0:00:00
What’s up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Web Design for Dummies. I’m your host Kevin Geary and I just got back from vacation. Let me pop up the chat here. Where’s our chat window? I don’t know where our chat window has gone. Let’s go window, chat, chat, chat. Where are we at? Comments, reactions, there it is. Okay.
0:00:28
All right, we got Jason Vargas coming in from Arizona. Joe is here from Maryland. Justin from Australia. Johanna, Johanna, Johanna, one of them, from Scotland. GDN Web Media from Woodstock, Georgia. Right around the corner from me. Denmark in the house, Czech Republic, Italy, Finland, UK, Slovenia, Netherlands. All right, we are all over the place as usual. Hey, what’s up everybody? Okay, Andreas has delay. What does delay mean? Is there something wrong with my audio, video? Hopefully nothing Hopefully, nothing’s going wrong.
0:01:12
I was having some technical difficulties earlier, but hopefully, they are all good. We have 41 people watching live. We’re very close. Hopefully that number escalates very shortly. We need to get over 100 again. That is our standard here. We’re very close to Christmas. This is fantastic. I think that people may be traveling. There’s a lot of stuff going on.
0:01:40
Justin says, looking like you have a little color in your cheeks from the cruise. Maybe, maybe. It is very possible. You know, I was in St. Thomas, St. Martin, and Coco Cay last week, and it was a phenomenal weather every single day. Very, very hot. And then it was just like a slap in the face. I came back to Atlanta, it’s like 35 degrees, it’s raining. It’s just, you know, you go from, it’s, ah man, just the two extremes. And all of my family is sick. They all, everybody has a really bad cold. Thankfully, not me, thankfully, um, it held off until after the cruise. So it didn’t ruin the cruise. That was, that was a really good, so, you know, I’m thankful for that, but now we are back and life is hitting us, life’s coming at us fast.
0:02:30
Let’s just say that. So, everybody’s got a very bad cold. I feel like I am, it’s trying to get me. It’s coming after me. It hasn’t got me yet. I don’t think it’s going to get me. I’m taking my zinc, my vitamin D, my vitamin C. I’m just loading up. A lot of times I can keep it away. And I’m confident this time because it’s been a few days now. I don’t think it’s going to get me.
0:02:56
I’m confident. So, hopefully, I’m not overconfident, but I am confident. All right, so we are going to get started. Let’s first talk about what is Web Design for Domies. What are we doing here? Our goal with the Web Design for Domies series is to help everybody elevate their game. You want to take your game to the next level in terms of web design, in terms of web development, best practices. We talk about UX, we talk about UI. This isn’t just like me pull up a website, let’s react to it, okay? This is me pull up a website and really dissect what’s going on with the UX, the UI, copywriting, the strategy, SEO, we might look under the hood, you know, show me your DOM kind of thing.
0:03:44
We might look under the hood, see if you’re a DOM ass, all right? Now, it’s, you know, it’s not an insult, it’s just we’re all DOM asses from time to time. We just want to make sure, you know, that everybody’s on the same page with regard to elevating your game. We talk about accessibility. We kind of hit on all aspects of it. So, when you see other people do web critiques, web design critiques, a lot of times they’re just critiquing the design. Sometimes they’re critiquing the copy, you know. It’s usually one or the other.
0:04:14
It’s not like an all, you know, across the board, like a real dissection of all of the key aspects of a website. And that’s what we do here on Web Design for Dummies. You get it all on these streams. If you want to participate in Web Design for Dummies, there is a link in the description of this video where you can go ahead and submit a site for critique. It’s open to everybody. You don’t have to be a member of the inner circle. I’m going to put that link up right now, digitalambition.co slash inner circle. If you do want to join the inner circle, but you don’t have to be a member of the inner circle to participate in Web Design for Dummies and to get your website critiqued, just go to the link that is in the actual description of this video and you can submit your site for critique.
0:04:59
But if you want all the other great stuff that we do in the Inner Circle, you want to join over a thousand other agency owners and freelancers just like you, then the Inner Circle is definitely the place to be. All right, we’re going to go ahead and our viewership is growing here. That means people are coming in. We’re going to go ahead and pull up our first website. And let’s see if we can screen share this. Oh, wrong button. Here we go. Screen share.
0:05:27
Sorry, I’m a little rusty. If you go to St. Thomas, St. Martin for a little while, you get a little rusty. Okay. Ian Forrest, wedding and party DJ. Discofever.co.uk. All right, what do we have here? So let’s first just kind of scan our site here and just see what we’ve got going on. Decide where we wanna start with this critique. I can give the overall.
0:05:57
The overall vibe is very clean, it’s fun. I like the, right off the bat, I just say I like the, you’ve got a little header, nav bar here, and I like the rotating colors, the animated background color effect. I’ve seen this before on other sites, I’ve used it before on other sites. I think this is a good use of the effect here, and I think it matches the vibe of like, hey, wedding DJ kind of thing. All right, so wedding DJ hire in Sussex, Surrey and Kent. Wedding DJ hire. What do y’all feel about that headline? I’m not sold on it. I’m not sold on that.
0:06:41
I think the headline, I mean, obviously you’re going, like you’re trying to get the SEO going here, okay? So you’re pointing out key areas and is this, is that, was this crafted from, like, is this SEO speak? I don’t know. What do you guys feel about this headline? Because it’s not real English. It’s not wedding DJ hire, okay? It’s not, you know, you’re not speaking to me as the visitor. I think you’re speaking more to a search engine here.
0:07:17
That’s what it feels like. I’m here to make sure that your wedding is the best party that you and any of your friends have ever been to. I think you can take any of your friends, best party that you and your friends have ever been to. I don’t know that friends, like you’re talking to weddings. I’m going right, I’m diving right into copy here. We’re just diving right into copy. We’re going to get to the design and everything else in just a minute. Yeah, I’m not, I think there’s a better word than friends here. And this is just any of, this makes it a little too wordy. Okay, so you can clean this section up right here.
0:07:58
But overall I think you can have a stronger, you can still keep the SEO, right? You can still keep the SEO. Let’s inspect this. This would be your H1, okay? So you can have like a smaller H1 that’s, you know, wedding DJ for hire in Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, and then you can use a marketing headline that’s not the H1 to really speak to the visitor that’s on this website. That’s probably how I would approach it. I like the getting married here. So I do want to point out, because I’m seeing in the corner of my eye, that you have other, you do other things besides weddings.
0:08:36
You have weddings here, but then there’s other parties, right? So you could be a Christmas DJ, you could be a New Year’s DJ, a birthday party DJ, a theme night DJ, but your call to action is getting married, question mark. And I think a lot of people would maybe be critical of this and say, okay, but that call to action doesn’t speak to people who might want a birthday party DJ or, you know, these other things that you do. But I’m actually not going to be critical of this. I like the fact that you are like all in on, this is my target market. I do weddings. Yeah, I can do birthdays.
