make the inquiry. Having those little, subtle differences can make all the difference to monitoring and measuring. To know what's actually happening, what's working. So measure, measure, measure, and measure some more is the gist of it. And be nerdy about it.

There is the old marketing adage, that if you just throw mud at the wall, some of it will stick but you don't know which part of it worked. Well, you do all this advertising, some of it works, don't know which bit. That is an excuse in the digital age. Because in the digital age, you can analyse it to the nth granular degree, and know exactly what's working, and exactly what's not. So the whole, leaflet drop of not sure which ones work, so I'll keep doing all of it because it covers the stuff that works, just isn't relevant with digital marketing. You really can hone in on what works and then do more of it. And then retarget as well, you know, if you're finding that a product is selling really well, follow people around the internet, retarget, use Google to do a retarget marketing because like most marketing, people need to see something 7 to 10 times before they start to engage with it.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: And it's a bit naive, if people think someone's going to land on their website, cold, never heard of them, ring them up and buy something. It's not going to happen. They need to nurture that relationship. And they can nurture it via email, you know, they can capture someone's data so they can follow up. And make sure to position yourself as an expert rather than selling what you do, so that when someone has a problem, they will think: "Ah, I know who can solve that."

Samantha: Yeah.

James: Rather than sell, sell, sell.

Samantha: Oh completely. You see that a lot. It's all about buy now, buy now, buy now, when you need to think about your long-term brand awareness. That's going to have a huge impact on your long-term sales.

James: Yeah, exactly. And by all means, have a "Buy Now" button. If someone's in a shop online, they need to know which button to press to buy your product.

Samantha: Of course.

James: But yeah, it's not about just selling products, unless you're B2C. So there are some exceptions. If someone's trying to buy the cheapest AA batteries, and they don't care where they come from, and you come up cheapest on Google Shopping, then they're like: "Yeah, okay, batteries", you don't need to build a relationship and send them a Christmas card to sell them some batteries cheaper than somebody else on Google. That is a B2C, simple product transaction.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: But when it comes to business to business, you've got to build relationships, people buy from people, and if you try and bypass that and hide behind your computer, it won't be successful.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: People need to know who they're talking to. They want to be able to speak to somebody, you know, they want to be able to get that information. And yeah, I think that answers the question. I do have a habit of waffling a little bit. I'm just... I'm very passionate, I get excited about how I can help.

Samantha: That's really good. It's all useful information coming out, so it's all excellent. You've mentioned a couple of tools earlier. Are there any other tools that'd make people's lives easier? Things that they should be looking at, in terms of looking at and understanding SEO, perhaps even improving it?

James: Thank you for bringing me continually back to SEO because that is the purpose of the vlog. That's very good. So yeah, there is a tool called Longtail Keyword Pro. If you google Longtail Keyword Pro, it's very reasonably priced. And it links in nicely to what I was talking about earlier in relation to long tail keyword research. So if you use Google, you can put in a broad phrase and when you're using Google in it, it brings down some sort of suggestions of what other people have searched for. That's okay, because you know for sure that these are sort of fairly long tail phrases that link off a broad phrase, a seed phrase, and the fact that Google have suggested them means people have searched for it in the past. So that's one way of doing it.

But that's a very simple and less effective way of doing it than using a tool that's designed specifically for long tail keyword research. What Longtail Keyword Pro does is: you put in a seed phrase, and it will dig into Google, and it will give you an analysis of a phrase, or for example, off the back of this... So let's say you were running an e-commerce shop for dog lead or dog collars, okay? If you try to come up Nr.1. for dog collars, you'd have a fight on your hands versus all the other companies that sell dog collars, including the likes of Amazon, you know. I think Jeff Bezos is probably still in space while we're recording this, so I think he's nailed how to do broad searches. So you want to think small to think big. So, what you would do with Longtail Keyword Pro is put in dog collars. It will then scan Google and say: "Okay, here are some specific long tail phrases that people are searching for." So, for example, "red dog collar for golden retriever", right? Very, very specific. Twenty people a month searching for it. Three competitors. Happy days. There is a gem, there is some low-hanging fruit, okay? You then take that list and if you had that product, you'd optimise that product, you'd write a blog about how, you know, Bobby the golden retriever loves his red collar and you'd link in and segue off to that product. So that's what longtail keyword research is about and 70% of traffic that goes to websites from Google are longtail keyword phrases. They're not broad.

