EP18 6 Website Essentials to attract more Business

Want + leads + clients + sales? We’d love to help – just Contact Us

If you want more from this episode check out the full transcript below:

Kym: Okay. So recording now. So just keep it a little quiet for a minute or so. And I’ll get us started now, Okay. Here we go. Okay, welcome to the Data Marketing Strategy Show. The Marketing Strategy Show is all about getting the right marketing for your business. In the marketing strategy episodes, we pull back the curtain with experts on a specialized topic. And today we’re going to look at one of the biggest topic in marketing websites. Now the most common mistake people make on [inaudible] of rebuilding an existing website. That’s what we’re going to cover today. Because let’s face it, if your website is not set up to be working as it could be, you will be missing out on lead inquiries and ultimately paying cards. And that conversion is really important. So one of the other things that we are going to touch on today, we will call a high performing website or a good website. And today we have a special guest to help us see some of the mistakes we might be making and looking at a new or redesigned website. And his name is Justin Meadows, from Evergreen. Now, Justin’s company doesn’t build websites directly for businesses, he builds them for agencies. And that gives him a unique insight. His business is the business behind the digital agencies that build website. They’ve been our go-to expert for websites for quite a few years now. But because he builds websites for clients’ clients, he could see a lot of good and not so good websites, his agency’s clients need to fix. So, let’s hold on for some real marketing gems with Justin today. Justin, are you there?

Justin: Yeah. Good day, Kym. How are you?

Kym: Very well, indeed. Thanks for joining us on the Marketing Strategy Show.

Justin: No worries. Happy to be here.

Kym: Fantastic. We might kick off a bit about your website and your internet journey, your background I guess. (2.19)

Justin: Sure. So I started about 8 years ago. Initially, I was doing SEO and I started doing  SEO consulting. I’d worked on my own sites a bit and realized that I had something that could help other businesses. But then I quickly found that to fix their– improve their SEO, I needed to fix the websites and I found that the website was actually fixing the websites during the website development was a better business model for me and something that I could scale and help more people. And I come from a small country town so it’s hard for me to get directly in front of clients to help them out. So that’s why I went with this wholesale model where I can help agencies. And they can be getting clients all over the world. And yeah, we build the websites in the background.

Kym: Well, of course, that’s one of the biggest advantage for website today. It allows businesses to compete with larger business. It doesn’t matter where you are.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: That’s of course if you’ve got the right website. [Laughs]. (3.19)

Justin: Yeah. [Laughs].

 

Kym: That’s our topic today isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: So we might jump into I guess, I think everyone knows why having a website is important. But why is having a good website important? I guess, what is a good website in your eyes? (3.35)

Justin: For sure. So yeah, having a website doesn’t just– just having something out there isn’t quite enough these days. People– most businesses realize now that they need to have a website. But having a website that gets you good results is a different beast and things are changing. So you need to have a website that is going to convert well. And there’s a few elements to that I’ll go through in just a moment. But the–  I guess the difference there is some people– it’s easy to get a website up these days. You can easily find someone cheaply and quickly to just throw something up but to get something that is  going to give you a good return on investment and a good result that’s going to help you grow your business, takes a lot more thought and a lot more work. And therefore, it’s something that you can’t just do on the cheap.

Kym: I guess, that’s interesting thing you just talked about then, Justin, good websites, one that converts . But convert can mean different things to different people.

Justin: Absolutely. And for some businesses, they’re not necessarily looking for direct sales or marketing even from a– perhaps, yeah, marketing but different styles. So they might be like for some wholesale businesses, they might have products that they need to have a website to show off their product information but they’re not actually looking to sell the product or even get contact information from the customers. They’re just having it up there as this source of information for their product which might be in stores or there’s a wide variety of different ways that a website can help a business. And it also can do things like cut down the amount of time that your support staff or reception staff are spending on the phone answering questions and that sort of thing. So there’s other ways to see the value that you might get from a website. (5.41)

Kym: That’s last one’s interesting. I’ve paid quite a few companies where the support call actually gets you to log on to the website and they guide you through the website if you like, as opposed to just talking, not taking it in. And then you get to learn all about the website at the same time. A lot of IT companies do that, for example, don’t they in software products.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it can be a great way to just host the information in a way that’s easily accessible by people and to establish trust and authority in a market place. Yeah. So it really– the conversions and the goal and value that a website has varies differently from business to business.

Kym: I guess that’s– they’re probably leads us to what are the keys in creating a good website? So where do you start? Now, we’re also talking about a good website. We’re not talking about one that’s necessarily starting from scratch are we.. I mean re-building a website is just as important isn’t it? Than building a new one. (6.38)

Justin: Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s actually– these days, that’s most of the work that we do is rebuilding existing websites. Most businesses now know that they need to have a website. And also, I will say that when you are just starting out and you’re testing a new idea or new business, it’s probably not so important to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a really good website because you haven’t yet tested your idea or your business model. So it’s probably a good idea to make sure that you’ve got a good business and just have something up that’s cheap and nasty in the short term to do the job. But then once you do know that you’re on to a good business and you’re a bit more established, then it’s worth reinvesting into getting a really good website that’s going to help to grow your business. And so, yeah, I do find that quite a lot of the work we do is rebuilding existing websites and also things have changed over time. Your business will change over time. You might find that your business might pivot a little bit in the way that it’s serving its customers or products or whatever. So it is important to update and keep your website fresh and in sync with where your business is at and also where your market is because at because that’s also obviously changing over time. (7.54)

Kym: Yeah. I’ll come back in a little bit. Just as a little sideline. If there are businesses out there that are stuck and I’m sure there are but just get and going. Would you recommend they just use something like a Wix or a Weebly or something? Do you have any preference for those if you just got to test an idea in a quick website up?

Justin: Yeah. Look, I’m internally yelling at myself when I– [Laughs]

Kym: Yeah, of course.

Justin: — when I recommend something like that because for an established business, I would certainly not recommend that sort of thing.

Justin: But yeah, in terms of just getting something up and getting started. Yes, those sort of things are a good solution. There’s a few things to be aware of though and reasons why you wouldn’t go down that track once you have tested it and you want to move away from that. Sometimes it can be hard to move away from those platforms onto something that you can own. And one reason why you don’t want to stick with those platforms is because that you don’t have control and ownership of your asset. You are just a page on their website. So it’s kind of like having a Facebook page. It’s not an asset that you control Facebook own that page. They control the rules. They can change the rules and they change the rules more often than I change my bins. (9.16)

Justin: Yeah. So it is important to have a website that is yours, your domain that you can post wherever you like and you can control that website.