0:09:14
Yeah, I can do these other things. I can do I can DJ a Christmas Thing but that’s my bread and butter is Weddings and I want to be known for weddings and I want to rank for weddings and and so my call to action is centered around Weddings and I actually think that that’s a and let’s see where this goes Okay, so this goes to your wedding packages. Yeah, I like that. Because the truth is you can really focus in on one specific niche like wedding DJs and you’ll still get business for other types of DJing, 100%. Even if you didn’t list them here, even if you didn’t even have this page that said other parties, you just listed weddings.
0:10:00
People will literally contact you and be like, I just really like you as a DJ and will you do my Christmas party? They’ll do that. You’ll get, you’ll still, you’re not excluding these other things, I mean, unless you want to, you can always decide that you’re going to not do anything else. But you don’t even have to market the other kinds of DJing that you do or can do. You’ll still get business for that. So I like the fact that you’re going all in on just like, hey, let’s focus on the wedding thing. All right. Yeah, I would just clean up this copy right here. I think this leaves a bit to be desired. Let’s talk about design now and going down through.
0:10:37
So you’ve got your wedding DJ card, your photo booth card, your dance floor card. You’ve got, yeah, it’s a nice, it’s a clean design. I do like the bold red color for your calls to action. It stands out well. It’s a really good contrast on the page. Party DJ High. This has got to be, there’s got to be something. There’s got to be a reason you did this. Wedding DJ Higher. Alright, and where are you? The UK? Where are these places? I don’t even know. United Kingdom? Is that where we’re at? Alright, Wedding why are we all caps here wedding DJ hire? Okay, all right, I’m gonna do wedding DJ and We’re just gonna get a bunch of other We’re just gonna see what our options are for wedding DJ And of course a traps like anytime my live stream H H rafts is like decides to piss down its leg and you know it Is it because I’m searching in the UK I wouldn’t think so I don’t know hrs What are you doing if I was selling href software right now? This would be embarrassing Okay, come on. Let’s go. I Want to see what my options are what can I rank for for wedding DJ? Here we go Okay, so you got wedding DJ wedding DJ near me obviously. There it is. This is what you found right here. Is this what you found?
0:12:01
Wedding DJ hire? If you notice over here, the parent topic, this is a really good column to monitor. I don’t know if you used Ahrefs or you used, you know, Simrush or whatever, but I want you to see that all these are grouped together. They’re all wedding DJ. Wedding DJ is the thing you want to rank for. You are probably thinking to yourself, hey, if I get a little bit more specific maybe I can, it’ll be easier to rank. But what’s being indicated here is that Google interprets all of these terms as exactly the same thing, that somebody is looking for a wedding DJ. So, for higher and higher, there’s no difference there whatsoever and really there’s no difference that you just go wedding DJ Now there may be something in here. That’s not grouped under wedding DJ some other long tail variation of this term that You could definitely rank for and would make sense to target here’s wedding DJ in Surrey and that’s one of the ones that you had had put on your site.
0:13:15
And there’s Essex. Okay. So, I’m just continuing to look down, just seeing if there’s any other angles on this for like long tail variations. But what this is basically saying is that you can drop this word higher, right? Now, you can use like the phrase hire a DJ for your wedding, like use different variations that include the word hire, but you don’t need these exact match headings right here. Really what they do is they, you know, they don’t speak to the visitor when you have an opportunity. You should be trying to sell the visitor on these wedding packages, and that’s what Google wants you to do.
0:13:54
And Google recognizes that you’re a wedding DJ in these areas, and if you have enough domain authority and backlinks and things like that, you’re going to be ranking for this. If you have enough trust signals flowing to this site, you’re going to rank for these terms. You don’t have to list them, you know, specifically, okay? So I would change, I would, yeah, that definitely now is confirmed that this copy can all be switched up. Just target wedding DJ in these areas and and that’s that’s your goal All right back to sorry we went on I was saying we’re gonna do design and then we went off into SEO land for a minute It’s just because the copy kept getting me. I kept seeing it over and over and over again All right. I like the photo. I like the little tilt that you’ve got going on on these cards very slight tilt But it adds a little bit of life to these sections I’m not, you know, I’m not 100% sold on this.
0:14:51
This is just not a good photo to me. This one I like. I like this one for sure. It’s, you know, bride and groom having fun, letting loose, so to speak. So this is good. One thing I think is missing from this home page is a video. So I see you have videos right here. We’re going to get to that in just a second. But I think having one on the home page is your opportunity to really put the life of DJing at a wedding in front of somebody in like I get – because here’s what I’m missing. When I don’t have video, I’m missing a big part of the experience, right? If you had a video on the homepage right away front and center maybe like the best wedding that you’ve DJed, like the crowd is lit, whatever, you know, whatever you need to communicate here, I’m seeing it represented in photos but I want to experience it because how am I going to hire a DJ if I can’t really experience it now?
0:16:05
I can probably go to here and we’re gonna see some videos and I’m sure I can experience it here But you’re what you’re doing is you’re asking the visitor to go to another page and then just like make a selection here What am I making a selection based on I don’t really know I’m making I don’t know any of these people. So I would have to randomly like start clicking on videos. Not to mention here’s another critique that would come in here. You can do a lot more with the thumbnail stuff here. First of all, I believe this needs to be a grid. Asking somebody to scroll video after video after video. I want to see a grid. I want to see more videos at once to choose from. And then imagine if we had very lively thumbnails on all of these videos that were just as exciting as all the other stuff that you’ve got going on. You know, excitement, party, excitement, party, party, okay. Then I go to the videos page and it’s like, there you go.
0:17:02
It’s like dark, blurry, can barely read it, not even sure which one I should be clicking on. This page leaves a lot to be desired. So, on this page, I would definitely grid this up, make this a lot livelier with the thumbnails and let’s just click on one. Can you guys hear this? Well, right now there’s no audio playing, but let me know if you can hear this. Okay. So, yeah, I just think pick your best one, your best video, and it should be on this home page somewhere. That would be one suggestion for you. Okay.
0:17:49
I don’t know what the mixed minus, if you guys can hear my computer audio or not hear my computer audio. So clarify that in the chat when you get a chance. Let’s see what everybody is saying so far in the chat. OK. Let’s find where we were. Everybody’s still saying happy holidays. OK. Could you maybe keep the header, let me elevate these here, could you maybe keep the header as higher wedding DJ than maybe put the locations in the smaller text?
0:18:23
Well, ideally what we would have happen here is you would have service area pages, right? I think that’s one thing that’s missing here is there’s no service area pages. So you would want a wedding DJ in Sussex page, a wedding DJ in Surrey page, and a wedding DJ in Kent page, ideally. So that would be one thing I would say to add to this site going forwards is you want a, you want all of your service and really these are probably your main service areas but if we got more granular with it, there’s probably some surrounding towns and areas. You could also create service pages for and rank for those as well. So that’s how I would handle it. And then your H1s on these pages become very, very clear because it’s always, you know, wedding DJ in Sussex. Then you would have a marketing headline below that. Okay, I’m seeing a problem here.
