358: The Ultimate Website Audit Checklist With Ian Cleary

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have my friend Ian Cleary on the show, and Ian is the founder of Razor Social, where he helps companies with their content marketing. And in this episode, you’ll learn the right way to do content marketing, how to audit your site for SEO, and which platform that you should start with. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce, and it’s crushing it for me.

00:29
I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce, and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Claviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you always imagined?

00:59
And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? Do you ever wonder how companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase.

01:27
often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. Now, to learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

01:56
the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:22
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Ian Cleary on the show. Now Ian is someone who I met at social media marketing world, where we both spoken for the past several years. And I remember stumbling into one of his talks and noticed that he always has this entourage of people following him, cheering him on from the front row. And they’re always dressed in like orange hair or something like that. Anyway, Ian runs Razor Social where he helps companies with their digital marketing efforts. And today we’re going to talk about

02:51
site audits, content marketing, basically what he does every day at his firm. And with that, welcome to the show. Ian, how are doing today? I’m doing great. Thank you very much for having me, Steve. Delighted to be on the show. And it’s always great to meet you at events, you know, here or there in the US mainly. So who who are those people in the front row? I have no idea. the guy with the orange hair. I know that was a guy with a white coat and he’s

03:17
He works for a gaurapult, so he always dresses up as the character he puts on because he has a podcast or something. And then there’s just there’s always an Irish entourage over. Yes, that’s what it is. The Irish entourage. Yeah. So we end up going drinking together, you know, typical Irish, you know, it’s like we meet over here, then we go to the States, then we go drinking together in the States. And yeah, there’s always a gang cheering me on the front. So, you know, what are in good or bad? I still get the cheers.

03:45
So tell us about your background, what exactly you do and how you arrived at this point. Sure. Background is mainly technology. So I spent a good few years working in software companies, mainly in technical management roles. And then I got a bit fed up and I started dabbling in entrepreneur stuff. So I done all sorts of stuff. I was selling property in Eastern Europe at one stage. Then I was selling robotic lawnmowers and all sorts of gadgets, robotic hoovers.

04:14
So I dabbled in a range of things. And then I was at an event one day and somebody asked me, would I speak on social media? You know, and I didn’t have any knowledge of social media. So I said, yeah, sure. So because I like figuring out. this Mike Stelzer or? No, no, no. This is over in Ireland. OK. And then I because of that, I had to learn stuff about social media. And then I got involved in that. And then I wanted to do something international.

04:43
And I had a lot of technical knowledge and at that stage, a good bit of social media knowledge. And I seen on a lot of different sites on the web, was, you know, everybody in social media has a blog. So it was very competitive, but I found that nobody really focused on the tech side. So the blog was really tech focused, mainly based on a lot of tools and social media. And that sort of got a lot of traction. You know, it was like.

05:09
I was getting the one stage, I was definitely over a thousand shares every single post and I was getting some shares where 25, 30,000 shares for big ones I was doing. it was just tech, tech was, is a really popular topic and nobody else was really talking about it. And on the back of that, then I got speaking at social media marketing world and the whole range of events. And then over time, raise the social evolved and I drift away from pure social media to be digital marketing.

05:37
And I found that my niche was really helping companies that were going through a lot of change in digital. And they were struggling working with external agencies and consultants and stuff. And because we had the technical and the marketing knowledge, we understand the whole process from start to finish. So we advised a lot of companies, we ran projects for companies, we upskilled companies and stuff. And then I drifted into audits. We were doing a lot of

06:06
Audits, as you mentioned at the start, Steve, and I’ve just started launching Razor Audit, which is the only independent company that provides website audits because most companies are pure agency. They build websites to do SEO and we don’t do that type of work. So we try to give a completely independent viewpoint of where people’s websites are. Right. Which means it’s unbiased because you don’t actually offer to fix what you’ve audited. Right.