Kym: Okay. So that’s a really important point. I hadn’t really thought about that. And I tell people all the time with Facebook and Google, etc. Don’t just look at one way to track business because you don’t own that asset, the same with social media platforms but you’re saying it’s the same with things like Wix and Weebly and all those other web hosting companies, if you like, don’t belong as soon as you can give it on your own platform and your own website, I guess. So I guess that leads us to the case of running a good website. I mean I’m a very firm believer in WordPress and so are you I believe.. Let’s talk about that start off with. What is WordPress? (10.09)

Justin: Okay. So WordPress is a website software. And the benefit of it is that it is open source. And so what that means is that no one really owns WordPress. No one owns the WordPress code. You can build a website with WordPress and you can do whatever you like to it and that’s fine. And no one can really tell you that you’ve got to do it this way or no one has– you can own that website. Now, the reason why WordPress has become so popular is because in its’ early days, it was a great login tool. And that’s what initially built ours and that meant that it was really good for search engine optimization and being found in Google. But now it’s become so popular and there’s such a big community around it of people who can develop plugins, tools, themes. There’s finding a WordPress developer is quite easily, finding good ones in our store. But the benefit of that is that it can integrate with anything you really want it to. There’s always going to be integration out there somewhere that can help it do this or that and plugins that can add the functionality. And it’s able to be customized to create exactly what it is that you need for your business.

Kym: Maybe I should try and draw a note because I hear this quite often happen I see people say their website is built in WordPress. But WordPress is and I’ll try to use an analogy– like the English language. If like the one language, English is spoken differently, written differently and a lot of different places could mean lots of different things for people.

Justin: Absolutely. Yeah. WordPress and that’s one of the great things about it. And the reason that it’s been taken up so widely is it’s so flexible and so it can really be adapted to meet the needs of so many different businesses and it’s been used in so many different ways.

Kym: Right. And what about the question that people ask. And I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about this question about security for WordPress because that’s a thing that comes up quite often for people, too, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah. Sure. That is a big one. And I think that the analogy to draw there is that it’s similar in a way to Microsoft in that it’s so popular and so widespread, that if you’re going to make some malware or virus or try and hack into something, you’re going to target WordPress simply because it’s the most popular. And that’s the same sort of thing that happens with Windows for business. (12.35)

Kym: But I guess there is also a lot of security programs written in the same way, right? [Laughs].

Justin: Absolutely. And so yeah, that’s the flipside is that as long as you take the right sort of precautions and you have the security in place, you actually don’t have any issues. The issues come with people who don’t maintain their website properly. Don’t have the security systems in place and then it’s quite easy for them to get hacked because there is a lot out there. And we also manage, host and support the websites that we build and websites that other people built. They bring them to us to just, to look after them. And we’ve never had an issue with any website that’s on our support and hosting. But I’ve had a number of clients who we’ve built a website for them and then they’ve gone, “Oh, no. Look I don’t want to host with you. I’m going to go somewhere else” or whatever. and then they come back to us and say, “Oh no, it’s been hacked.” And that’s because it hasn’t been kept up to date and they didn’t have those security measures in place. And so it is quite easy to be a security threat, I guess, well have security holes in it. But if you look after it well, there’s no problem. (13.43)

Kym: But I think that’s a basic tenant of people who build e-commerce sites not in WordPress who have had the same problem. It’s not about the platform, necessarily it’s about having the right security in place. That’s probably a whole different topic is that security. [Laughs]

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kym: But let’s jump in now in our– yeah, WordPress is what we’re going to talk about. Let’s jump in to the keys to creating a good website. So what are the keys you think to creating a good website, Where do you start?

Justin: Sure. So the very first thing is to make sure that the focus is on the customer. And this is a problem I see quite common. A lot of people when they’re thinking about their website, they’re thinking of it as they’re putting up information about themselves. And so that’s the kind of mindset they have when they’re writing all the content and they’re thinking about what or what are we putting on this website, about what do we do. And really you need to flip that perspective to how does this help the customer. What does the customer want?. What does the customer need to see in order to realize, “Oh yeah, this is the place that I need to be. This is the business I want to work with. What’s the next step?” So you’ve really got to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Think about their journey. Think about the message from their point of view. And actually that sort of leads into the next thing. And I think that it’s– the other thing that’s important is having one core message and making that very clear and making it benefit driven. So it’s got to be–one thing I’ll– this is a bit of a side topic. But a popular thing, a few years ago, was having image sliders on the website and that’s still popular. But one of the reasons that that has come out of fashion is because people have realized that it doesn’t quite work. And there’s several reasons for that. But the main thing is that it tries– you’re trying to put too many messages into the one place. When a person lands on your website for the first time, you have just a few seconds of this first impression and a lot of the times if you don’t hit the mark on that first impression, people will simply hit back and go back to Google and keep searching or go back to whatever they were doing. They were, “Oh, no. This is not for me.” And yeah, people are impatient on the Internet. They have a short attention span. And so you need to get that core message across quickly and clearly. And so you want to have no distractions on the top of your home page. You want to have a message that speaks exactly to the problem that you solve for that customer and the benefits that you can bring to them. And so yes, so that is partially your marketing message but it’s also how you lay out that website to deliver that message with imagery and with your text as well. (16.20)

Kym: So that one core message per page, basically?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The home page is the most important but on every other page you want to have that as well. You want to make it very clear and immediately obvious who you serve, what you have to offer them and yeah, whether– so they can quickly decide if it’s for them or not.

Kym: So I guess it also means from that, from marketing and analytics perspective, we need to go and have a look at things, get like  people [inaudible] and see what pages people are going to and whether they’re leaving. Is that right? (16.54)

Justin: Yeah. Absolutely. But I think the step before that is just to make sure that you understand your market very clearly. You’ve got to get clear on who your core target market is. Not just– a lot of people, their instinct is to say, “Yeah, we serve everyone who has a car.” You’ve got to think about who is the person who you want to have walking in the door every single day and you’d love to have more of them to be there, hundreds of them. You think about that one person that you want to get more and more of. And when you think about what do they need to see, what are their pain points, what’s their problem. And quite often as well, businesses will have a lot of different services that they offer and that they can do. And they try and cram in a little bit of everything and try to show that they can do all your needs. We service everything. But you really want to narrow down what is the core part of your business, that’s most important. And so you want to match up that core target market with the core problem that you solve and the solution that you have and the benefit that gives that core market.

Kym: And of course, you can achieve that by chunking it down. Say a legal firm, for example has individual legal services like family law and etc. or they might have commercial services keeping  that– the chapping of by one. The visual guy who you business go there. You got to put all the call services on the front page

Justin: Exactly. And quite often, a legal firm will have one service which is their sweet spot. And so you just need to identify which is your sweet spot and then highlight that on the main parts of your website and you can still put the other things in there but you want to make that the focus.

Kym: Yeah. And that makes really good sense. So whatever that main action is and that user experience. So what’s next then?

Justin: And then the core message and then the next thing is to have one primary goal. So one thing that you want them to do next. So what’s the next main action for them to take.
And again this is one thing where a lot of– a common mistake is to try and do too many things. You want them to contact you. You want them to go to your Facebook page. You want them to sign up for this free thing. And you want them to book. You’re trying to do six different things all on the home page and they’re all fighting for attention. It’s important to identify which is the sweet spot. What’s the main thing that you really want them to do and you highlight that. You make that front and center and you stick that at the top of the website, down the bottom of the website. And you have it standing out from everything else and you can still put in your other calls to action and your other important parts of your business or what they could possibly do next. But you want to have identified what that core primary next step is and highlight that throughout the website.