0:19:20
Let me see if it’s, yeah, you see this problem right here? Okay, so I go to the, if I trigger any of these drop downs and then I leave it with my mouse, I can’t, it doesn’t go away. It just stays there. There it finally went, because I hovered over something that didn’t have a drop down. But if I don’t touch anything else around that nav, I cannot get rid of that drop. It’s just in my face at all times. I can’t get to that text back there. So there’s a little, I can’t hit Escape.
0:19:51
Escape’s doing nothing. I have to go back up and hover over something that does not have a drop down. So there’s a technical issue for you to investigate. Let’s see if we can keyboard nav this. Oh, womp, womp. Hold on. Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab. Nope, no keyboard nav. No keyboard nav.
0:20:11
So this is something that this menu needs to be accessibility-ified. That’s not a term. But you know what I’m talking about. Okay, let’s go back to, look, it stays up. That menu, I even switch pages, that sub-menu is just still like, hey, choose something. But I don’t want to. I want to keep interacting with this page. It’s trying to force me to choose something in the dropdown.
0:20:36
So this whole menu is whack. This whole menu needs to be fixed up, reworked, band-aided. OK, let’s keep going down here. So we’ve talked a little bit about copy. We talked a little bit about the design. We talked about what you can add to the page. Here’s something that’s missing, the footer. I don’t, I’m just not seeing a footer here. There’s like a little bit of a start of a footer, but you know, you’re missing some opportunity here for where are all the links to your pages again, okay, we’d like to see those.
0:21:12
I’m not seeing any copyright, I’m not seeing any legal page notices I’m not we’re missing a lot of that kind of cross your t’s dot your eyes kind of stuff down there And then a you know, we’re not using the the sandwich call to action technique. You’ve got your call to action Let’s see where so this is a blog we in the page with a blog call to action, which doesn’t make you any money Okay any money. Okay click here, click here. That’s another thing let’s let’s go back to just straight up calls to action. I don’t like click here, follow me, click here, click here, click here, click here, click read me, read me, read me, read me, read me. None of this does anything for the visitor. None of this does anything for SEO. None of this does anything for accessibility. This is in fact this accessibility nightmare. In fact let’s inspect. Show me your DOM.
0:22:04
Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for. The show me your DOM portion of Web Design for Domies. Let me zoom in and see what we’ve got going on. We’re going to inspect a card. This is one of the first things I always do when I want to check on maintainability, scalability, accessibility, those things. The ilities, okay? When we want to see how good we are with the ilities. So we see right off the bat. Let’s go.
0:22:29
Here’s our section. Then we have a container. This is built in bricks. Then we have a div which is our actual card and I want you guys to note here. There is no class on this card. This is a default bricks class. There’s no custom class on this card. So right off the bat, I’m getting the heebie-jeebies because I’m like, is this styled at the ID level? Is this styled at the ID level? Let’s see what we got going on.
0:22:59
So there’s that, wait a minute, hold on. The whole thing, then there’s a link wrapper inside of it. This has a box, oh gosh, look at this. Look at this, my friends. We have found our ID styling. So right off the bat, I know that this is a person who loves to copy and paste. They just copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste like all over the website. Anytime they need to change up those styles, just not going to, this is not past the scalability maintainability test. Let’s open this up. Also, this is a classic accessibility fail. So, anytime you have multiple types of content in a container, you can’t just link the container. You can’t, the whole thing is a link. You can’t, can’t just do that.
0:23:56
This is a nightmare for accessibility. So, then, and then what you’re going to see is additional problems. I can almost guarantee without even looking further. You’re going to see, let’s see, right here, this is a span, find out more, okay. Alright, at least there aren’t any other links. It doesn’t appear inside. So we don’t have a multiple link issue going on. But we’re still not accessible. to do this correctly. Here’s your body with your H3 right there. So this would ideally come first in the DOM right there.
0:24:31
And then you would actually use order, the order property, to flip this back to the top. I don’t know if this is a flex container by default. There it is. Okay, good. So now visually you have the correct structure, but HTML-wise you also have the correct structure because now our H3 is the first thing inside of the card. This H3 now should also be the link. And then you use the clickable parent technique to expand this link to the entire card’s clickable area.
0:25:09
This is a dummy button basically, which it still appears to be a dummy button. Yeah, I don’t see any other link in it, so that’s fine. It would remain a dummy button like that, but when people select the card then what will be announced is wedding DJ. Now, I, you know, this is, I would say this should be like wedding DJ Yeah, something like that. So I don’t think just the term wedding DJ is, I don’t know. We can also see here is that this is not a list of services, right? So technically this should be a list. Right here would be the, this container would be a UL. So that should say UL right there. this card right here, all of these should be your LIs, your list items. And then it’s basically your list of services now, because that’s what it is. So that’s how you would start to fix that DOM structure. So we need clickable parent on there. Now I’m going to go check down here, because I saw these, and I’m just going to see if we can find the problem I normally find. Well, there’s one right there. So these don’t need to be h5 so these need to be h3 And what I’m guessing is you made it an h5 because you maybe wanted the size of it to be an h5 But it still technically needs to be an h3 and then you can use CSS to make it appear like it’s the size of an h5 and There you go, so there’s a link here’s the let’s see. Yep. So here’s the problem. I normally find I didn’t find it on this card up here, but I have found it down here.
0:26:53
And this is the multiple links issue. And let me see if the whole card is… So this whole card is not clickable. Yep. So, but look at this. I can click on the image, okay? So the image is a link. So we’ve got one link in our card. The H3 is a link, that’s two links. And then down here the read more or it says read me is also a link.
0:27:21
So again for accessibility when somebody is keyboard navigating this, it’s going to announce this photo as a link, then they’re going to have to keyboard navigate to this heading which is also going to announce as a link and then it’s going to make them go to this read me which is also a link and it’s going to announce that and they have no idea what the context of any of these things is. Okay, when it announces the photo, where’s that going to take me? When it announces it here, okay, now that’s actually what should be the link. But then I go down here and it’s like read me and I don’t know, am I in the same card? Am I in the same element? It’s an accessibility nightmare.
0:27:58
So you never want three elements or two elements, really more than one element linking to the same place in the same component. So this all would have to be rebuilt for proper accessibility and HTML5 compatibility, yada, yada, yada. All right, anyway, back to the main page and then we’re going to move on to a different site in just a second. I do want to analyze this blog for SEO real quick before we leave, but the sandwich technique. We need a big, bold call to action down here, because what I was getting to is you don’t really have any calls to action. Getting married takes me to a services.
0:28:33
The only call to action on this page, even up here you don’t even have one. There’s contact me in the nav, there’s get a quote right here. But other than that, it’s all just take me to different pages. Yeah, this is going to take me to, it’s all routing me to the same pages as before. But what if I just decided, I’m on the home page, I decided I want to hire you, and I made that decision around here somewhere. You’re gonna make me go to another page in order to hire me or hire you? So these should just be calls to action.