06:34
Yeah, exactly. And some people will come to us and go, hey, well, no, we want somebody to fix it. And we go, well, well, we’re not the people there. We’re the agency. You come to us if you want a completely independent view of what, you know, what is are the issues because we’re looking at going, OK, our main focus is, can we find issues that drive you more traffic that can convert more business? We’re not going, can we, you know, build a new website for you? You know, that’s not our interest. So we’ll if possible, we’ll go

07:03
let’s fix up what you have. And if we think it’s really bad, we’ll advise on building a new website, but it’ll be completely independent view. I actually love that model. You just tell people what’s wrong and then you say, sorry, I can’t fix it. But that’s it. Exactly. No, not for us. We don’t do it. You know, so let’s talk about site audits in particular. Okay. I want you to walk me through the process so that potentially people in the audience kind of know what to look for with their own websites. And maybe you can even talk about.

07:31
some of the common mistakes that people make. So what are your first steps when you conduct one of these site audits? Well, the first step is really get access to analytics. So we get access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. And sometimes that’s the starting point of the issues because a lot of people don’t have analytics set up. So you really need to have your analytics set up. And once that’s set up, then we will extract some data from your analytics and we’ll use some

08:01
SEO tools to understand about your traffic and where you’re getting your traffic from and how well your site is optimized. So are these mainly SEO audits then? We do the whole range. So we do, depending on the plan you come in for, we will do a user experience audit, looking at the user journeys as people travel to the website to make sure you cater for all your audience and make it easy. We’ll do an SEO audit. We’ll look at your branding.

08:31
We’ll definitely look at conversion. We can analyze your content, analyze your competitors, look at the traffic through analytics. So there’s a whole range of things we would do there. Let’s pick one of those that you think might be the easiest to talk about on a podcast. So maybe SEO. So you have their analytics and you have their Google Search Console. What specifically are you looking for in those reports? Well, suppose from an SEO point of view, the starting point is going

08:59
we’d look at are there any technical issues in their site? So quite often people have missing titles, duplicate titles, missing descriptions. So the basics are not being optimized correctly. So we’d identify all those issues and say, here’s a batch of issues you can resolve to make things better. Then we’d look at what are you currently ranking for and identify quick win opportunities where you may be ranking for good terms

09:28
that you know on page two or lower down on page one. And we’ll give some practical advice of how you could optimize that to move it up and search results to drive more traffic. So what are some of those things? Let’s say I’m number 12 for a keyword. What is some advice that you would give me to get on the front page? So we generally use a tool called Ahrefs. There’s a range of SEO tools.

09:53
So what I would initially do is I would do an analysis and see who’s ranking on the first page. Then I would look at each of those pieces of content, decide how come they’re ranking on the first page. And in Ahrefs, it will show me the main keywords, the ranking for, and the related keywords. And that’s going to give me some idea to expand the content that’s on page two on our site, or the site we’re reviewing. So we’ll be adding content on.

10:22
We’ll be targeting additional keywords in there. We’ll be advising them to look at the titles of the post, the meta title within the post. The easiest thing is really expanding the content. But then we’ll be looking and say, well, can you link to that content from other content on your site? And that will give it a little boost as well. Now, the one beyond that is getting links from external sites.

10:48
So there’s a process there you can follow. back up real quick. strategy number one is to actually look at what else is on the front page and write something that’s more comprehensive. Is that accurate? Well, if you’re on page two, what we’re looking to do is see who’s on page one and then get some ideas about content. And that could be to expand the content, add more content on. OK. And what I want to see in AHA drafts is what are they ranking for and what’s all the related keywords they’re ranking for?

11:17
because there could be opportunities to add more content on about those related keywords to strengthen that post. So if you find those keywords, do you suggest putting those in those keywords within like heading tags when you’re editing the content? Yeah, so there is related keywords in there. If there’s additional sections we can add to a page, for example, you know, like I say, targeting related keywords and add a paragraph of content around that within that content.

11:45
that additional relevant content is always going to help. I’ve noticed now that Google ranks a lot of the headings individually as opposed to the full articles. When you click on the link, it automatically zooms down to where that relevant text is. So I’m just wondering whether you can put together a big article, but it seems like it’s much more important now to put those in heading tags so Google can auto parse them.