Kym: Okay. So we’ve got our target market. We’ve identified what our core promise is and what’s next? (19.57)

Justin: So the other thing is make sure your website loads fast. That’s something that– yeah, it’s become more and more important recently, especially because I think it was either earlier this year or like late last year, Google announced that they are now using the speed of the website as a ranking factor. So if you have a slow website, you’re not going to rank as high in Google. And if the other thing that affects is, if you’re doing Google Adwords campaigns, they actually give you a penalty on your quality score. So if your website loads slowly, you’ll get a lower quality score and that means that you need to pay more per click for your ads. So it’s going to be costing you more and getting– you’re going to get less traffic. And the reason for that is that Google knows that slow websites convert less. They know that it’s a bad customer experience to have a website that’s loading slow. So they don’t want to send people from Google to slow websites because they’re all about giving people what they want quickly and they know that that gets a good result. So yeah, it’s important to make sure that you have a fast loading website. (21.07)

Kym: Okay. So what else we’re going to– any other keys regarding the website?

Justin: Yeah. The other thing is it’s a bit more obvious now. But make sure you’re mobile responsive that people really are using phones and small devices more and more. So you want to make sure that you have a good experience on the phone, on the tablet, on the desktop, on the large desktop, on the laptop. You want to make sure you cover all bases with that.

Kym: Yeah. And that’s really important. There’s nothing worse than– yeah, you’re looking at a website on a mobile phone and you’re trying to scroll across to see the rest of the page, right? And what do you do? It becomes too hard and you just leave. But I guess the more you leap very quickly too, the more Google knows people leaving and you get ranked downward and downward. It’s actually cyclical, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Kym: You’re not just looking at your analytics. Google is looking at your analytics and well, seeing how well people engage with it. And how long they stay on the site, how many pages they visit. And all those are indications to Google. This is not a bad website, let’s rank it higher. This is rubbish website, let’s rank it lower.

Justin: Exactly. Yeah.

Kym: So then, are they the main keys you think for building a good website? (22.16)

Justin: The final thing would be building trust. So I think that this is something that is really important on any website. People are still– still have hesitations, rightly so, when it comes to handing over money on the internet. You want to make sure that you trust the person that you’re doing business with, that you’re handing over money to. So trust is still a very important factor when it comes to your website. And so yes, so there’s some things to think about there. Things like having testimonials and case studies and proof, social proof or a proof of concept, your proof of your product. Examples of where you’ve appeared in other places to sort of verify that you’re legitimate, I guess. And–.

Kym: News articles yeah.

Justin: Yeah. All those kind of things. But it’s really important and it does get overlooked sometimes with a lot of websites that I see, where they, yeah they just start– I think some people have a hesitation to talk about themselves in that way and sort of don’t feel like they should prove– have to prove themselves. But it really does make a difference with selling things online or even getting people to hand over their email address. People are protective of that these days and so you want to make sure that you’re proving that you’re legitimate and that you’re not going to spam them or that sort of thing.

Kym: Well, you’re right. I mean and that about page is a really critical page doing that. I see that so often. It becomes like a CV if you want to call it that. But when I look at website analytics and just some professional services firms in particular that about page is often the second most visited page. (24.00)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kym: So having those testimonials on that page, not just a separate testimonial page. And that’s–

Justin: Yeah. I find that’s good to sort of sprinkle it throughout the website as well.

Kym: Yeah. Yeah. Just have another quote marks around it. In those times when people taking action on the contact page or that other page is really important and re-enforced that because no one likes to make the wrong decision do they?

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: Oh, If I’ve gone what have I done? [Laughs]

Justin: I find that in the footer of a website is a good place to put some of these kind of trust elements because at the top, you want to– you don’t want to clutter the top with these kind of things because first you want to just establish that you have the solution for them and what it is, that you’re the right person for them. And then once they go, “Yeah, this looks like the sort of thing that I’m after.” Then the next thought is are these guys legit. And so yeah, so it’s sort of the first you want to have that core message at the top then down the bottom, in the footer so that’s on every page. You have those sort of things that build that trust and credentials.

Kym: Okay. So what’s 3 simple tips you would give to someone who is about to embark on a website building or rebuilding? (25.03)

Justin: Yeah. So I think the first step, like I’ve already I guess, gone over this a few times now but simplify. You want to trim back all the distractions and all the things and get really down to the core. What is the main thing that– if your website only had this one thing, would it still give you the result. You want to boil it down to that and then make sure that’s uncluttered and undistracted and that sort of thing. So simplifying as much as possible, always gets a better result than when you try to add in too much.

Kym: Again, so what would the next tip be?

Justin: So the other tip would be, don’t D.I.Y. Don’t try and do it yourself. As we’ve already talked about, doing it yourself at the start when you’re just testing things or if you just throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. That’s probably okay. But if you’ve got a serious business. You’re established, you really shouldn’t be thinking around in the website yourself. You’ve got more important things to focus your time on and even your staff’s time on. If they’re not website developers, they shouldn’t be playing around with that. I’m sure they have more valuable things to be spending their time on, that are going to help you grow your business in other ways, it’s better to outsource that sort of– those sort of jobs to technical experts, people who know what they’re doing when it comes to websites that can get you a better result with less hassles and things on your part. (26.32)

Kym: Of course, that being said though, it should be a website with a platform like WordPress. It actually allows you to update content regularly yourself though. Is that right?

Justin: Yeah. And that’s true. WordPress is good because it is user friendly. However– and for some things if you’re doing a lot of content writing, for example, you might find it’s easier to just upload that yourself. But also you might find that you are spending an hour or so just adjusting things here and there and trying to get images to look right, move things around. That’s really not the best use of your time. So it is better for you to find someone who can give you this– we offer a support service and there’s others as well that do this where you have that sort of unlimited support for those kind of small changes. So if you’re doing a blog post every week, you just do the writing and then handed over to someone else and they take care of it from there.

Kym: And they click the links and do a lot of stuff.

Justin: They do the tech parts.

Kym: Yeah, yeah. They should be using a web dev. So definitely don’t– it’s important to remember that people look at a website as an expense. But to me it’s like your shopfront these days, everyone knows that seventy or eighty percent of people know you before they contact you and that’s because they look at you online. That’s your window to the world if you want to call it that. So if you cheapen that by doing it yourself, that’s the perception people have of your business.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. It’s your shopfront, it’s your 24-hour sales man. It’s really one of the most important marketing assets for your business. So you really want to be treat it as such not as some expense. (28.10)

Kym: And ultimately, I think you touched on this point before, something to think about. No matter, whether you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, social platforms or other distribution points you have, the ultimate aim is to get people back to your website because that’s the asset that you own, these other people can change the pricing there or whatever, we’ve seen that happen a lot with Google Adwords and even Facebook, they have started to get very expensive these days. So you need to have a good website that you own that you can engage with people, then email and we’ll reach out and get them back to your website, to buy and find more information.