The big companies that have big fat budgets go broad because it's easier. It's easier, and quite often the marketing manager’s job in that company is to spend the set budget. So if a company comes along and says: "Oh, we'll charge you 20,000£ a month to get you position one, page one for dog collars." They'll go: "Yeah, great. Now I can have the afternoon off because I've spent the budget." That's how corporates work sometimes, which is crazy. But it's just how they work. So as a small business owner, as a medium... we don't have that luxury, nor would we necessarily want to be that frivolous with a budget. We want to make it work as effectively as possible and squeeze every last penny out of it. So yeah, that's how you'd go about that.

Also, if you are paying for traffic from Facebook Ads or from Google, think reinvestment, think percentage rather than budget. So a lot of people think: "Oh, I've got this amount to spend every month as a budget." Okay, yeah. So, once you've spent that, what do you do? You just stop till next month? Or you could say: "Right, okay, here are the margins on this product. I'm going to really do some laser-targeted marketing, through the compound effect of multiple blogs. Really, really specific phrases. I can do the same thing with paid traffic, the display network and really get highly-targeted people looking at this." The money that's generated from that, I'm going to analyse that, as a product in its own right and say: "Okay, I've made, you know, 500£ profit from that product this month, for example, and I'm going to reinvest 100£ of that. I'm going to reinvest 20% of the revenue that's come in."

Samantha: Yeah.

James: And it grows and it grows, and then six months down the line, perhaps you're making 1000£ a month from that product, because you've reinvested and focused on that product. At that point, if you're spending 20%, you're spending 200£, and you want to be spending 200£, because that means you're getting 800£ profit, not 400£ profit. So just think percentage and think I'd rather have a big fat 80% than a really small 100%.

Samantha: Yes.

James: And think like that, instead of budgets. I get why budgets exist, and they have to exist to bankroll something. Of course they do. But once it's moving, think percentage, not amount. Is that...? Does that make sense?

Samantha: I think that's true in general.

James: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. That's how you scale from an e-commerce point of view.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: Another advice: get the right team around you, play to people's strengths. You know, if your strength is not developing a website, because you're not a web designer, get a web designer. And I'm not saying that... I'm not pitching here, I'm just saying, get a web designer to do it, who’s got a good reputation and knows exactly what they're doing, because it's the time-money equation. If you're spending, you know, X amount of thousands of pounds developing, and it should be thousands of pounds to be done properly. If you're spending X amount of thousands of pounds with your web developer, and it's their time and expertise, in that time that you're not spending DIY-building your website, what could you be doing that more than pays them to do that job for you? And you buy your time back. And you know, you can earn what you need to earn to pay for that website. At the end, you get a better website, more time. It's just a really simple equation. But so many people go down the DIY route, because they're starting out and they don't have a budget. And I get it.

Samantha: Completely. Completely. If you literally don't have the capital, and you can't get the funding...

James: ...you have to start somewhere

:Samantha: ...you have to start somewhere. But I am always inspired by one thing or another in these interviews. As I said, right from the start, because I've got a series of these and one of the first sets of vlogs I did was about starting up a business. And one of the first tips that came out of that interview was: as soon as you can afford... even if you have to build it yourself to start off with, as soon as you can afford it, invest in a proper website.

James: Yeah, absolutely.

Samantha: Invest in a properly designed, properly built...

James: No, you're absolutely right, if you need to start somewhere, start. But the moment that you can reinvest some money, get it done properly. And that's not meant to be a slight at anyone who's done their own thing.