12:16
Yeah, and we always advise, I mean, people don’t pay enough attention to heading tags and they don’t write descriptive heading tags. So you need to think about your headings like a H2 within your content is like a mini title. So you got your main title of the post, but then think, put a lot of consideration into your subheadings because they’re mini titles. They’re there for a couple of reasons. One is from a Google perspective, they will go through it. And like you say, pick out them H2s and, and, and, you know, you might end up

12:45
ranking for that content within them sections. But also, it’s a good way of structuring your document anyway, or your blog post anyway, to have H2 sections within it. Yeah. And then, so you do some internal linking next, right? So you find other posts with whatever anchor text, I guess, that you want to rank for internally. And I guess the missing piece, or the hardest piece, really, is getting other people to link to it. Do you have any strategies to share on that?

13:14
Yeah, just step back one second about when we say to do the internal linking, people often say, well, how do I find any content that’s related on my site? Well, go to Google, type site colon and the name of your website, and then type the keywords that you are looking for content on. So Google then will search your own website and find content for you. And then you’ll find a selection of articles to link back into this article.

13:41
But then as you’re saying, Steve, I’m going to give my buddy Spencer a plug here. I actually, I don’t know if you guys are using this plugin, but I’m using this plugin called link whisper. And what it does is it actually parses all of your articles and it’ll, it’ll just give you internal linking opportunities. And all you have to do is just check a bunch of boxes and it automatically updates those posts. Wow. That’s cool. I never heard of that one. That’s a link whisper. You guys just shout out Spencer here. Yeah. Cool. I’ll check that one out.

14:09
Yeah, then you’re looking to build external links, you know, so external links. I mean, of course, it’s challenging, but if it’s a good piece of content, you can reach out to people and find related content where people are linking to poor quality posts and asking to replace it with your post or they’re linking to posts that were similar in content but are no longer there. So it’s a dead link. You could do exchange links where

14:37
You’d say to somebody, listen, will you link to mine and I link to yours? mean, so is that dangerous in your opinion? You know, it’s, it’s not when it’s done on a small scale. I mean, you don’t want be doing this all the time, but if there’s only a small percentage of your vote, your links are like that. It’s not a concern. Okay. Do you know if anyone has been penalized for doing something like that? Link exchanges and. Not at the moment. No, because you know, if it’s, if it’s small and it’s only a links to a page, it’s not a big issue.

15:08
So when you’re doing this outreach, what would you say your hit rate is? It really depends on, do you know the audience, whatever. if like in my world, because I’ve done a lot of blogging and built up a lot of relationships with people, I’m reaching out to people I know. So, you know, when I get links and getting, you know, 75 % of when I reach out, I’ll get links. So you have to put a bit of work into, if you’re a blogger, build relationships with people.

15:36
you know, share their content, interact with them so that when you do reach out, you know, it’s it’s like, for example, we know each other, Steve. So you reach out to me saying, you know, would you mind like that? go, sure, Steve, no problem. You know, but if we didn’t know each other, then then you’d have to come up with a good reason for doing it. You know? Yeah. I mean, I get probably like 20 of these requests a day, actually. Yeah. I’m sure you get more. Yeah, we get loads. Yeah. Yeah.

16:04
So that’s why I was asking what your hit rate is. So you would suggest actually getting going out and getting to know people or becoming an authority in your industry before like to improve the hit rate for this strategy. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. And then you have when you have them relationships, then it’s you have an audience to tap into and they they’ll come and you’ll help them out as well. So yeah, if you’re just doing it, blasting an email outreach tool and you’re sending out a thousand emails to people.

16:30
Maybe you’ll get five or six links or something. The hit rates can be low, but that’s a lot of work. I don’t like that at all. So I’d prefer in this, build the relationships and then you can leverage off those relationships. How important do you think links are these days? mean, Google claims that they continually put it as less important compared to some other things like onsite metrics. What is your view just working with companies?

16:59
Well, I read a report recently of 65 top SEO people and they put down that, you know, what was the, if you had a pie chart, what was the percentage that was important for onsite ranking, you know, and they put 15%, you know, for on-page optimization, about 20, about 25 % for the authority of your website and about 25 % for links and then another 15 % for relevant anchor texts to them links.