Justin: Yeah. It’s a very important asset to have. And you want to be bringing people onto your platform and to capture their information there and really earn that relationship rather than having it built on someone else’s platform where they can just change rules and take– pull the rug out from under you. And also the other thing to remember is that your website is actually a saleable asset and part of your business. So in terms of the– when you go to sell your business, the website is part of that and it brings a lot of value. And if you have a website that is bringing in a lot of your business and leads and creating it, generating a lot of your profit, then that’s really an important part of your overall business value. (29.36)

Kym: Well, that’s an interesting point you raised, Justin. We had an interview on the marketing strategy here with Craig West from Succession Plus probably about three or four episodes ago now, I’ll put the link in the show notes. One of the things Craig was saying, a lot of buyers, now when they buy a business. They’ve actually asked him for the website analytics. They want to look at how well the website before to them that is a key factor in how much they’re going to pay for it because it is so important these days, website and your CRM system.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: So we’ve got simplicity, don’t D.I.Y. What’s number three? (30.10)

Justin: Number three is don’t go for cheap. And again, I’ve already touched on these topics a bit, I guess. But yeah, I think that it’s important to really value your website as an asset and don’t try and take shortcuts. You can always find someone to do it really cheap. But whether or not they’re going to do a good job is another story. So if you go with someone cheap, they’re probably not going to help you with that design that’s going to be customer focused and simplified and high converting and those sort of things. And if you go for a cheap development, cheap build, then they’re probably going to take shortcuts and use themes that are maybe not supported and fiddle around with source code that they shouldn’t touch. So that when there’s a future update, there might be security holes or things that break and yeah, you can just– you can run into a lot of problems when you start taking shortcuts and doing things on the cheap. It might work in the short term. But six months down the track, you might find yourself spending more to fix problems that you could have avoided by just paying properly for the website at the start.

Kym: Yeah. I’m sure you hear some horror stories. I certainly have. I’ve seen people say, “Look, I really like this website.” So the cheap developer either locally or overseas. It just copied the code from a competitors website and pasted it. And the links are going back to the competitors website and they don’t even know it. That’s the worst one I’ve seen. But I’ve seen others where they build the website. You can’t make any changes, so you can’t go in and update content because it’s just so poorly done or you can’t optimize it properly for search engines. It’s so slow. There’s all sorts of things, isn’t it? (31.52)

Justin: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen all sorts and we do– we’ve done quite a lot of jobs where people have come to us going, look “Can you please just help me fix this website? It’s got all these problems or– we do quite a lot of websites where we are rebuilding because there is– they might have liked the look of their website and quite often it’s hard to know if you’re not a developer how it really has been built under the hood and what problems you might encounter until they happen.

Kym: I think that’s a really important point. I often think about websites in three different components. And we’ve discussed this a bit before our interview today. There’s this strategy part of it which is this part that you’ve focused on, which is I think really important getting that understanding of the customer and what they want do, what their journey is and what you want them to do on the website. Second part that is design making it look good. The third part is development. I find very often, if you do it on the cheap, you would have compromised on—you’ve certainly compromised on strategy. But you’ve certainly compromised either design or development—to either get a developer to do it on the cheap and it looks awful. Like a designer who builds a well but slow to load because it’s not coded well. (33.07)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it really is important, too. I think that separation is quite good.

Kym: Yeah. I think– think about that people should think about that when they’re talking to a website supplier. Ask about what strategy they offer. Ask about what design they do and ask about what development they do. And there are probably some good tools out there, too, Justin, aren’t there? They evaluate mobile responsiveness and sites speed etc.

Justin: Yeah, yeah. There are some good tools for– well, yeah, but for different components of it. But yeah for site speed and for mobile responsiveness, Google has some good free tools that you can just find. But there are some out there. And the other thing is that you can quite often, if you’re not sure, you can take it to someone else. We do offer this service as well where we can do an audit of the people’s page speed and we can– yeah, so you can always get your websites audited by another developer or something like that just to make sure that there’s no issues with it. (34.07)

Kym: Yep 100% and its always a good idea, I mean I think it’s a bit like getting a doctor’s second opinion, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: [Laughing]. We’ve got– so much we’ve covered and so much more we’ve got to cover. So what I might do, Justin, is get you back again, if you’re– again, talk about some of those other issues like security, etc. But I’m might just backtrack and go through if I can what basically what those keys are to creating a good website there, just to recap on those. So you just walk me through those keys and go–

Justin: Yeah, sure. So the main keys we’re making sure that it’s customer focused, stick to one core message and have one primary call to action.

Kym: One CTA? Yeah?

Justin: Yeah. Make sure it loads fast. It’s mobile responsive and build trust. (34.55)

Kym: And then trust. So that’s six things. They’re customer focused, one core message, one call to action, loads fast, mobile repsonsive and it builds trust. So they are the six keys and the three I guess simple tips you offered there were, if I remember right, make sure it’s simplified.

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: Don’t do D.I.Y. And don’t go for cheap because it’s a short term investment, basically, isn’t it? If we do that.

Justin: Absolutely. You get what you pay for. (35.23)

Kym: So one of the other things I think you touched on during the call , we touched on before is, you know the service or even if you don’t develop the website, you can host the website for them or getting the hosting, have that in a different conversation because that affects speed even a whole variety of things and access and security. You can host websites but all those small updates, it did become a pain and are difficult. You can do some of those small updates. So instead of paying 20 dollars or 30 dollars or 40 dollars these days for cheap hosting, where you get nothing. A little bit more dollars and you get a lot done for you, basically. Is that right? (36.03)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. We have a service where it makes it– basically, we take care of all the websites hassles for you. We make sure you’ve got really fast hosting. We have our own hosting solution and server admins. We look after the hosting side of things. We make sure that your website is secure and kept up to date. We run maintenance checks on it monthly and yeah, constantly monitor it to make sure that nothing is going wrong. And we also take the stress out of making changes to your website and making sure that your website is current and up to date with your business and that you make it easy to publish content and that sort of thing by having those unlimited small changes just taken care of in one easy monthly retainer.

Kym: Look, I know for most of my clients and personally I think it’s a fantastic service and I think like two or three years ago, I was wishing someone had that service and I think you and I spoke about this when we first talked ages ago, how difficult it was for people who did this. So it’s a fantastic thing, you’ve got that service and all. Put some links in there, people check them out. It’s worthwhile looking at. Check it out, if it’s right for you by all means go ahead and Evergreen would certainly look after you. I think the whole issue of site speed, hosting and security is another topic that I’d love to cover because there is so much to talk about with that. If you are going to come back, I’d love to have you back and talk a bit more about that and on another episode. (37.32)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be more than happy to. There certainly is a lot to unpack on those topics.

Kym: And I think it’s something to think about, too, that you need to be asking the right questions. So maybe the next topic should be the right questions to ask a web developer and being one yourself, you’ve probably got a good idea of that as well because it is confusing to people. They’ll meet someone at the local networking group or Google it or ask their mate. They might not be asking the right questions and there’s different questions depending on what you want to do, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: But I think the basic thing is you follow those six key areas that you spoke about and then have those three tips in mind. You’ll be well on the way, we’ll make sure we put all of those in the show notes. Justin, thank you again. Oh and if people want to connect with you are you on Linkedin or just go to Evergreen hosting or we’ll just put in the show notes,

Justin: Yeah. We might as well put a link in the show notes, but they can find me on LinkedIn as well. Justin Meadows, yeah. (38.34)

Kym: Fantastic, mate. And I really appreciate that. Then that’s some excellent marketing jewels I think what to look for via website. So we just make sure we take note of those and take some action with them more importantly. Justin, thanks again, mate. Look forward to seeing you and we’ll tee up that second episode and talk about those other areas.

Justin: No problem. Thanks for having me.

Kym: Thanks mate. Cheers. Bye bye.