Samantha: No, of course not.

James: And some people have probably done a really good job of building their own website. And that's cool. That's great. But the point is, if somebody came to me and said: “Can you respray my car?” I'd say: "Are you colourblind? Or are you going to look at it? Because if I do it, I don't think you're going to be very happy." Because I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. And you just... my point is bring in the experts in every area of your business. An accountant for example is worth their weight in gold. Literally. Because they will... the right side of the line know how to present your business efficiently. So you obviously pay your taxes, everyone needs to pay their taxes, but you don't pay more than you need to. And it's all done properly and you're ticking every box. And you would spend so much time trying to do that on your own, and never do as good a job because it's not what you do. Yeah, so many people will try and do everything. And then they run around like headless chicken and they can't see the woods for the trees, and then they very sadly give up on having a business.

Samantha: Yes.

James: Because they are trying to do everything. And it's really sad when you can see that someone's got a fire in their belly about what they do, and they've got passion, and the absolute best thing they can do is, just do that. Just focus on that. And for everything else, get someone else to do it. Who's got a passion for the other thing that needs doing?

Samantha: Oh, yeah. The moment I passed on my accounts over to an accountant, all the bookkeeping, everything. That's several hours a month you got back, you know what I mean?

James: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Samantha: And it would be the same with everything.

James: Yeah, it is absolutely the same with everything. Yeah.

Samantha: Would you say...? Just one, really specific point: Google My Business. How important would you say having your website and company details set up on Google My Business is?

James: Now that's a really good question, because about four days ago, I had a review left on Google My Business. I think it was from a competitor. It was a fake account.

Samantha: Oooh.

James: It was a very... it wasn't... well, it wasn't nice. And it was someone... I didn't know the name, they've never done anything else on Google. And they said things in there, like, you know: "I've worked with this person and etc." I'd never heard of him before. I've never worked with them before, so... Google My Business in terms of generating traffic for your website... I would say the two aren't really relevant. I think it has its place for certain types of businesses. For example, if you're a café.

Samantha: Hmm.

James: Same as TripAdvisor really. It's a sort of a necessary evil in some industries. But something I really, really, really dislike about Google My Business, being frank, is that the mechanism to remove a fake review is not there. So there's a big difference between someone being entitled to leave a review, that's genuine, even if it’s not a good review, because you haven't delivered a service. And a competitor leaving a fake review, which is defamation, to try and gain business from you, or whatever nefarious reason there is behind that review. And then not being able to get Google to remove that because they're basically saying: "Well, we can't prove that is a fake person." That's wrong in my opinion.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: I've actually removed my listing entirely from Google My Business.

Samantha: Oh, wow.

James: Because I disagree with that so highly, that I'd rather not be on it than have the risk of that happening again.

Samantha: That's appalling behaviour, whoever did that is... oh...

James: It's absolutely disgraceful, but what annoyed me more was Google.

Samantha: Yeah, they should absolutely have a mechanism for you to dispute it.

James: Yes. And I mean, you can flag a review. You can say, you know, this person is impersonating somebody or this person, you know, I haven't done business with it. But 99% of the time, they'll go: "Well, we can't prove that. The review stays." Now, because of that, and because it's so easy for someone to do it, I would rather not use Google My Business. Period. If they're not going to provide a protection for business owners, then I will just not use it. It's that simple.

Samantha: Gosh. That's terrible.

James: Yeah, it is.

Samantha: But for a cafe or someone like that...?

James: Yeah, it has its place. It has its place.

Samantha: But how do you combat that? If you do need your Google My Business Page. Do you actively ask for Google Reviews, so that you have lots of them? Sorry about that, the dog just burst in there. That's a labrakita by the way, if anyone...