17:29
Now, if you think of it that that is you got like nearly 65 % is related to links, you know, and then 15 % is related to optimization of on-page and then there’s a few extra things. So I think links are still absolutely crucial, you know, so that hasn’t really changed. I just feel like so many large companies are gaming the system just because I’ve been interacting with them also, you know, I mean, it’s like a little boys club of all these

17:58
companies that are funded, they all work together to interlink with each other. How does a little guy fight against that?

18:06
I suppose it’s in terms of the relationships you build with people in the industry and what you want to target. You really want a niche. know, when I set up Razor Social, my niche was, OK, was it really busy world of social media where every single person in the world and social media had a blog, you know, so it’s the worst place to go into and around digital marketing because they all have blogs. So you have to come up with something different. So if you are, you know, going against the big guys, well,

18:34
You know, a lot of times that content is pretty poor anyway. So you need to go, well, how can I write better content, different content, different format on razor road audit? I said, you know, for my first post. I needed because it’s just a competitive area. I wanted something really stands out. So I wrote a 32,000 word article about auditing because I trolled the web to find what was the best guys on website auditing. I didn’t find a really, really good one. found.

19:04
good articles in different places at different parts of audits, but no one place to go. So by doing that, then I can really focus in on that article. And I am doing link building because, you know, people will go, wow, you know, I haven’t seen an article like that. So if you’re really impressed somebody with a really in-depth article like that, they’re more likely to pay attention.

19:27
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:56
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

20:25
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. You know, people always say content quality is king. I tend to disagree. I feel like Google ranks a lot of junk. And this is just people writing content, taking other people’s content, putting it together into one longer article. And it’s links. Like when I look at their backlink profile, some of them

20:53
It’s even blatant that they’re using some sort of private blog networks because the domains are kind of funky. Yeah. What are your views on that? Yeah, I think if you if you don’t have authority website, well, then you need good quality content. But as you you build up authority, there is a lot of junk. I mean, if you look at the likes of, you know, don’t the name newspapers, but Forbes, there’s a lot of bad quality content there. You know, it’s not for them. It’s not about the.

21:22
quality of content, have the authority. they will rank for anything up there today and they’ll rank tomorrow with no links or no nothing. So yeah, so I do believe there is a lot. if you get good, valuable links and you don’t have authority, you need to build that authority over time. And you have no chance of building it. If you’re not doing dodgy things, you have no chance of building it unless you create really good content.

21:51
Yeah, relationships. need to have the relationships of people is just as important because otherwise if you don’t have the relationships and the audience within, you know, how you get your content out there other than paying for it. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. That’s why I think it’s really important to go to events, which is why 2020 was was like a bad year for me in that respect. mean, that’s how I get podcast guests. That’s how I get, you know, a lot of things. I develop friends that way. That’s a lot of the friends I’ve.

22:19
I have today are people who I met at events live. So yeah, I know. I really miss the events, you know, I’m dying because that’s to me, it’s I’m in the office at the end of the garden. You know, we work with a really small business here, myself, my wife and a couple of our time people. So I love getting out and meeting the likes yourself and everybody else. And, know, people that are like do content creation, do work online, you know, do similar stuff that we’re doing. It’s always great to meet up.

22:49
So let’s shift gears away from SEO a little bit, unless you have more to add, because obviously there’s more to just getting traffic to your website. I know you also focus a lot on conversions and specifically getting leads and sales. What are some of the things you look for there when you’re analyzing a site for auditing? Well, I the first thing, I suppose the thing is you need to have a fast website. So you’ve got a good experience. You need to have a well-designed, well laid out website. You need to have

23:17
good content that supports the customer’s journey to the site. So if people are going through the site, are they getting all the relevant information? So you can’t be talking about calls to action yet until you go, well, is it easy to understand what you do? Is it easy for any type of customer to step through your site to get to a stage of wanting to buy? So you have to cover all of them basics. And then you can start thinking about, OK, do I have my

23:46
calls to action very obvious on the page, you know, to like, for example, book now or buy now or ring me or any of that to make that easy. You need to have a good mobile site and make sure from mobile. A lot of times you see people don’t have a well designed mobile version of their site. So it’s just that the content is not adapted properly. So that drops conversion. So yeah, once you’ve got good user journeys, then it’s like, yeah, you have very clear calls to action.