Justin: Cheers.

Kym: Okay. So recording now. So just keep it a little quiet for a minute or so. And I’ll get us started now, Okay. Here we go. Okay, welcome to the Data Marketing Strategy Show. The Marketing Strategy Show is all about getting the right marketing for your business. In the marketing strategy episodes, we pull back the curtain with experts on a specialized topic. And today we’re going to look at one of the biggest topic in marketing websites. Now the most common mistake people make on [inaudible] of rebuilding an existing website. That’s what we’re going to cover today. Because let’s face it, if your website is not set up to be working as it could be, you will be missing out on lead inquiries and ultimately paying cards. And that conversion is really important. So one of the other things that we are going to touch on today, we will call a high performing website or a good website. And today we have a special guest to help us see some of the mistakes we might be making and looking at a new or redesigned website. And his name is Justin Meadows, from Evergreen. Now, Justin’s company doesn’t build websites directly for businesses, he builds them for agencies. And that gives him a unique insight. His business is the business behind the digital agencies that build website. They’ve been our go-to expert for websites for quite a few years now. But because he builds websites for clients’ clients, he could see a lot of good and not so good websites, his agency’s clients need to fix. So, let’s hold on for some real marketing gems with Justin today. Justin, are you there?

Justin: Yeah. Good day, Kim. How are you?

Kym: Very well, indeed. Thanks for joining us on the Marketing Strategy Show.

Justin: No worries. Happy to be here.

Kym: Fantastic. We might kick off a bit about your website and your internet journey, your background I guess. (2.19)

Justin: Sure. So I started about 8 years ago. Initially, I was doing SEO and I started doing  SEO consulting. I’d worked on my own sites a bit and realized that I had something that could help other businesses. But then I quickly found that to fix their– improve their SEO, I needed to fix the websites and I found that the website was actually fixing the websites during the website development was a better business model for me and something that I could scale and help more people. And I come from a small country town so it’s hard for me to get directly in front of clients to help them out. So that’s why I went with this wholesale model where I can help agencies. And they can be getting clients all over the world. And yeah, we build the websites in the background.

Kym: Well, of course, that’s one of the biggest advantage for website today. It allows businesses to compete with larger business. It doesn’t matter where you are.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: That’s of course if you’ve got the right website. [Laughs]. (3.19)

Justin: Yeah. [Laughs].

 

Kym: That’s our topic today isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: So we might jump into I guess, I think everyone knows why having a website is important. But why is having a good website important? I guess, what is a good website in your eyes? (3.35)

Justin: For sure. So yeah, having a website doesn’t just– just having something out there isn’t quite enough these days. People– most businesses realize now that they need to have a website. But having a website that gets you good results is a different beast and things are changing. So you need to have a website that is going to convert well. And there’s a few elements to that I’ll go through in just a moment. But the–  I guess the difference there is some people– it’s easy to get a website up these days. You can easily find someone cheaply and quickly to just throw something up but to get something that is  going to give you a good return on investment and a good result that’s going to help you grow your business, takes a lot more thought and a lot more work. And therefore, it’s something that you can’t just do on the cheap.

Kym: I guess, that’s interesting thing you just talked about then, Justin, good websites, one that converts . But convert can mean different things to different people.

Justin: Absolutely. And for some businesses, they’re not necessarily looking for direct sales or marketing even from a– perhaps, yeah, marketing but different styles. So they might be like for some wholesale businesses, they might have products that they need to have a website to show off their product information but they’re not actually looking to sell the product or even get contact information from the customers. They’re just having it up there as this source of information for their product which might be in stores or there’s a wide variety of different ways that a website can help a business. And it also can do things like cut down the amount of time that your support staff or reception staff are spending on the phone answering questions and that sort of thing. So there’s other ways to see the value that you might get from a website. (5.41)

Kym: That’s last one’s interesting. I’ve paid quite a few companies where the support call actually gets you to log on to the website and they guide you through the website if you like, as opposed to just talking, not taking it in. And then you get to learn all about the website at the same time. A lot of IT companies do that, for example, don’t they in software products.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it can be a great way to just host the information in a way that’s easily accessible by people and to establish trust and authority in a market place. Yeah. So it really– the conversions and the goal and value that a website has varies differently from business to business.

Kym: I guess that’s– they’re probably leads us to what are the keys in creating a good website? So where do you start? Now, we’re also talking about a good website. We’re not talking about one that’s necessarily starting from scratch are we.. I mean re-building a website is just as important isn’t it? Than building a new one. (6.38)

Justin: Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s actually– these days, that’s most of the work that we do is rebuilding existing websites. Most businesses now know that they need to have a website. And also, I will say that when you are just starting out and you’re testing a new idea or new business, it’s probably not so important to go out and spend thousands of dollars on a really good website because you haven’t yet tested your idea or your business model. So it’s probably a good idea to make sure that you’ve got a good business and just have something up that’s cheap and nasty in the short term to do the job. But then once you do know that you’re on to a good business and you’re a bit more established, then it’s worth reinvesting into getting a really good website that’s going to help to grow your business. And so, yeah, I do find that quite a lot of the work we do is rebuilding existing websites and also things have changed over time. Your business will change over time. You might find that your business might pivot a little bit in the way that it’s serving its customers or products or whatever. So it is important to update and keep your website fresh and in sync with where your business is at and also where your market is because at because that’s also obviously changing over time. (7.54)

Kym: Yeah. I’ll come back in a little bit. Just as a little sideline. If there are businesses out there that are stuck and I’m sure there are but just get and going. Would you recommend they just use something like a Wix or a Weebly or something? Do you have any preference for those if you just got to test an idea in a quick website up?

Justin: Yeah. Look, I’m internally yelling at myself when I– [Laughs]

Kym: Yeah, of course.

Justin: — when I recommend something like that because for an established business, I would certainly not recommend that sort of thing.

Justin: But yeah, in terms of just getting something up and getting started. Yes, those sort of things are a good solution. There’s a few things to be aware of though and reasons why you wouldn’t go down that track once you have tested it and you want to move away from that. Sometimes it can be hard to move away from those platforms onto something that you can own. And one reason why you don’t want to stick with those platforms is because that you don’t have control and ownership of your asset. You are just a page on their website. So it’s kind of like having a Facebook page. It’s not an asset that you control Facebook own that page. They control the rules. They can change the rules and they change the rules more often than I change my bins. (9.16)

Justin: Yeah. So it is important to have a website that is yours, your domain that you can post wherever you like and you can control that website.

Kym: Okay. So that’s a really important point. I hadn’t really thought about that. And I tell people all the time with Facebook and Google, etc. Don’t just look at one way to track business because you don’t own that asset, the same with social media platforms but you’re saying it’s the same with things like Wix and Weebly and all those other web hosting companies, if you like, don’t belong as soon as you can give it on your own platform and your own website, I guess. So I guess that leads us to the case of running a good website. I mean I’m a very firm believer in WordPress and so are you I believe.. Let’s talk about that start off with. What is WordPress? (10.09)

Justin: Okay. So WordPress is a website software. And the benefit of it is that it is open source. And so what that means is that no one really owns WordPress. No one owns the WordPress code. You can build a website with WordPress and you can do whatever you like to it and that’s fine. And no one can really tell you that you’ve got to do it this way or no one has– you can own that website. Now, the reason why WordPress has become so popular is because in its’ early days, it was a great login tool. And that’s what initially built ours and that meant that it was really good for search engine optimization and being found in Google. But now it’s become so popular and there’s such a big community around it of people who can develop plugins, tools, themes. There’s finding a WordPress developer is quite easily, finding good ones in our store. But the benefit of that is that it can integrate with anything you really want it to. There’s always going to be integration out there somewhere that can help it do this or that and plugins that can add the functionality. And it’s able to be customized to create exactly what it is that you need for your business.