0:29:08
This slash weddings slash weddings. See, all this right here is just wasted. Let me see if I can highlight. Right here. This is just a bunch of wasted space. You’re saying the same thing right here that you said right here. And it’s the exact same call to action. So you’re wasting an opportunity. This can be a get a quote right here. This can be get a quote right here.
0:29:32
They can get to Party DJ. Well they should be able to get to it from your services grid. That’s kind of another thing. This is a, it’s starting to get a little, it’s a little disjointed, right? There’s only some of the options available here. There’s like an additional option here, but this option is a duplicate of this option. So I think in terms of like how you’re presenting, you know, what is available to people, that can be a little bit more organized here. The other thing with a business like this, I need to hear from a lot of, like, this is an important day, all right?
0:30:01
I’m a bride for a second. Okay. I’m a bride now. I’m a bride. I’m about to hire a DJ. I get one shot at this. I get one shot at this. You better have more than two testimonials, my friend. I need to hear from every other bride you’ve ever done business with. Okay.
0:30:17
So this is an example where I’d put four to six testimonials here, maybe eight testimonials. I want it just, I want someone scrolling to just be hit with like look at all these people who love this right and their day was perfect to I’m like okay I don’t know if I can I don’t know if I can put all my faith in to people so I need a lot of testimonials here let’s let’s get that beefed up big call to action down here so when they get to the end of the page it’s right in their face you know nice a nice, bold, hire me kind of call to action there. All right, let’s look at the SEO perspective. So let’s just scan these. Five wedding regrets from real couples.
0:31:01
Okay. We’re going to go here. We’re going to go up here. Wedding regrets. I’m going to put this on US now. Okay. Because your content marketing is not really targeted to a specific area. I mean it helps you in that area by default, but really when we’re just getting ideas, it’s not like area specific. All right, so you’ve probably found wedding regrets, all right, as a keyword.
0:31:28
All right, five wedding planning hacks. I bet that’s a, you know, if we did wedding planning, see what our options are there. So there’s a checklist, okay. This is an example of like doing SEO. Also gives you ideas for freebies that you can give away. So not only can you rank, but you can also have a freebie. And this could even be shifted towards like wedding planning DJ checklist, right? Like if you’re hiring a DJ, here’s the things you need to think about for your wedding. Again, because wedding again because this is your one and only day. They better be able to get it right. You better have the right songs playing at the right time. You better be able to put in your request for which songs are going to play.
0:32:15
Which songs are we not going to play? I don’t want you to touch, you know, like we don’t need to be playing WAP at the wedding, right? Can we make sure that’s crossed off the playlist? That kind of thing. Right? So here’s an opportunity for you to have a freebie that they can download to help them prepare for their day. But now you also have a lead capture. All right.
0:32:37
And, and you get this idea from doing a little bit of SEO research, right? Okay. So, um, there’s some ideas there. You’ve got some real weddings mixed in here. Most requested party songs of 2020. Okay, so I can see that this is done fairly well. Now, the next test would be we click on it and see what’s going on. This is where it’s not done so well. So in order for SEO to really, like in order for Google to really want to rank this post, right?
0:33:11
One, it’s a little odd that we don’t have, that I have space for a sidebar, but there is no sidebar. And you’re missing a big opportunity here, like a big, bold call to action that floats down the page with them, sticky, would be nice here. Big opportunity right here. You’re just wasting a bunch of space right here, okay? You could put categories of your post. You could put your latest post. You could put a lot of things here. You could put your author bio, right?
0:33:35
That would help. So, right now, being a blank space, that doesn’t help at all. But now we look here and we have to talk about readability, right? Nobody wants to read this, right? It looks to me like a giant wall of text. There’s no spacing between the bullet items and there’s no headings in here. No headings whatsoever. So, we’re missing out on SEO opportunities. This is an example of like the SEO research, the SEO strategy can be correct, but the execution of the content leaves a lot to be desired and therefore maybe we don’t get the results that we wanted to get or that we were hoping to get. I would like to see more photos in here. I would like to see, you know, there’s a lot that can be done to really spice this up and liven it up.
0:34:26
We look at another one, let’s take a look at the regrets. Guests that don’t show up, wedding cars, wedding favors, buffets, okay. So it’s a little light on content. Yeah, there’s again, no, let’s inspect this real quick. Why are these age sixes? Can I ask that question? Is it because you want them to be that size? Because you went from, if we talk about hierarchy of the page, right? Here’s your H1, which is correct. That should be your H1. Where’s the 2, 3, 4, and 5, right? We can’t get to 6 if we haven’t used a 2, a 3, a 4, and a 5, right? That’s just basic HTML structure. You can’t just skip. You can’t just be like, oh, let’s just do a six for whatever reason.
0:35:14
These need to be H2s. So all these are H2s and they need to have a little more context. If I’m just reading this, it can be like wedding regret number one, guests that don’t show up. Wedding regret number two, wedding cars. Now this just needs to be reworded right here. Um, what about the car is the regret? What about the favor is the regret? What about the buffet is the regret? You’ve got a lot of opportunity here to be more descriptive in what the regret actually is and then you’re reiterating it with this copy, but you need to tell what the regret is with the headline.
0:35:53
All right, that’s going to get you ranked. These like little generic headings are not going to get you ranked. So that’s a little bit of on page, right? And then you’ve got to spice these up. We’ve got to have more than one photo, right? I would put a photo after every single one of these, okay? So guests that don’t show up, show me an empty wedding. Wedding cars, show me a shitty wedding car, okay? Like you get the point, right? Show me terrible food, a photo here at a wedding.
0:36:20
Or a cake that’s all messed up, like it’s like the leaning tower of pizza, okay? Whatever it is, like give me visuals and that’s going to help get you ranked. Whereas just hey, here’s this syntax that answers the query, that doesn’t work anymore. Okay, have we done this enough? Have we done enough on this site? Let’s check out what people have got going on in the chat. All right. Hi, from Florida. I think the website should look more visually cool. Say shapes, mass, etc. And of course, video. Says Raptor X.
0:37:02
Yeah, I mean, you can always liven things up. The thing is, you know, that doesn’t sell people on hiring a wedding DJ as much as they think it might, right? This is, as a design, this is perfectly fine. This can absolutely sell wedding DJ services all day long. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s visually appealing. It’s clean. Okay. So this is going to get the job done.
0:37:27
The design is not any part of the problem here really. It’s the copy is more of the problem, right? So the copy leaves a lot to be desired. The calls to action leave a lot to be desired. And you know, let’s go back to what I just said about the checklist, okay? I always look at a company’s website and I say to myself, who has the opportunity to convert here? Because there’s people coming in all different stages of the sales cycle. And you’re going to get people at what’s called the top of the funnel, you’re going to get people at the middle of the funnel, and you’re going to get people at the bottom of the funnel.