James: Oh, hello. Absolutely. You know, actively ask for Google Reviews, if you have a situation like I had. I mean, I don't really... you know, I wasn't really using Google My Business in particular. It's no biggie for me to remove my listing and that was what I decided to do. But if you need it, because you're running a cafe or you're running a service, where more people use Google My Business to check you out, and you have a situation like that, then reply to that fake review. Reply and simply say, you know: "Thank you for your review, and we can't find a record of your name or what work we did for you. Can you please give us some more information?" Then it will absolutely go quiet. Because you never did business with this somebody, you know? But… and I don't know whether it was… I have no idea… we'll probably never know. And I've moved on already, you know, so…

Samantha: Yeah.

James: But that is my biggest frustration with Google My Business. And I just think that's plain wrong, you know? There's a massive difference between not being able to moderate a genuine review so that anybody considering working with you has a true reflection of your business, good and bad. There's a big difference between that and someone slating you, that you haven't worked with, that's using a fake account, that's trying to hide behind their computer, to have a negative effect on you in your business. And to not have a simple mechanism to go to Google and say: "That is fake. Can you remove it, please?", is wrong. And off the back of that... the stance I've taken is: "Okay, I just won't use it." Because I'm not prepared to have that risk.

Samantha: Yeah, that's fair enough. I shall keep an eye on my reviews.

James: There you go.

Samantha: It's all five stars so far, but...

James: Yeah, absolutely. And so it should be. And so it should be. And what's really interesting about this bit of the conversation, actually Samantha is, it again reinforces the importance of your own real estate. Nobody can do that on my website, because I don't provide them the mechanism to do it. If they did, I would take it off, if it was a fake review. I've lost control there with Google. And yeah, that's not good.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: It's not good for a corporation to be able to dictate whether something that is absolutely provably fake, is removed or not. That's not right.

Samantha: It's not, it's not. They need to do more.

James: Yes.

Samantha: Is there any element of SEO that I haven't asked you about that you think is really important to cover?

James: I think with on-page SEO is making sure, for example, if you've got a specific title, that has come out of your long tail keyword research, that particular piece of content, product, etc, that you have, make sure that those keywords are included in the first paragraph of the copy. Make sure they're there a couple of times in the copy, but don't do keyword stuffing. That's very 90s. And it doesn't work anymore. I'm sure there are some viewers who remember going down to the bottom of a website and highlighting the bottom of it and see a lot of words being in the same colour as the background. Yeah, that stopped working a very long time ago, and it will kill your rankings. Google is not stupid. They're not fair sometimes, going back to what we were talking about a minute ago, but they're not stupid. So yeah, if you've got an image on there, make sure that the file name of the image matches the long tail keyword phrase. Because again, your comment earlier about the engineering company where someone was searching for a part number and an average person wouldn't know to do that. Going back to the dog collar example: "red dog collar for golden retriever". If the picture of the golden retriever with his lovely red dog collar on, has the same filename as the search term, then someone might find your product via Google Images. If they search in Google Images for that phrase. If they then click on the picture, they'll come through to your product. However, if you just take the picture, upload it to your website and you leave whatever file name the camera decided to call it, no one's going to search for "6471.jpg".

Samantha: Yes.

James: Right? So call it the file name and make sure that you hyphenate as well because otherwise Google will read it as one word. So say for example, you named it "red dog collar for dogs”. I've picked a really long example, haven't I? "Red dog collar for golden retriever." If you named that without hyphens as "RedDogCollarForGoldenRetriever", Google would read that as "reddogcollarforgoldenretriever.jpeg". It will read it as a word. If you hyphenate it, they will read it as "Red-Dog-Collar-for-Golden-Retriever.jpeg". So hyphenate between your words, and then Google will see it as a sentence, not a word.

Samantha: That's a very good tip.

James: And then set the Alt tag, with the same phrase. So when someone hovers over it, it's the same phrase. These are just some simple techniques, which if you habitually do them, from an on-page SEO point of view will over time have a massive impact. You know, if you just upload images and simply think: "Okay, well, from what I can see, the page looks great." That isn't necessarily what Google's going to see.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: They'll be reading the meta description. They'll be reading the title. They'll be looking at the filename of the image. And if none of that relates to the focus keyword phrase, you're not going to get ranked very high.

