Is your website terrible? Maybe that’s the problem!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJSMFuAaog&t=54s

Hello again. Michael Byrd here with Home Services Digital giving you video number 14. In the last couple of videos we talked about doing a homemade, by hand, one word at a time keywords analysis. Actually, more accurately, let’s just call this a score sheet. A true keywords analysis really looks at search volume and some other things that we guessed at. We made an educated, common-sense guess at it. And it really is good enough for you to see whether you’re getting the search results that matter – those that are high volume, relevant to your business and that are going to cause your phone to ring.

Are you far from Page 1?

As I as I talked about this I went through a couple of scenarios: a good scenario in which you are already getting good search results, and a bad scenario in which you were so far from Page 1 that it might not be the best thing for you to do next. It’s almost always a good thing to do, but you’ve got to understand that it’s in that kind of situation where you’re on page 9 or page 10 for the good searches that it’s going to take a while. It’s gonna take some weeks and months to get you to Page 1. And you want to do some other things to make the phone ring in the meantime.

But it occurred to me that there are a couple of situations that we want to address. And I want to take you over to our worksheet again, so I’m gonna start that other screen recording and do the picture-in-picture. We’re gonna jump over here and we’re gonna walk through that. OK, here we go now. Let’s go to this tab here which is the not-so-great search results. I want to show you an instance where you’re not even in the first 10 pages. And if you use any software — you can find software to do some of these things for you. Once you understand them one at the time then you can can speed that process instead of going word by word, page through page of a Google search result. You can use some software to to speed this kind of thing up.

I talked about being anywhere from Page 1 to Page 10. This is page 10, the ninth result — about as bad as you can do but it’s really not. You can do worse. If you get a zero result that means that you are even more than 10 pages back and, who knows where you are, if you’re anywhere, if you’re being found at all. You might be 17 pages back. You might be not coming up at all. So that is the instance that I wanted to address here: a zero result. Normally the lower number is better but not zero. You want to be in position 1 not in position zero.

Or are you on Page 1 but not getting phone calls?

All right let’s look to the good scenario. I want to define a few terms that are worth knowing just because they’re a part of of the digital world and the search world. I cautiously and reluctantly defined SEO last time just because you’re gonna hear it. You’re gonna hear SEO: search engine optimization which is really Google optimization, which really just means getting Google search results or search results on Google. So I showed this good scenario here where we see, we figure out a way to come up with search volume. We have several ways, of course, and you can use some tools to do this. But common sense and the fact that Google’s search window suggests terms tells you that there is some volume for these terms.

And you plug these terms in and you see where you are and you say “Oh my goodness. I’m on Page 1.” This is all great. And I say your phone’s probably ringing. What if you’re on Page 1 one and your phone isn’t ringing? This is the instance that I’m gonna be real blunt about. I’m not going to call up any examples because I’d have to hurt somebody’s feelings. But what is happening here if you are on Page 1 and we know that we have a high volume of searches? Maybe your website sucks.

Impressions come first

When this term is searched 2,500 times, let’s say, and you’re up in position 4 and a person is seeing that list of 10 results. That’s called an impression, OK. They see you. Whether they notice you or not is a different question but they see you among that list of 10. That’s an impression. You have to have impressions before you can get the next thing which is really the thing that matters and that is a click.

OK if you’re getting impressions and you’re not getting clicks that means that what is appearing in that search result is not attractive enough. I gave an example a few videos ago of the company that was coming up but it wasn’t saying anything in the headline and had many more characters they could have used, many more words. They should have used those words. That is the title tag so that is an impression. That is the situation where you’re getting an impression and not getting a click.

Then clicks

If you’re getting the clicks and you’re not getting the phone calls — you’re not getting the conversions — somebody is looking at your website and they are not impressed. There are a lot of things that can cause this. This is the situation where your website is not converting, or maybe worse, your website just sucks. I want to talk about how you can do some measurement once you’re getting clicks and that is with Google analytics. I don’t want to get into the details of Google analytics — I don’t really need to but might at some point. (If you want to learn how to use Google Analytics all you have to do is Google it: “Google Analytics.” But remember, the Google Analytics about your website is only measuring what’s happening on your website. I don’t believe that’s where you should start. I think you should start with the marketplace at large. Just because you have this little fishing hole where you’re getting a nibble every 20 minutes doesn’t mean there isn’t a much better fishing hole over there and another one over there and another one over there where there are many more fish, where you might be getting a nibble every 20 seconds.

OK, so you need to see what’s going on in the marketplace. If you’re getting clicks and you’re not getting conversions let’s just say your website sucks. There are many things that we can do there but I’m going to start with the overview of what could be going on. And I’m being blunt on purpose because I have an opportunity to do that in this video, because I don’t have a particular situation. I’m not in a particular circumstance, so I won’t have to tell you face-to-face that your website is either not attractive or it’s unimpressive. If you have a website that’s clearly old, that it looks like what we had in the early days, 15 years ago that you got a website built you are ahead of the game. You were forward-thinking. Your nephew built it. Usually it’s a “some guy” website if it’s that old. Primarily web sites in the day were built more by computer people than by marketing people.

A shoddy old website might not get calls

So it’s just like if your car is not impressive or your clothes are not impressive or the front of your building is not impressive or your truck is not impressive. You can say it’s not fair but that’s how the world works. If I go and I want a plumber and, let’s say I’m a woman and somebody’s gonna be coming into my home. I don’t want to see something that’s shoddy, that is in some way not comfortable to me. So that’s the first thing. It doesn’t involve anything technical. It doesn’t have anything to do with your wording. It’s just the look. And you have to be really honest with yourself and say “Does my website look as good as my competitors websites in this marketplace? Does it look as good as it could?” You don’t have to be the best. You don’t have to have the super shiny website. That’s not necessarily what’s going to get the clicks. But you do have to look modern, like you are a serious, going concern of a business and that you are in the ball game.

So that’s where we’re gonna leave it for today. We’re going to talk about a couple more things about your website that you can change fairly easily and get more conversions. Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. Please ask your friends to subscribe. Please, you subscribe and you’ll get notices when we do another video which is, right now, one every four business days. Thank you.