Kym: Maybe I should try and draw a note because I hear this quite often happen I see people say their website is built in WordPress. But WordPress is and I’ll try to use an analogy– like the English language. If like the one language, English is spoken differently, written differently and a lot of different places could mean lots of different things for people.

Justin: Absolutely. Yeah. WordPress and that’s one of the great things about it. And the reason that it’s been taken up so widely is it’s so flexible and so it can really be adapted to meet the needs of so many different businesses and it’s been used in so many different ways.

Kym: Right. And what about the question that people ask. And I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about this question about security for WordPress because that’s a thing that comes up quite often for people, too, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah. Sure. That is a big one. And I think that the analogy to draw there is that it’s similar in a way to Microsoft in that it’s so popular and so widespread, that if you’re going to make some malware or virus or try and hack into something, you’re going to target WordPress simply because it’s the most popular. And that’s the same sort of thing that happens with Windows for business. (12.35)

Kym: But I guess there is also a lot of security programs written in the same way, right? [Laughs].

Justin: Absolutely. And so yeah, that’s the flipside is that as long as you take the right sort of precautions and you have the security in place, you actually don’t have any issues. The issues come with people who don’t maintain their website properly. Don’t have the security systems in place and then it’s quite easy for them to get hacked because there is a lot out there. And we also manage, host and support the websites that we build and websites that other people built. They bring them to us to just, to look after them. And we’ve never had an issue with any website that’s on our support and hosting. But I’ve had a number of clients who we’ve built a website for them and then they’ve gone, “Oh, no. Look I don’t want to host with you. I’m going to go somewhere else” or whatever. and then they come back to us and say, “Oh no, it’s been hacked.” And that’s because it hasn’t been kept up to date and they didn’t have those security measures in place. And so it is quite easy to be a security threat, I guess, well have security holes in it. But if you look after it well, there’s no problem. (13.43)

Kym: But I think that’s a basic tenant of people who build e-commerce sites not in WordPress who have had the same problem. It’s not about the platform, necessarily it’s about having the right security in place. That’s probably a whole different topic is that security. [Laughs]

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kym: But let’s jump in now in our– yeah, WordPress is what we’re going to talk about. Let’s jump in to the keys to creating a good website. So what are the keys you think to creating a good website, Where do you start?

Justin: Sure. So the very first thing is to make sure that the focus is on the customer. And this is a problem I see quite common. A lot of people when they’re thinking about their website, they’re thinking of it as they’re putting up information about themselves. And so that’s the kind of mindset they have when they’re writing all the content and they’re thinking about what or what are we putting on this website, about what do we do. And really you need to flip that perspective to how does this help the customer. What does the customer want?. What does the customer need to see in order to realize, “Oh yeah, this is the place that I need to be. This is the business I want to work with. What’s the next step?” So you’ve really got to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Think about their journey. Think about the message from their point of view. And actually that sort of leads into the next thing. And I think that it’s– the other thing that’s important is having one core message and making that very clear and making it benefit driven. So it’s got to be–one thing I’ll– this is a bit of a side topic. But a popular thing, a few years ago, was having image sliders on the website and that’s still popular. But one of the reasons that that has come out of fashion is because people have realized that it doesn’t quite work. And there’s several reasons for that. But the main thing is that it tries– you’re trying to put too many messages into the one place. When a person lands on your website for the first time, you have just a few seconds of this first impression and a lot of the times if you don’t hit the mark on that first impression, people will simply hit back and go back to Google and keep searching or go back to whatever they were doing. They were, “Oh, no. This is not for me.” And yeah, people are impatient on the Internet. They have a short attention span. And so you need to get that core message across quickly and clearly. And so you want to have no distractions on the top of your home page. You want to have a message that speaks exactly to the problem that you solve for that customer and the benefits that you can bring to them. And so yes, so that is partially your marketing message but it’s also how you lay out that website to deliver that message with imagery and with your text as well. (16.20)

Kym: So that one core message per page, basically?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The home page is the most important but on every other page you want to have that as well. You want to make it very clear and immediately obvious who you serve, what you have to offer them and yeah, whether– so they can quickly decide if it’s for them or not.

Kym: So I guess it also means from that, from marketing and analytics perspective, we need to go and have a look at things, get like  people [inaudible] and see what pages people are going to and whether they’re leaving. Is that right? (16.54)

Justin: Yeah. Absolutely. But I think the step before that is just to make sure that you understand your market very clearly. You’ve got to get clear on who your core target market is. Not just– a lot of people, their instinct is to say, “Yeah, we serve everyone who has a car.” You’ve got to think about who is the person who you want to have walking in the door every single day and you’d love to have more of them to be there, hundreds of them. You think about that one person that you want to get more and more of. And when you think about what do they need to see, what are their pain points, what’s their problem. And quite often as well, businesses will have a lot of different services that they offer and that they can do. And they try and cram in a little bit of everything and try to show that they can do all your needs. We service everything. But you really want to narrow down what is the core part of your business, that’s most important. And so you want to match up that core target market with the core problem that you solve and the solution that you have and the benefit that gives that core market.

Kym: And of course, you can achieve that by chunking it down. Say a legal firm, for example has individual legal services like family law and etc. or they might have commercial services keeping  that– the chapping of by one. The visual guy who you business go there. You got to put all the call services on the front page

Justin: Exactly. And quite often, a legal firm will have one service which is their sweet spot. And so you just need to identify which is your sweet spot and then highlight that on the main parts of your website and you can still put the other things in there but you want to make that the focus.

Kym: Yeah. And that makes really good sense. So whatever that main action is and that user experience. So what’s next then?

Justin: And then the core message and then the next thing is to have one primary goal. So one thing that you want them to do next. So what’s the next main action for them to take.
And again this is one thing where a lot of– a common mistake is to try and do too many things. You want them to contact you. You want them to go to your Facebook page. You want them to sign up for this free thing. And you want them to book. You’re trying to do six different things all on the home page and they’re all fighting for attention. It’s important to identify which is the sweet spot. What’s the main thing that you really want them to do and you highlight that. You make that front and center and you stick that at the top of the website, down the bottom of the website. And you have it standing out from everything else and you can still put in your other calls to action and your other important parts of your business or what they could possibly do next. But you want to have identified what that core primary next step is and highlight that throughout the website.