24:16
And then you have if somebody wants to buy, that’s great. But a lot of people don’t. So then you need to go, well, how do I capture their details if they’re not going to buy? And then how can I build out my sales funnels to progress them from somebody that’s cold to warm to hot? So, for example, email, you know, is still crucially important because the vast majority of people that come to your website won’t buy. So whether it’s an e-commerce or non e-commerce site, they, you know, they won’t

24:45
by a service or the One Fire product. So you have to look at how can I capture the emails. That’s why in an e-commerce site, you will often see if you’re exiting the site, they’ll say, hey, do you want to sign up and get a 5 % discount? Or if you’re within the checkout process and you try to exit, it tries to get you back into the checkout process. But building an email audience like that means then you can build your sales funnel behind that after somebody ops in.

25:14
send a initial welcome email sequence and try to sell over that email sequence. So email is very important. Another way of capturing the audience is if you have a Facebook tracking pixel on your site, well, even if they don’t give you any details, you can still capture the fact that they visit your website. And then you can start advertising to Facebook at a later stage, even months later. Are you doing much with SMS these days?

25:43
No, not doing that, but ask some, ask it all now. you? Yeah, I am actually. It’s working surprisingly well. Yeah. I did have a question for you. You mentioned site speed. I personally think that all the site speed mumbo jumbo out there is, is meant to scare and not actually affect. It doesn’t really affect your rankings. Like if I look on the front page for some of the sites that are in my niche that are ranking a lot of their sites are super slow or they’re getting really poor scores. What’s your view on that?

26:13
Well, the scores that Google page insights give them scores are not related directly related to a faster, slow your site or it’s a more of a score related to are you using the techniques that are the recommended techniques for a faster website. So sometimes you can get a high score on a slow website or the opposite. So that’s one thing to page insights. I’ve never seen a high score resulting in a slow website before with Google PageSpeed Insights.

26:42
I’ve seen the opposite. Yeah, developers can trick it into getting a high And I’ve seen developers do that just to pass because sometimes we’re doing audits and the developer will go, listen, I’ve changed this. I’ve got a higher score. There’s no difference. So that’s there’s there’s web speed. I’ll get the name of the tool, Web Page Speed Test. Yeah, Web Page Test and there’s GT Metrics. Yeah, Web Page Test I actually think is better in terms of giving you

27:11
a more realistic view of the page speed. Now, I did see an article only last week on Search Engine Journal saying that your man Muller from Google said they are going to take speed as a ranking factor. Actually, the scores that you get through Google Page Speed Insight, they’re going to start using that as part of a ranking factor. So I think you’re right up until now. They may have, you know, used it a little bit or something, but they’re putting more emphasis on it.

27:41
So will become increasingly important. Okay. I mean, they’ve been saying that for years as far as, I mean, I almost feel like Google uses these tactics to scare people and doing what they want. Yeah. They don’t necessarily enforce it. Cause if you look at half the e-commerce stores on the web, they’re, they have scores in the red on PageSpeed Insights and a lot of these stores are making like eight figures, know, nine. So, mean, the thing is to,

28:09
to go to machine or empty out your cache and load up your website and have a look at the speed there. If you’re doing international stuff, then you just need to look at it there as well and make sure you’ve got a good hosting provider in as well. But yeah, if it feels really slow, well, that’s just a bad user experience. So even if Google doesn’t penalize it, your website visitors not going to enjoy going through your website. So when you’re auditing, what are your guidelines then?

28:39
in terms of speed and when to worry about it? Well, we look at the speed index on web page speed test and try to make sure that’s sort of under three seconds. And that’s really, the speed index is really when it appears to be loaded from the user. So they feel, oh yeah, it’s loaded, so it’s quite fast. So if you use something like GT metrics, I know GT metrics uses a different way of

29:08
doing it like, for example, a fully loaded time in GT metrics is when the website is fully loaded plus two seconds. So they wait for two seconds to see that there’s nothing else loading. And then it goes, that’s the time. And all the tools are different. And that’s why it’s so confusing. You’ll get a different score all the time. And you’ll even get different score on Google Page Insight if you refresh and do it again.