Samantha: Right. That's a really good tip, especially the hyphenating, 'cause I didn't know that.

James: Yeah, it makes a huge difference, because Google will read it as one word, if you call it "RedDog...", they'll go: "reddogcollarforgoldenretriever". And no one's going to search for that, because it's not a word. But if you hyphenate it, they will search for it as "Red Dog Collar for Golden Retriever". And that's... So, if someone then searches for that, and they click on images, it could literally just bring up your picture. If someone clicks on that picture, it will go straight through to that article, straight through to that product, where they can buy said red dog collar from you. So from an e-commerce point of view, that's a very powerful thing to do, because every single image can relate to the product title.

Samantha: Yes, yeah. Especially in some industries I can see that being so useful.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's about having this sort of approach of… you know, some people might think: "Oh, yeah, but no one's going to search for me via an image." They might not, but they definitely won't if you don't use the principle of the search engine.

Samantha: Yeah, I mean, I Google Image search all the time.

James: Yes. Stop judging how other people search. Stop assuming. And this is where Hotjar is really good in terms of a heat map for a website. How you think or want someone to use your website isn't necessarily how they're going to use it. And that will give you a really good indicator of what people are actually doing when visiting your site. Because best will in the world, you could still have no idea, right? What I want someone to do is: when they go onto my website, they do that, they click that button, fill in the form. Any person that visits you… they don't care what you want them to do. They're looking at it from what's in it for me, where's the benefit to me for whatever it is I'm doing on this website, on the big, you know, worldwide web of the internet, that's very noisy. So it's always got to be about them. And yeah, just digressing slightly again. That's exactly what has upset me so much about that Google My Business situation, because it was about Google, not about the business.

Samantha: Yeah. Yeah.

James: And that's a bit worrying, when you have that situation where there's not a mechanism for a business owner to say: "I can absolutely highlight that's fake." And you've got no control over that. That's not good.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: That's not good. And you see it on TripAdvisor as well. You'll get a competitor of a café, who will go to TripAdvisor or even create a fake account, and they'll go and select something and you know, it's just wrong.

There was this thing a few years ago, here where we're based. Our offices... there was a really, really bad, one-star review a few years ago, because someone said they visited these serviced offices and the cafe was really bad. We haven't got a cafe. Yeah? So it is really bad that a business owner can't defend themselves, by just removing something, you know, you shouldn't have to reply.

Samantha: Equally, someone... it was a talk from an SEO expert, who said that you should buy reviews to look good. The look on your face says it all. I disagreed with that immediately, and I see that you do too.

James: If I'd taken a sip of my tea two seconds earlier, that would be all over the screen. No, you should never buy followers, you should never buy reviews. That's the opposite of being authentic. You know, some people might disagree with my approach of killing a listing because they might think: "Oh, yeah, but you could have shown your professionalism by replying and all the rest of it". If it was genuine, I would. But why should I, when something's completely fake?

Samantha: Yeah.

James: So there's different ways of viewing things. And sometimes there's no right way to deal with unfair things. Then different people view things in a different way. But yeah. No, you should never buy a review. That's just so disingenuous.

Samantha: I don't think...

James: Were they called a guru, by any chance? Because normally you hear these things from people that are called gurus.

Samantha: No, they didn't call themselves a guru, thankfully. But yeah, that kind of shocked me that they would say such things, because that can really destroy your reputation.

James: Yeah.

Samantha: I mean, sometimes it's so obvious as well.

James: Yeah, of course it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody reading that thing will go: "That doesn't correlate with, you know, that person." You know, it was interesting, in that situation, I had a lot of people come to my defence actually, proactively, without me even asking them to, in terms of writing other reviews. And I contacted them and said: "Look, I really appreciate it, but I'm shutting it down, because I don't agree with that mechanism, it isn’t fair." And yeah, it's interesting. But anyway, I'll stop waffling about.. Back to reviews. Yeah, paying someone to review… that stuff is just really bad. And it wouldn't surprise me whether that's what’s happened. It wouldn't surprise me whether a competitor paid someone to write that, when you think about it.