0:38:04
If you don’t know what these terms mean, top of the funnel basically means that they’re in a information collecting, you know, just basic general interest stage, but they’re not ready to make a decision. They’re not really going to just say, oh, you know, F it and sign up and hire somebody, right? They’re not there yet. They’re still looking at all their options. Middle of the funnel, in fact, top of the funnel, they’re not even convinced they need a DJ yet. Maybe someone just told them they need a DJ or they need to start looking into DJs and they’re like, ah, do I really want to spend the money on a DJ?
0:38:38
I don’t know. That could be a top of the funnel person. A middle of the funnel person is like, I know I need a DJ, but I’m not sure which one and I got to do more research. I got to be convinced on who’s the best option to go for, I’m trying to, you know, get referrals and whatever. Okay, bottom of the funnel is like, I’m ready to hire a DJ right now. You say all the right things, I’m signing on the dotted line right now. I’ve got to get this thing booked, I want it off, I want the box checked, I don’t want to think about it anymore, I’m ready to hire.
0:39:09
That’s the bottom of the funnel person, okay? So we have to have a website that is able to capture, hopefully, all stages of the funnel, not just bottom of the funnel people. Almost every website by default goes after bottom of the funnel people, and that’s what their calls to action go after. And so like get a quote is like a bottom of the funnel kind of call to action. It’s like, hey, you’re pretty close to signing up, so let’s go ahead and get you a quote.
0:39:37
But if I’m top of the funnel and I’m middle of the funnel, what are my options? And there are none. And this is like a mistake that a lot of websites make is there are just none. Now, if you’re using a specific strategy or, you know, you’re still in the early stages of doing things, you might only have had time to get a bottom of the funnel call to action together. Because the middle of the funnel call to action and the top of the funnel call to action, they take a little bit more creativity, they take a little bit more work to set up. So think about the checklist, right? The checklist is a good middle of the funnel call to action. They’re not ready to hire somebody yet, but they are collecting a lot of information and they’re trying to get their ducks in a row and they’re trying to figure out what they need to be worried about and thinking about in this process of hiring a DJ.
0:40:24
So you put a checklist in front of them, they’re going to take that. They’re not going to get a quote yet because they’re not ready, but they will take a checklist. And then by giving them a checklist, you now have the ability to nurture them from middle of the funnel to bottom of the funnel. So the checklist builds trust, it informs them, and then you send them some follow-ups and those follow-ups get them to book with you. And because you gave them the checklist and it wasn’t the other DJ, you’re going to get hired. They’re not going to go choose the other DJ. When you’re the one informing them and helping them and giving them value and building trust, you’re going to be at the top of their minds.
0:41:04
You’re going to be the person that they most likely are going to go with when it’s time to sign on the dotted line. That’s a middle of the funnel call to action. So we need to build some of those in as well and content is a perfect way to do that because what a middle of the funnel people consume most of, content, right? Because they’re trying to do research, they’re trying to learn things, they’re trying to figure things out. So that’s some stuff that we can build in. And again, that’s where your wasted space comes in. So you could have this up here actually.
0:41:34
You can put those kinds of things like where’s your freebies, resources, things like that. You can also start building your local network, okay? Where’s the list of all your wedding planners that you’re friends with? Where’s the list of all the venues that you’ve done stuff at? I don’t see any of that stuff here. That’s all going to help with local SEO. It’s going to, again, help build the network. Now if I put a link to all these wedding planners, maybe they will link to me on their websites. You can kind of set that up, right? You start to build those relationships.
0:42:05
All the venues should have you linked on their sites, in their resource, and you should do the same to them. So you wanna build this strong local network. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of missing. It’s not the design though. It’s not, there’s nothing, I wouldn’t put any more time and effort into design. I would start putting my time and effort into better content, better copy and a more robust website targeting all of these other things that I’m starting to list out here.
0:42:32
All right, let me get back to the chat. All right, everybody says good to go. All right, might be worth hiring someone to create a promo video. Not sure all those videos do a good job of matching the fantasy engaged couples have around their special day. This is a really, really good comment. Okay? You definitely, like, not just giving them, hey, here’s random videos of people dancing to music. Let’s put a narrative sampler promo video together that really, you know, pulls at those heartstrings with the bride, right? She watches that and, you know, she’s melting in your hands.
0:43:10
She’s like, no, we gotta have this DJ. This is the DJ we gotta have. That’s what you got to kind of to get together. Firing your party. I don’t know what that means. Show me your dom. Yes. Okay. My head’s in the way. Of what? My head’s always in the way. I don’t know what was down there on the right side that my head would have been in the way of. All right. I feel like a dark theme would go well with the party theme. It being so light takes away from it a bit. Maybe, I mean you could make it work with a dark theme obviously. I don’t think it’s a problem with it being a light theme. It’s easy for people to consume. Please move yourself to the top right corner.
0:43:49
Oh, the dev tools. That’s what it was in front of, the dev tools. Okay. All right. Well, am I going to be, see up here I’ll be like covering the nav or something, you know, it’s always a problem, every, everywhere I go. All right, how would you set the card as a whole link but when you tab through it, it goes to the button and announces it properly? That’s the, that’s the whole clickable parent technique. So I have multiple videos on clickable parent on, on this channel, so you’re definitely going to want to go watch them.
0:44:20
Here we go, here’s some code for you guys to fix this. Kevin’s head, transform, rotate 360 degrees, transform, origin, top left. Okay, you guys, so if you just pop that in it’ll it’ll know it won’t fix it All right. Let’s see question. Do you have any link to documentation about the clickable parenting? Yeah. Okay. Just go watch the videos WAP is a must at any wedding even the Orthodox ones. Okay Let’s see Weddings and parties. Oh, okay. All right, and we’ve got, hold on, I’ve got to ban the, I’ve got to ban the, yeah, the bad people. Okay, here we go. Let’s go with a different site now.
0:44:57
So we’re done with Ian Forrest. Thank you Ian for submitting your site. Let’s go ahead and bring in this one. This is website number two. Dynamit, Dynamit, Dynam IT, Dynam IT. Okay, right off the bat, we have a just pronunciation issue here. Hold on. How can I get this translated? This is…where’s my little translate button? Hold on.
0:45:26
It’s still loading. It says, waiting for translate.go. Okay, there it is. English, thank you. Always translate Dutch, thank you. Okay. Oh, I said English and it didn’t translate it. Where’s the translation? Okay, we may need to come back to this one in just a sec because it’s it’s loading something. I don’t know what it’s loading We’ll come back to that Okay, we’ve got the mystery of history Okay, the mystery of history comm World history curriculum of all ages. Am I in front of anything? Is my big head blocking anything? No, okay, not currently.