29:34
So what I’ve done in this realm is I just don’t want to have to worry about it. Google keeps threatening to make it an important part of ranking. I’ve made it so that my site is all in the green on Google PageSpeed Insights. But I’m not sure if this is the right way to do it. But what I do is I just defer the loading of everything outside of the content until someone moves their mouse or something happens. But that way, the content shows up. And then from a machine’s point of view,

30:04
Everything loads up super quick. And it’s only if it’s like a human is detected, really, when they move their mouse or whatever, then it loads the rest of the junk. Yeah, there’s that there’s one of the stats on Google page insight, which is about the how does it feel like it’s been loaded for a user? So, for example, there’s a difference between sitting at your machine and nothing appears, then everyone appears after two seconds or sit in a machine and things start appearing. So you feel things are moving. So the impression of speed is better.

30:33
Even though both of them load in two seconds, the one with more progressive loading appears faster to a user, which is better. And by the way, on the Google page speed inside, they trottle stuff for mobile. That’s why the scores are lower. they simulate a slower network connection and a slower CPU. So the scores are always lower on mobile.

30:59
Sorry for that aside, I was just kind of curious. So it looks like three seconds or less, you’re probably in good shape, is what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And then what were we talking about next? We were talking about conversion. Conversion, So it’s a about just user journeys, make sure it’s simple. A lot of times people don’t really explain what they’re about and understand what their business does and then make sure you’ve got good content and then very clear calls to action.

31:28
It can ease to do business with you and then have really good analytics in the background. For example, have an e if you have a shop, have e-commerce tracking set up so I can see exactly as people move to the funnel and where people are dropping out and what revenue I’m getting from what traffic, you know, and then when you’re not converting, then build audiences across email, Facebook retargeting lists and stuff. So you’re constantly capturing people’s details and then build out funnels on the back end.

31:57
through email where you can generate emails over a sequence to people to try and convert them and then on an ongoing basis, use email as a tool to convert as well. I know in your talk, you often do these content audits where you’ll essentially de-index articles that aren’t good, the ones that are okay, you kind of beef up with content. Yeah. When you’re working with companies,

32:27
have you found a profound effect that has a profound effect on their rankings? So for example, let’s say I had like hundred junk articles on my blog that are just junk. By eliminating those, does that actually improve your rankings overall? It depends. And some websites have improved the rankings a lot just by removing the junk articles. As long as you’re not removing articles that have good links to your site, for example. So they’re ones you’d probably redirect.

32:57
But I’ve seen 20, 30 % increase in traffic by tidying up a lot of content. It takes a couple of months before you see that, but it’s from that tidier process when things are really messy, when they had a lot of low quality articles, know, broken links and all sorts of stuff, but just tidying up that and redirecting articles that had good links, but it was poor quality content and not driving any traffic. So then you’re reassigning links to other pieces of content and making that stronger and giving that a boost.

33:27
Let me ask you this. So my podcast right now, I deindex a lot of the episodes on my site because those podcasts episodes, just audio. had transcripts at one point, but they still weren’t ranking. Would you recommend deindexing all the podcast episodes? I would, unless you’re actually going to write good quality articles alongside it. So it’s not transcripts either. It’s actually creating an article. So for example, in our conversation, you might go,

33:56
I’m going to create an article about website audits and you’re into you know, you’re bringing in feedback that we talked about within the conversation, but not just transcript because, you know, people are not going to really link to a transcript, but they might link to a really good quality article that has a, you know, the ability to listen to it and sound as well, you know, and it’s a combination of both. It’s just it’s it’s hard work. It’s like, I mean, I suppose the good thing is you could probably get somebody else to to write it up.

34:24
but you would need to write good quality articles based on it. you know, if it’s just a podcast, yeah, why not the end? Right. OK. Yeah. So that implies that if I want to do it right, I should actually hire someone to listen to the podcast, maybe pull out the prime points and create a really good article on it. Yeah, exactly. OK. By the way, this question just kind of came to my head right now. We’ve been talking primarily about the written word thus far. What are your opinions on YouTube versus blogging versus podcasting just as a content medium?