Samantha: Could be. It could be that all web developers all over the UK are getting really bad reviews, from some agents.

James: It could, but I mean, from a reputation point of view, how damaging would that be, if that person was ever identified? That would kill their business.

Samantha: Yeah, absolutely. It would. It would. Quite rightly, too.

James: Yes. Yeah. Quite rightly. You're absolutely right. So no, my advice is never ever pay for followers and never ever pay for reviews. Listen to your gut when someone's telling you something, and be wary of anyone that's called a guru, because...

Samantha: Yeah, that is an immediate...

James: Yeah.

Samantha: I'm one of those people that if someone gives themselves a stupid title like that, I'd immediately don't want to have anything to do with them.

James: No, exactly. But yeah, you do have to be careful, because there are people, who are absolute experts in their field online. There are also people who make their money through selling a dream to other people through courses and things, where they literally say: "Come on my 3000£ course, and by the end of it, you'll master this, and you will master that." Just be careful. Because if it's a genuine person, and the course is worth that, and the value... you know, who says it's not? But just be careful. Do your due diligence before you go down that road. Because if they're talking the talk and not walking the walk, chances are they've made all their money, selling the dream to someone else. And that's how they've got their dream, not through actually achieving what they're purporting to be able to provide to somebody else. So just be careful.

Samantha: Yeah, yeah, I agree completely. There is a wide range of experts out there. Most titles aren't protected. I'm a chartered marketer, but anyone could set up and call themselves a marketer.

James: I have the same thing. You know, you get: “What is it, Tuesday? Oh, I'll be a web designer this week.”

Samantha: Yeah. Oh, my word. Yeah. I know so many people that... a lot of them genuinely say: "I'm a web designer. And I use plugins." And then I've also met web developers and within a short amount of time, it doesn't take long for me, because I know...

James: Yes.

Samantha: It didn't take a too long of a conversation. "Oh, so what do you use? What do you...?" And you find out that they're actually... they've just decided they want to do web development, and they don't actually know how to code.

James: Yeah, they don't know anything about anything in relation to... No, I totally agree. And for anyone watching: Plugins are fine. WordPress is... We use WordPress all the time. There's plugins that can do great things. So it's not... I know, you didn't mean a slight on plugin usage, etc.

Samantha: No, but...

James: Where somebody is...

Samantha: If that's all they know how to do...

James: If that's all they know how to do, yeah, and that part isn't that difficult. What's difficult is then making this plugin talk to this plugin and create both functionality and there's a huge difference. And a lot of people will use templates. They have their place going back to our part of the conversation about, you know, if you just need to start somewhere.

Samantha: Yeah, yeah. Completely.

James: Same with certain other DIY builders. There's one beginning with a W as well, you might have heard of it. So they're okay, they've got their place if you're starting out. But if you want something done to a very high standard, and you need to, you know, position yourself and be true from a brand point of view, from a voice point of view, you can't use a template. A template, by definition is shoehorning your message into something.

Samantha: Yeah.

James: You know, you don't get... not that templates existed at that time, but you wouldn't get someone like Picasso saying: "Okay, I'm going to paint this amazing picture. But if you can just do a pencil drawing of the bit I need to colour in first, and then I'll colour it in and create this amazing picture." He had a blank canvas. So a proper, bona fide web designer will use a wireframe, they will use a framework to build... Yes, they'll build a template, but the template will be unique for your website. And you'll then be able to use a visual editor to be able to add content and blogs and things on top of that template that they've built for you. They're not shoehorning your brand, your message, your voice into a fixed template. And there's a big difference. And it's not even that subtle. It is a massive difference.