Kym: Okay. So we’ve got our target market. We’ve identified what our core promise is and what’s next? (19.57)

Justin: So the other thing is make sure your website loads fast. That’s something that– yeah, it’s become more and more important recently, especially because I think it was either earlier this year or like late last year, Google announced that they are now using the speed of the website as a ranking factor. So if you have a slow website, you’re not going to rank as high in Google. And if the other thing that affects is, if you’re doing Google Adwords campaigns, they actually give you a penalty on your quality score. So if your website loads slowly, you’ll get a lower quality score and that means that you need to pay more per click for your ads. So it’s going to be costing you more and getting– you’re going to get less traffic. And the reason for that is that Google knows that slow websites convert less. They know that it’s a bad customer experience to have a website that’s loading slow. So they don’t want to send people from Google to slow websites because they’re all about giving people what they want quickly and they know that that gets a good result. So yeah, it’s important to make sure that you have a fast loading website. (21.07)

Kym: Okay. So what else we’re going to– any other keys regarding the website?

Justin: Yeah. The other thing is it’s a bit more obvious now. But make sure you’re mobile responsive that people really are using phones and small devices more and more. So you want to make sure that you have a good experience on the phone, on the tablet, on the desktop, on the large desktop, on the laptop. You want to make sure you cover all bases with that.

Kym: Yeah. And that’s really important. There’s nothing worse than– yeah, you’re looking at a website on a mobile phone and you’re trying to scroll across to see the rest of the page, right? And what do you do? It becomes too hard and you just leave. But I guess the more you leap very quickly too, the more Google knows people leaving and you get ranked downward and downward. It’s actually cyclical, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Kym: You’re not just looking at your analytics. Google is looking at your analytics and well, seeing how well people engage with it. And how long they stay on the site, how many pages they visit. And all those are indications to Google. This is not a bad website, let’s rank it higher. This is rubbish website, let’s rank it lower.

Justin: Exactly. Yeah.

Kym: So then, are they the main keys you think for building a good website? (22.16)

Justin: The final thing would be building trust. So I think that this is something that is really important on any website. People are still– still have hesitations, rightly so, when it comes to handing over money on the internet. You want to make sure that you trust the person that you’re doing business with, that you’re handing over money to. So trust is still a very important factor when it comes to your website. And so yes, so there’s some things to think about there. Things like having testimonials and case studies and proof, social proof or a proof of concept, your proof of your product. Examples of where you’ve appeared in other places to sort of verify that you’re legitimate, I guess. And–.

Kym: News articles yeah.

Justin: Yeah. All those kind of things. But it’s really important and it does get overlooked sometimes with a lot of websites that I see, where they, yeah they just start– I think some people have a hesitation to talk about themselves in that way and sort of don’t feel like they should prove– have to prove themselves. But it really does make a difference with selling things online or even getting people to hand over their email address. People are protective of that these days and so you want to make sure that you’re proving that you’re legitimate and that you’re not going to spam them or that sort of thing.

Kym: Well, you’re right. I mean and that about page is a really critical page doing that. I see that so often. It becomes like a CV if you want to call it that. But when I look at website analytics and just some professional services firms in particular that about page is often the second most visited page. (24.00)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kym: So having those testimonials on that page, not just a separate testimonial page. And that’s–

Justin: Yeah. I find that’s good to sort of sprinkle it throughout the website as well.

Kym: Yeah. Yeah. Just have another quote marks around it. In those times when people taking action on the contact page or that other page is really important and re-enforced that because no one likes to make the wrong decision do they?

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: Oh, If I’ve gone what have I done? [Laughs]

Justin: I find that in the footer of a website is a good place to put some of these kind of trust elements because at the top, you want to– you don’t want to clutter the top with these kind of things because first you want to just establish that you have the solution for them and what it is, that you’re the right person for them. And then once they go, “Yeah, this looks like the sort of thing that I’m after.” Then the next thought is are these guys legit. And so yeah, so it’s sort of the first you want to have that core message at the top then down the bottom, in the footer so that’s on every page. You have those sort of things that build that trust and credentials.

Kym: Okay. So what’s 3 simple tips you would give to someone who is about to embark on a website building or rebuilding? (25.03)

Justin: Yeah. So I think the first step, like I’ve already I guess, gone over this a few times now but simplify. You want to trim back all the distractions and all the things and get really down to the core. What is the main thing that– if your website only had this one thing, would it still give you the result. You want to boil it down to that and then make sure that’s uncluttered and undistracted and that sort of thing. So simplifying as much as possible, always gets a better result than when you try to add in too much.

Kym: Again, so what would the next tip be?

Justin: So the other tip would be, don’t D.I.Y. Don’t try and do it yourself. As we’ve already talked about, doing it yourself at the start when you’re just testing things or if you just throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. That’s probably okay. But if you’ve got a serious business. You’re established, you really shouldn’t be thinking around in the website yourself. You’ve got more important things to focus your time on and even your staff’s time on. If they’re not website developers, they shouldn’t be playing around with that. I’m sure they have more valuable things to be spending their time on, that are going to help you grow your business in other ways, it’s better to outsource that sort of– those sort of jobs to technical experts, people who know what they’re doing when it comes to websites that can get you a better result with less hassles and things on your part. (26.32)

Kym: Of course, that being said though, it should be a website with a platform like WordPress. It actually allows you to update content regularly yourself though. Is that right?

Justin: Yeah. And that’s true. WordPress is good because it is user friendly. However– and for some things if you’re doing a lot of content writing, for example, you might find it’s easier to just upload that yourself. But also you might find that you are spending an hour or so just adjusting things here and there and trying to get images to look right, move things around. That’s really not the best use of your time. So it is better for you to find someone who can give you this– we offer a support service and there’s others as well that do this where you have that sort of unlimited support for those kind of small changes. So if you’re doing a blog post every week, you just do the writing and then handed over to someone else and they take care of it from there.

Kym: And they click the links and do a lot of stuff.

Justin: They do the tech parts.

Kym: Yeah, yeah. They should be using a web dev. So definitely don’t– it’s important to remember that people look at a website as an expense. But to me it’s like your shopfront these days, everyone knows that seventy or eighty percent of people know you before they contact you and that’s because they look at you online. That’s your window to the world if you want to call it that. So if you cheapen that by doing it yourself, that’s the perception people have of your business.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. It’s your shopfront, it’s your 24-hour sales man. It’s really one of the most important marketing assets for your business. So you really want to be treat it as such not as some expense. (28.10)

Kym: And ultimately, I think you touched on this point before, something to think about. No matter, whether you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, social platforms or other distribution points you have, the ultimate aim is to get people back to your website because that’s the asset that you own, these other people can change the pricing there or whatever, we’ve seen that happen a lot with Google Adwords and even Facebook, they have started to get very expensive these days. So you need to have a good website that you own that you can engage with people, then email and we’ll reach out and get them back to your website, to buy and find more information.