34:54
Yeah, I mean, I’m a blogger content market, so I did dabble in YouTube as well before. mean, the thing that YouTube is probably easier to rank than Google on certain things on YouTube. But I find it really hard to produce video all the time because it’s so time consuming doing all the setup, doing the video, getting all the editing done, doing all the promotion. I find it much easier to go. I’m going to sit down, write a like a thousand word article is going to be much easier. So

35:24
So YouTube works great for people that really focus in on YouTube and build the audience and say that’s their channel. Generally with YouTubers, you’ll find that they really poor blog or no blog at all or don’t have much traffic, you know, except the big ones, of course. Yeah. But they they they focus on YouTube and do well on YouTube is just so there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s very hard to focus on blogging and YouTube. You know, from a from a podcast point of view.

35:52
I mean, what I love about the podcast side is that you have an opportunity to meet and connect with lots of people, especially with small business listening in, they’re going, you know, I need to expand my audience and need to expand my influence. You know, pick a pick a good topic and reach out to influential people, encourage them onto the podcast. And then you’re building relationships, building a network. And also when you start distributing the content, like you distribute my content, I’m going to start sharing that.

36:22
So that’s going to bring in a new audience to you as well. So a podcasting podcast can be hugely beneficial, I think. Yeah. I was just trying to think about that myself since I do all three right now. Oh dear. Yeah. Well, I was going to say you have to do, I mean, I know you do blogging and, and, uh, you know, podcasts as well. didn’t know you use YouTube as well. So have actually, it’s, been really good. It’s only been about a year, but it’s been really good. But I’m just thinking about the work level and the

36:51
The reason why I’m asking this question is if you’re like a new business, which one would you focus on to start with?

36:59
to see the immediate gains. Like I have my opinion, but I’m just kind of curious what yours is.

37:06
Yes, so if you’re starting off, I would recommend a blog. But I mean, I would be really tempted to do a podcast as well, because you now have an opportunity to reach out and connect with a new audience that you haven’t reached out to before, build relationships with key influencers at an early stage in your business. So so if I had to pick one, I’d pick blogging. But then I’d quickly follow it up with a podcast. I think I had the same answer as you, actually. I would.

37:34
You need the blog, you need a website as your home base, right? To collect emails, get pixel people and that sort of thing, no matter what. Right. And then podcasting actually helps a lot for link building. And in fact, I want to say, I’m just thinking right now, almost all the major links that I’ve gotten in the past year have been from people who have been on my podcast. Great. Right. Yeah. And then the thing I really like about YouTube though,

38:02
is that Google just does a really good job of sharing your videos, right? And that results in free traffic. The only problem is that traffic kind of still lives on Google or YouTube, I should say. And it’s hard to funnel that over to your site.

38:18
But that’s interesting. So you started out blogging. Even if you’re not a good writer, like I know for myself when I started, I hated writing and I was terrible at it. It was just a skill that it’s like a necessary means to an ends, I think. So have we missed anything in terms of the site audit? We’ve talked about SEO, we’ve talked a little bit about conversions and getting your message out. What else do you look for? I mean, the branding side is really important. And the branding, as Jeff Vizzo said, but in Amazon,

38:47
You know, a brand is about what people say about you when you’re not in the room and on your website, you’re not in the room. So people go and form an opinion of your website. So the branding is about, you know, things like what’s your tagline that describes, you know, overall what you do. And then is there expanded description given more details? You know, do you have a good logo? Do you have consistent colors, consistent fonts? Do you have a consistent message throughout the site? So it’s really important to get that because

39:17
Your brand is everything because there’s so much competition out there. You know, there’s bound to be lots of other people selling products or services that you have. So you need to differentiate yourself and your brand. So that’s an important part of the audit as well. Yeah, that one’s a little bit harder to teach. Right. mean, yeah, there’s both like an art and a science to that to that aspect of it. I mean, do you have any maybe examples of of clients that that got it wrong? I mean, obviously you don’t have to use their name, but an example where you

39:46
you diagnose something like that? Well, I think most people that we would have got it wrong. I want that what you know, because we review a lot of sites where people aren’t happy with the site. And the challenge is you go in and it’s not really clear exactly what they do and what service they provide. So the tourism business only their day. And it was just there was.