Samantha: Oh, huge, huge. I mean, I've worked with clients, you know, when they were starting out, and they haven't been able to afford that quite... you know, it is very limiting compared to going to a designer. Take mine. When I started out... I'm lucky. I have a web developer. He's not a freelancer, he works client-side, but I have a web developer, who's my behalf. And so I didn't have to pay for that bit.

James: How convenient.

Samantha: But my designer was amazed. She designed this great thing and she said: "He needs to come back to me, if there's anything that you can't do." She assumed there'd be stuff that you cannot do. But there wasn't.

James: Yeah. Exactly. Because it was from a blank canvas. I had a client, who... well, I still have a client that wanted/needed a very bespoke e-commerce website based on her audience. And she went out to her audience and she did a survey of what they wanted, where they wanted stuff from a usability point of view. As some of her audience is sort of dyslexic, they have, you know, issues trying to read certain things. They need very specific fonts. It was all very, very specific. And the way we worked in the end, I mean, she literally created the look and feel in Illustrator, and she said: "Right, don't care how you do it, because that's what I'm paying for. But when it's on a browser, I need it to look like that."

Samantha: Yeah.

James: "I need the dimensions the same. I need the fonts the same, I need...", you know. And it's then a case of me taking that and starting with a blank canvas and coding, so that we can recreate that into a browser across all devices without changing the look and feel. And you just simply cannot do that with a template.

Samantha: No, no, no. It's really restricting.

James: Yeah, it is. And some people will start off with a template, and then when they want to start adding specific functionality, like a live chat or something like that, they'll go to do that: "Oh, no. Can't do that." And, yeah, it's very frustrating, if you're genuinely trying to help somebody, but they don't want to hear it. And I've learned over the years to just leave the door wide open and just say: "Do what you need to do. I'm here, if you need any advice or whatever."

Samantha: Okay. Great. Thank you for that. There's loads of really useful information in that. Thank you so much.

James: You are very welcome.

Samantha: And do you...? Before you go, do you have anything to plug?

James: Do I have anything to plug? Uhm, not quite yet. For anybody listening, we had a very interesting conversation before this video, but I'm not quite there yet to be honest.

Samantha: Okay. Anything else to plug? Just generally.

James: Uhm, no plug so much, but just a tip, really. In every area of your business, just play to the strengths. Bring in the experts, bring in the right people for every area of your business. It's a false economy to try and do everything yourself and to do things on the cheap. And I understand completely. And I'm saying this genuinely, because I've been there, when you start out and you haven't got a budget and you haven't got any money, and you've got an ambition and a passion and something you're trying to do, it is hard. Unless you can get someone to back you or inject some money to do these things, I get it. But my biggest advice to someone in business, in that situation is, just focus on your passion, and it will fall into place. Network with people, build some customers just from networking. And then over time, when people start paying you money, reinvest it, if you need to do a part-time job to live so that your business doesn't have to pay for stuff, then fine, do that, but just have some goals. I hate the phrase key performance indicators. It's all sort of... but have some goals, have some objectives, and the biggest thing I would leave people with is: Have a purpose. A “Why?”. Why do you want to do this for your business? Why is this your passion? And focus on the why and you'll work out the rest as you go along.

Samantha: Brilliant, brilliant. Well, I will put your links and your contact details in, when I put this out anyway, so people can find you.

James: I don't have a Google My Business Review though, so...

Samantha: I won't put... There will be no Google My Business link in there.

James: Thank you.

Samantha: Brilliant. Thank you very much. And thank you everyone for listening.

James: And thank you for inviting me, Samantha. I really appreciate you. Thank you for your time. It's been really fun.

Samantha: Thank you very much.

James: All right. Take care.

Samantha: You too.

 

If you want more information about SEO from James, call him on 0800 112 3354, or email him at support@wolfproductions.co.uk.

If you need any help with your marketing, call me on 07791 521439 or email me at samantha@labrakita.co.uk

Interviewer: Samantha Tonge, Managing Director, Labrakita Marketing