0:46:07
All right. So let’s just do a scroll, a little scan. See what we’ve got going on. Clean, it’s clean. Okay, all right, let’s go back to the top. World History Curriculum for All Ages. The mystery of history and his award-winning world history curriculum written from a biblical worldview to guide students through a meaningful Engaging and historically accurate journey from ancient times to modern Okay, so it’s very the lead is very clear as to what’s going on here It is for all ages Okay All right Let’s keep going Easy to use for all ages.
0:46:46
As a living subject, the mystery of history is designed for the whole family with age-appropriate activities for hands-on fun, enriching research and purposeful discussion. Okay. All right. Okay. We have a quote. Has history been, here’s, now you’re speaking to the person. Okay, has history been hard for you?
0:47:05
We understand. Most of us grew up on boring, complicated history, are too busy to pull all the pieces together, are desperate to streamline our teaching for the whole family, have gaps in our own understanding of world history. Good news, we’ve done all the hard work for you. We’ve got look ahead, book, okay, choose, review. All right, I’m not sold on this section right here. We’re going to come back to this. Engaging world history loved by the whole family, kids, parents, view more. I like this. This is interesting.
0:47:44
This brings a lot of legitimacy to us. It’s like instead of showing people’s head shots, it actually shows handwritten notes. That’s interesting. I’m a little confused as to why there are multiple notes per testimonial. Like shouldn’t I just be looking at Robert’s note right here? Like, I see Robert, right? But for some reason, I also see Michaela’s and Michael’s and Emma’s. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do like the concept.
0:48:17
I like the concept of like, hey, let’s really show them the handwritten testimonials that we’ve received. That’s a good touch. I like it. I like the visual right here. This is a good visual representation of the product. But is it books? Is it online? Is it…maybe it says this right here. Okay.
0:48:42
Companion guide. Student reader. Hmm. Okay. Best seller bundle. Bestseller bundle, four volume set. Digital companion guide. Okay now I think it’s just, oh wait, audio books. Hold on, are they audio? Oh, yep, Q1 audio books.
0:49:04
Okay, if they’re not physical books, this creates a little confusion. If these aren’t physical books, if this is just audio books, I think maybe a different visual representation would work better. We can get to all of that in just a second. Okay, so these are some samples I guess. Yeah, okay. Oh no, this is a podcast. All right, so there is a podcast involved. Okay, all right. I’m just getting – I’ve got to get a big picture of what’s going on here in order to really start to dive into how we’re presenting all of this. Volume 3, courses, homeschool history online courses. Okay, so that was my initial question, right? Who is this for? You’re saying it’s a world history curriculum for all ages, but this is only for specific people.
0:49:57
One is people who want to learn about biblical history. Two is people who maybe need a history curriculum for a certain reason, like they’re being homeschooled. So if I’m in public school, my kid already does a history curriculum. If I’m in a private school, they already have a history curriculum that they do who needs a history curriculum probably it’s homeschool people, right? So what I need you to do or what I would ask you to do or I would advise you to do is Call out those people front and center right here when they arrive, right? World history homeschool curriculum for all ages or you know something like that Call out the specific and and by the way, is this for? I for, I guess you would be selling this to parents, there is a potential maybe you are wanting to like, oh but anybody can use it, okay, I get it that anybody could use it, right, but in order to really sell it, you have got to sell it to that specific individual that you are targeting and I guess that is home school parents, right.
0:51:08
So I would say let us call them out explicitly right here and let us speak to their need for this. You did this a little bit later okay like okay it’s history’s been hard to understand but really the idea is let’s say let’s say we are getting ready to homeschool our kids and we’re looking at alright we need a math curriculum, we need this curriculum, we need that curriculum we’re in a this you’ve got it and this is why it’s so important to identify a specific kind of person that is going to buy this and that you’re going to want to sell this to.
0:51:41
Because you have to now put yourself in their shoes. Alright, I’m in the process of putting together, here’s my math, here’s my science, what is my history going to be? And you need to speak to them from that angle. It can’t just, you know, talk about the actual mystery of history curriculum, right? It’s award winning and it’s, you know, written from a biblical, okay, those things are good if I care about those things. But I’m in a situation right now where I’m either I need a history curriculum or I don’t like the one we already have and I’m looking to replace it. You need to call out the specific type of person that you’re selling this to. Put yourself in their shoes with your copy and answer those like what are their problems? And if you interviewed a hundred different homeschool parents, you might get 30 different responses of, you know, what was your problem when finding a history curriculum?
0:52:32
Okay. And they list this and this, and there are 30 different things. But what you’re going to see is that like three of them overlap. Everybody says these three problems right here. So you stop caring about all the other 24 and you highlight those three and you just hit those three over and over and over again and now suddenly somebody’s reading this and they’re like, Oh my God, they know exactly the situation I’m in. That’s exactly what I was concerned about. Oh, that’s exactly the gap I’m trying to fill. Now I’m in, right? So we’ve got a, um, right now you’re talking about the curriculum and how great it is, but you’re not really talking to the specific person that you’re trying to sell this to. And I think that is a little bit of the problem here.
0:53:17
And you could very well be selling these, you know, I’m not saying you’re not getting any sales, we don’t even, I don’t know what your numbers are, I don’t know what the results are, I don’t know if this is struggling or if it’s going gangbusters, but what I can say is that even if you’re doing well, things like this can make it do better, alright? So maybe, and it’s something to test, you know, I’m not even saying necessarily that 100% this is going to help. I would say this angle needs to be tested. Okay, let’s check Dom. Let’s show me your Dom for a minute here. So we choose something. We got to identify a global element, right? Like this or this. So let’s show me your Dom. All right. Oh, we have an article tag. OK, so we’re going to come down and we’re going to look in here.
0:54:07
What is our link? Uh-oh. The whole thing is a link. OK. Then we’re going to come in here. We do have a picture tag. All right. I usually use a figure tag, but image. OK, OK. OK, here’s this div over here.
0:54:24
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. OK. Oh, I don’t see any classes here. I don’t see any classes. All right, here’s our age three. OK, div, bricks, basic text. Here’s a P. OK. OK. All right, I think we’re styling at the.
0:54:47
Oh wait, hold on. No, you’ve written this CSS. No? No, I don’t know if you have. What’s going on here? What is this? Okay, I don’t, this is loading in like a separate style sheet. Let’s go back. Let’s refresh this. Okay, I’m not seeing, there’s definitely no BIM here. There’s definitely, here’s a random just margin bottom S going on. So we are using automatic CSS, but we’re missing the our BIM. Like where’s our BIM at? All right, let’s keyboard navigate this. Okay, so I can correctly keyboard navigate this.
0:55:21
But let’s see how this is announced. Just, let’s just give this a shot, hang on. Cover your ears, maybe this is gonna be loud, maybe it’s not gonna be loud. Accessibility shortcuts. Oh, hold on, wrong thing. Accessibility short. Is that it? VoiceOver on Chrome. Visited.
0:55:39
Link. Four volume set. Article. Link. Best seller bundle. Volume one. Ancient history. Article. Link. Shop haul products.