40:11
There was calls to action everywhere in the page. was navigation across the top navigation down the side. And there was wasn’t clear from the outset that all the different services they provide. So you had to really work hard to do that. And then the the fonts were all different sizes across the website. No consistency and no consistent use of color or their logo and their logo could be different on social media and stuff. So there was no consistency, no repetition.

40:38
And, you know, the obvious wasn’t a color palette that was a defined set of colors they use, you know, for everything they do on the site. So a lot of small businesses don’t really pay attention to that and go, oh, branding’s for big companies. But it’s not, you know, and you don’t need to invest a huge amount of money in branding. You just need to have a lot of consistency, really, and clear messaging. Actually, you know, now that you bring that up, I think the colors are actually very important.

41:06
Like it’s important, especially for the action button. I think that needs to be some really bright color that stands out and has to be the same color on every single page of your site. Yeah. And then we advise people to, you know, that call to action color is a color that you don’t use anywhere else in your site. And it’s the one that stands out. when you, you navigate through the site, if you see that color, you know, it’s the call to action, you know? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And then I, I do a lot of site audits too. I think another one.

41:36
kind of building upon what you just said is like within the first three seconds, I need to know what you do and why you’re better. Yeah. And that can be hard. So you have to be really concise and make sure your font is, is, is big, you know, to, bring that out also. Mark Schaeffer often says to companies, you know, he starts off with a consultancy remark, so if it was a lot of digital marketing consultancy and he, we we’ve heard him on speaking on different circuits, but he starts off companies and you say only we finish that sentence.

42:06
You know, and it’s a hard sentence to finish, finish, you know, so it really gets people thinking to go, why am I different? You know, only we do X, you that’s actually a really good way to end this in what is your only we well, only we provide independent digital marketing support and auditing. There’s nobody else provides the auditing anyway. So we definitely were definitely the only way provide independent digital marketing auditing.

42:36
By the way, do you work with smaller companies too, or is it just mainly bigger ones? No, we work with smaller companies. On Razor social side, we work with bigger companies. On Razor audit, we work with a range of companies, from small, middle to large, because it’s just a pure auditing service. Okay. Yeah. No, I find the service really valuable. So where can people find more about this? Specifically the auditing side, I think. The auditing go to razoraudit.com. Okay. And can you just give us an idea of what the process is like and how much it costs?

43:07
Well, the starting price in terms of dollars is $1,100 for the starting audit. And then it goes up depending on the complexity of the audit. for the $1,100 starting price, you’re going to be able to, we’ll do an SEO audit. We’ll do conversion. We’ll look at the analytics. We’ll do overview of the branding. And then as we go into the next level, it’s bigger, more complicated sites, which would take longer, particularly for SEO audits and stuff like that.

43:36
And then you get this big long report that you take over to your agency and whatnot for implementation. So in that report, we will give issues, but we’ll give advice as well. And some of that you’ll be able to resolve yourself. And some of it will be things where you’ll go, well, if I don’t have the skills, I’ll need to get somebody to implement the changes. Okay. And do you have referrals for those? Sorry, it an inside joke that we had talked about earlier.

44:02
I mean, the idea of Ian’s company is it’s supposed to be very unbiased and you know, he’s not, he doesn’t have any hidden relationships with agencies and whatnot. No, no, you do not know. So that was a trick question there that I did. But Ian, I hope we get a chance to hang out again, man. Social media marketing role was a lot of fun and I actually use that conference a lot to meet new people to have on this podcast as well. So, right. Yeah. Well, hopefully we’ll, we’ll meet again soon and that conference or another one, you know, I’d love to.

44:32
It’s always great to hang out. It is great catching up with you. You too. Thank you very much for having me on your podcast.

44:41
Now I hope you enjoyed that episode and I’m so happy to have had Ian on because he is a celebrity over at Social Media Marketing World. Hope you learned a lot. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 358. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLABIYO.

45:11
Once again, that’s mywifecluderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

45:39
head on over to mywifequarterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.