Justin: Yeah. It’s a very important asset to have. And you want to be bringing people onto your platform and to capture their information there and really earn that relationship rather than having it built on someone else’s platform where they can just change rules and take– pull the rug out from under you. And also the other thing to remember is that your website is actually a saleable asset and part of your business. So in terms of the– when you go to sell your business, the website is part of that and it brings a lot of value. And if you have a website that is bringing in a lot of your business and leads and creating it, generating a lot of your profit, then that’s really an important part of your overall business value. (29.36)

Kym: Well, that’s an interesting point you raised, Justin. We had an interview on the marketing strategy here with Craig West from Succession Plus probably about three or four episodes ago now, I’ll put the link in the show notes. One of the things Craig was saying, a lot of buyers, now when they buy a business. They’ve actually asked him for the website analytics. They want to look at how well the website before to them that is a key factor in how much they’re going to pay for it because it is so important these days, website and your CRM system.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: So we’ve got simplicity, don’t D.I.Y. What’s number three? (30.10)

Justin: Number three is don’t go for cheap. And again, I’ve already touched on these topics a bit, I guess. But yeah, I think that it’s important to really value your website as an asset and don’t try and take shortcuts. You can always find someone to do it really cheap. But whether or not they’re going to do a good job is another story. So if you go with someone cheap, they’re probably not going to help you with that design that’s going to be customer focused and simplified and high converting and those sort of things. And if you go for a cheap development, cheap build, then they’re probably going to take shortcuts and use themes that are maybe not supported and fiddle around with source code that they shouldn’t touch. So that when there’s a future update, there might be security holes or things that break and yeah, you can just– you can run into a lot of problems when you start taking shortcuts and doing things on the cheap. It might work in the short term. But six months down the track, you might find yourself spending more to fix problems that you could have avoided by just paying properly for the website at the start.

Kym: Yeah. I’m sure you hear some horror stories. I certainly have. I’ve seen people say, “Look, I really like this website.” So the cheap developer either locally or overseas. It just copied the code from a competitors website and pasted it. And the links are going back to the competitors website and they don’t even know it. That’s the worst one I’ve seen. But I’ve seen others where they build the website. You can’t make any changes, so you can’t go in and update content because it’s just so poorly done or you can’t optimize it properly for search engines. It’s so slow. There’s all sorts of things, isn’t it? (31.52)

Justin: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen all sorts and we do– we’ve done quite a lot of jobs where people have come to us going, look “Can you please just help me fix this website? It’s got all these problems or– we do quite a lot of websites where we are rebuilding because there is– they might have liked the look of their website and quite often it’s hard to know if you’re not a developer how it really has been built under the hood and what problems you might encounter until they happen.

Kym: I think that’s a really important point. I often think about websites in three different components. And we’ve discussed this a bit before our interview today. There’s this strategy part of it which is this part that you’ve focused on, which is I think really important getting that understanding of the customer and what they want do, what their journey is and what you want them to do on the website. Second part that is design making it look good. The third part is development. I find very often, if you do it on the cheap, you would have compromised on—you’ve certainly compromised on strategy. But you’ve certainly compromised either design or development—to either get a developer to do it on the cheap and it looks awful. Like a designer who builds a well but slow to load because it’s not coded well. (33.07)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it really is important, too. I think that separation is quite good.

Kym: Yeah. I think– think about that people should think about that when they’re talking to a website supplier. Ask about what strategy they offer. Ask about what design they do and ask about what development they do. And there are probably some good tools out there, too, Justin, aren’t there? They evaluate mobile responsiveness and sites speed etc.

Justin: Yeah, yeah. There are some good tools for– well, yeah, but for different components of it. But yeah for site speed and for mobile responsiveness, Google has some good free tools that you can just find. But there are some out there. And the other thing is that you can quite often, if you’re not sure, you can take it to someone else. We do offer this service as well where we can do an audit of the people’s page speed and we can– yeah, so you can always get your websites audited by another developer or something like that just to make sure that there’s no issues with it. (34.07)

Kym: Yep 100% and its always a good idea, I mean I think it’s a bit like getting a doctor’s second opinion, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: [Laughing]. We’ve got– so much we’ve covered and so much more we’ve got to cover. So what I might do, Justin, is get you back again, if you’re– again, talk about some of those other issues like security, etc. But I’m might just backtrack and go through if I can what basically what those keys are to creating a good website there, just to recap on those. So you just walk me through those keys and go–

Justin: Yeah, sure. So the main keys we’re making sure that it’s customer focused, stick to one core message and have one primary call to action.

Kym: One CTA? Yeah?

Justin: Yeah. Make sure it loads fast. It’s mobile responsive and build trust. (34.55)

Kym: And then trust. So that’s six things. They’re customer focused, one core message, one call to action, loads fast, mobile repsonsive and it builds trust. So they are the six keys and the three I guess simple tips you offered there were, if I remember right, make sure it’s simplified.

Justin: Yeah.

Kym: Don’t do D.I.Y. And don’t go for cheap because it’s a short term investment, basically, isn’t it? If we do that.

Justin: Absolutely. You get what you pay for. (35.23)

Kym: So one of the other things I think you touched on during the call , we touched on before is, you know the service or even if you don’t develop the website, you can host the website for them or getting the hosting, have that in a different conversation because that affects speed even a whole variety of things and access and security. You can host websites but all those small updates, it did become a pain and are difficult. You can do some of those small updates. So instead of paying 20 dollars or 30 dollars or 40 dollars these days for cheap hosting, where you get nothing. A little bit more dollars and you get a lot done for you, basically. Is that right? (36.03)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. We have a service where it makes it– basically, we take care of all the websites hassles for you. We make sure you’ve got really fast hosting. We have our own hosting solution and server admins. We look after the hosting side of things. We make sure that your website is secure and kept up to date. We run maintenance checks on it monthly and yeah, constantly monitor it to make sure that nothing is going wrong. And we also take the stress out of making changes to your website and making sure that your website is current and up to date with your business and that you make it easy to publish content and that sort of thing by having those unlimited small changes just taken care of in one easy monthly retainer.

Kym: Look, I know for most of my clients and personally I think it’s a fantastic service and I think like two or three years ago, I was wishing someone had that service and I think you and I spoke about this when we first talked ages ago, how difficult it was for people who did this. So it’s a fantastic thing, you’ve got that service and all. Put some links in there, people check them out. It’s worthwhile looking at. Check it out, if it’s right for you by all means go ahead and Evergreen would certainly look after you. I think the whole issue of site speed, hosting and security is another topic that I’d love to cover because there is so much to talk about with that. If you are going to come back, I’d love to have you back and talk a bit more about that and on another episode. (37.32)

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be more than happy to. There certainly is a lot to unpack on those topics.

Kym: And I think it’s something to think about, too, that you need to be asking the right questions. So maybe the next topic should be the right questions to ask a web developer and being one yourself, you’ve probably got a good idea of that as well because it is confusing to people. They’ll meet someone at the local networking group or Google it or ask their mate. They might not be asking the right questions and there’s different questions depending on what you want to do, isn’t it?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Kym: But I think the basic thing is you follow those six key areas that you spoke about and then have those three tips in mind. You’ll be well on the way, we’ll make sure we put all of those in the show notes. Justin, thank you again. Oh and if people want to connect with you are you on Linkedin or just go to Evergreen hosting or we’ll just put in the show notes,

Justin: Yeah. We might as well put a link in the show notes, but they can find me on LinkedIn as well. Justin Meadows, yeah. (38.34)

Kym: Fantastic, mate. And I really appreciate that. Then that’s some excellent marketing jewels I think what to look for via website. So we just make sure we take note of those and take some action with them more importantly. Justin, thanks again, mate. Look forward to seeing you and we’ll tee up that second episode and talk about those other areas.

Justin: No problem. Thanks for having me.

Kym: Thanks mate. Cheers. Bye bye.

Justin: Cheers.