0:55:49
Main. VoiceOver off. Alright, so no real issues there. Alright, there’s just a, you know, a classic scalability, maintainability problem. Like we’re going to get it probably here as well. So we have the whole thing linked. Here’s our picture tag. Okay, so there’s just no…yeah, look at all this…yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there’s no custom classes. I don’t actually know what’s going on here.
0:56:15
I don’t like that…this is that Bricks thing that we’ve been talking about this…I call it a bug. I refer to this as a bug. But the fact that Bricks just attaches like its basic classes to this other class. I think what’s happening here is you’ve turned off IDs in bricks so that there’s no IDs. Well, no, there are IDs here. But it’s acting like these are all styled at the ID level. Well, you’ve got some BIM classes going on here. You just don’t have them on these components.
0:56:48
I don’t know. There’s a lot of inconsistency going on here. Hold on. What’s this? All right. Here’s the A. Way over here. Container, transparent, home product card, dark card hover. OK, see this dark card hover doesn’t match this home product card, but also home product. This isn’t a home product card, because you could use this card anywhere.
0:57:12
Why is it a home products card? Right? So this is, this would be an example of like, um, a BIM error, right? An error in using them that you’re trying to use it, but it’s an error in how it’s being used. You, you want to avoid like specificity like this, where it’s like, Oh, this is the product card for the homepage. But then what happens is you get to a different page and you’re like, I want to use that card again. And suddenly you’re like using home product cards on a not a home page.
0:57:39
So that’s an example of like that’s just a naming issue right here. But as you can see, like look at all this styling that’s not attached to that class. It’s attached to these other random, these are bricks generated classes. And that’s where your styling is attached to. So there’s just a lot of like, this stuff is everywhere. And when stuff’s like everywhere, it’s not automatically scalability maintain a bit of a nightmare So somebody comes along behind you and they have to do something or you come back We talked about the three-month rule, right you come back three months from now and you’re like, oh my god, where well what’s going on?
0:58:12
I don’t know what happened. It’s stuff is everywhere. It’s just an absolute nightmare So yeah, that’s the dumb the dumb side of this critique has failed the checks. Okay, let’s go to courses, homeschool history. So you call it out here, right? Why wasn’t it called out on the homepage? Why are we calling out your people on a sub page, right? That they may never get to because the homepage didn’t convince them that they’re in the right place. All right, so we have volume three, lesson sample, volume four, lesson sample.
0:58:50
Where’s volume two and one? And again, you might think that this is obvious. Oh, well if you did this and you did that and you went to this page, then you would know. But people don’t, they scan. People scan. They’re like, I’m just trying to figure out where do I start? Shouldn’t I be starting with volume one, it feels like? So I go to courses and I canít find volume 1, I canít find volume 2, I just see volume 3 and then I see volume 4.
0:59:18
So Iím a little lost, Iím a little confused there. Letís just quickly go through some other pages here. Overall, the design, the design is, I like the design. Itís very clean. Everything is good. So now I have to go in to critique the actual copy, the order things are presented in. And I think that’s where there’s mostly room for improvement here. So let’s say I wanted to buy this. I get to here. About the course, what will you learn. This is all driven by, I can already tell, this is all I believe, this is, because it feels different, right?
0:59:57
It’s like now we’re on a different color scheme. We went from dark to light. It feels like this was generated by another plug-in, you know, maybe some sort of LMS type deal going on here. So, there might be some limitations to your layout there. I don’t know. Let’s add this to cart real quick. Let’s view the cart. Okay. All right, okay, that all seems pretty straightforward.
1:00:29
Okay, all right. Okay, let’s go to resources. I want to see the blog. I don’t know if there’s a lot of SEO opportunity here, probably, if I had to guess. Why can’t I go to the blog? Uh-uh, womp womp. Oh, no, no, wrong one. Why can’t I go to Linda’s blog? Can I go here? Oh, oh, wait.
1:00:55
Oh, I see. See? Guys, I do this for a living. I’m confused. If I’m confused, your visitors are really confused. That the fact that this changes, well, some of them change. See, this one changes the content here. This one changes the content here. This one does not change no content. It takes you to this events page.
1:01:15
And then this takes you to a newsletter. OK. So this is a UX. I would say that this is a UX issue. If I click on Home Education podcast, take me to a podcast page, OK? Just trying to load up two little things right here, and then making me click here to actually get to the page that I’m trying to get to, that’s a UX nightmare, as we would call it.
1:01:35
OK, here’s the actual blog. 12 days of homeschool, 12 days of homeschool, okay. None of this is SEO driven. I can just tell by reading the headings of these articles. This is really just content that you are giving people so that they can get an idea of you and your personality, which is all fine and dandy. I’m just saying if you’re if you want to be using SEO, this really doesn’t do anything for you. And I’m not seeing any that are obvious. Okay, like this one, this one is SEO, right?
1:02:16
What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? I can I can imagine I don’t even have to go into HRS. I can just you can tell when you’ve done this a while like who is King Tut. Okay, this can be ranked for, but let’s go in now and look at the actual content here. Okay, good. We need to break these up into smaller paragraph chunks, but overall there’s some spacing issues here like with your quote and against this other text, but oh, well this heading doesn’t, that leaves a lot to be desired. That leaves a lot to be desired.
1:02:55
These subheadings are not getting the job done in terms of SEO? Well, this one right here is. This is an example of a good one, okay? Here’s good, here’s bad, right? And then bad and bad, all right? So in terms of on page, we’ve got the right concept, okay, and then we put this in, what are the Dead Sea Scrolls. We can also see, all right, what are the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the likelihood of ranking for this is slim to none.
1:03:30
We can actually go in here and check this out. And we can see, okay, you’re battling against Wikipedia, IMJ.org, Britannica, which is an encyclopedia company the Smithsonian history.com Dead Sea Scrolls.com alright I can tell you right off the bat this is a this isn’t and I’m just doing this for people who are interested in SEO maybe starting to learn SEO and wondering why their content marketing is not working or what they should be doing in terms of their content marketing just got to go into different angles in these things are people are going to get bored. If we just do the same things all the time, people are going to get bored. So, let’s talk about this for just a second. This is a situation where you decide, why am I writing this article? Am I writing this article to try and rank and get traffic and bring in new eyeballs and visitors or am I writing this article because I need to use this article for something else, for people just to find on the blog and inform them or do I want to run ads to this article, do I want to use it for brand awareness, there’s a lot of things you can use an article for.
1:04:38
If you’re not going to use it, if it’s not important to your, maybe I’m going to write it because I want to send it in an email and it’s going to be part of my email sequence that goes out. That’s a valid way to use an article. If you don’t say, I don’t care if it ranks i needed for this other thing over here that i’m doing in marketing that’s perfectly fine okay not every article has to be for s e l but if you’re not using it in your emails and you’re not using it in for ads and you’re not using it for anything else and you’re like why hope it ranks this is an example of an article you just would not write it’s a waste of time all of this you well all the time you wasted all that time.
1:05:15
If that’s your only objective, because you come over here, and this is when people are doing keyword research, right? There is one other reason you might write this article, knowing that you’re not going to rank for it. And that is, I still need Google to understand that I’m an expert in these things. So the content is there, so that when Google crawls your site, Google is associating this expert driven content with you and your website. Okay, that’s still an important angle, but you got to recognize we’re not ever going to rank for this. And so what most people will do is they’ll look at the volume, oh, 3.2 thousand searches a month.
1:05:54
Oh my God, look at that traffic potential. That’s what TP means because the variations of this term right here all added up if you are ranking in the top spots, there’s a lot of traffic that can be driven to your site based on these terms, okay? There’s also a CPC value attached to this term which means that people are actually advertising against this term. So that’s a good sign in terms of SEO. The bad sign and it’s not just this keyword difficulty, I mean that’s a red flag, but the bad sign is here. When you actually analyze the specific keyword and you go down, there’s two ways we can analyze this. I want you to see this chart is actually really important, okay?
1:06:36
But this list is what’s most important. This is a manual analysis of this keyword to see can I possibly rank for this term. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now we’re gonna, oh, eight, okay. I don’t know this one, the Gospel Coalition. Okay, I don’t recognize this. So now what we can do, but we’ve gotten seven positions out of 10, because we don’t care about 11, 12, 13, that’s not worth writing the article for.
1:07:07
I care about three, five, seven. Can I be in there somewhere? Even if I can’t be one. Obviously we want to be one or two or three. But there’s just times where it’s just not going to happen, right? But can I be four? Can I be five? Because I’m still going to get some good traffic off that. All right? But here’s what we would do. Further manual analysis, okay? Well, I can already tell. Christianity.com. I don’t have to look these up. What I was about to do is go up here to Site Explorer and I was going to put in that URL, okay? And I just want the actual URL of the site. All right, and we’re going to look this up.
1:07:42
We’re going to look at this number right here. This is what you care about, okay? 81. Now, let’s do a little, here’s the mysteryofhistory.com. So we’re going to grab this, if I can get it. All right. Is my big head covering something else up again that you guys need to see? Okay, let me look at this. No, no? All right, we’re good.
1:08:00
All right, I’m going to put this in. So, remember that number, 81. This is the eighth or ninth ranked site for this term is an 81. The mysteryofhistory.com is a 35, which is actually not bad, okay? Not bad. We usually, you know, see a lot lower than this. Now the article, right, the URL rank is going to come in to play a factor here as well. But in general, you look at a term like this and you see can’t ever be beat. You’re not going to beat Wikipedia. You’re not going to beat these DR 80, DR 90 website.
1:08:34
You’re not going to beat them for this term. It’s just not ever going to happen. Okay. And then you look at this chart. So what does this chart show you? This chart shows you the movement of the rankings. Okay. And we can look over the last year and I want you to see right here, as of September 2022, that was three months ago, as of September 2022, there has been no change in these top rankings. You know what that means?
1:09:02
We look for volatility in these charts. Volatility is fairly good for you as a newcomer trying to rank for a term. When there’s no volatility, it basically means Google is satisfied that these are the top 10 best articles on the internet for this term right here. Google is just, it’s done. Google doesn’t, it’s not even testing other people out. Back here, it was testing some people out. It was like, okay, it threw this one in, tested it for a little while, went up and down. It threw this yellow one in. Then it actually decided, well, this yellow one is actually there.
1:09:38
It took it out for a little bit, probably put something else in its place, then it decided, no, no, the yellow one was better and brought the yellow one back, right? And so, and since then, the yellow one has stayed there. It took this orange one out for a little while, tested a different one, and then it put the orange one back, decided, no, that one we tested wasn’t as good. This is what Google does. Google plays with every now and then, it’s just going to throw one in there and be like, do you do better? Oh, you didn’t do better. Okay, let’s put the other one back.
1:10:06
That’s kind of what it does, right? But you see a term with no volatility, Google’s not testing anymore. Okay? It will eventually, but the likelihood that it’s going to be your article that it tests, no, slim to none. So this is just an article where you look at the term and you’re like, we’re not ranking for this, period. If we’re not Britannica, Wikipedia, Smithsonian, we don’t have a DR90 website. We’re not going to rank for this term. And so you don’t even write it unless you need it for a different reason.
1:10:34
So that’s just a little extra content there related to some of this SEO stuff. Now tell me in the chat, is this valuable for you to talk about this kind of stuff or do you want to stick to DOMs and copy and all this other stuff that we’ve got going on. Let me know in the chat. All right, let’s see what we’ve got going on for comments. Okay, Nicholas says they are physical books. Okay. All right, well that makes it a little even less clear because then it said audio books, but now this is physical books. I see though how that could be confusing. Yes. Okay. Agreed. We need to guide our clients to highlight homeschool, but they wouldn’t budge and wanted it to be for everyone. Yeah. So that’s where I would sit them down and I would just say, do you want it to be for everyone or do you want to actually make more money? You know, like it’s, you’ve got to have a really, uh, maybe you did, maybe you did and they just wouldn’t budge whatsoever. Um, then it’s a situation where you monitor You monitor What they wanted the performance of what they wanted you monitor that with the analytics and then six months from now you’re like hey Let’s try a different headline on the home page Let’s do some a B testing clients will almost always agree to split testing right because it’s not like no Let me just override what you thought if you just approach them and say hey, we can start doing some testing now Let’s go ahead and test out some different headlines. Let’s test out some different copy on the homepage and let’s see if it makes you more money. I’d love to know if it makes you more money or not because I’m sure you’ll be happy with that if it does.
1:12:12
And let’s let the data decide. If it doesn’t make you more money, then we’ll just put it back to the way it was, no harm, no foul, right? But just convince them to do a test. And then what’s going to happen is you do a test and if your test wins, now that’s like money in the bank for you in terms of trust, authority, expertise, okay? So now you can, and by the way, why would you do this? Because this leads to potentially other business with the website, right? There’s other things that they can do with this website in terms of SEO that get you more money, okay? So we can do some ongoing SEO with a retainer, or we can just add a few pages that are targeted. We can do an SEO sprint.
1:12:53
But if they don’t really have any real world proof that you know what you’re talking about other than that you built the site for them, then they’re less likely to buy in. But if you do a split test and your idea wins and makes them more money, it’s very easy to come and be like, okay, and now the next thing I want to do is, and they’re like, well, that last thing you did made us a lot more money. So let’s let him try this new thing. And guess what? They also have more money to pay you with to do that thing. So doing this kind of testing and being adamant about like, let’s keep pushing this client in the right direction, even though they’re stubborn, can actually make you more money in the long run. It’s not just wasted time and it’s not, it’s not something you should just say, Oh yeah, they, you know, they’re stubborn, they’re not going to do it. No, you got to keep, you got to keep pushing them towards it.
1:13:41
And the split testing is a good way to do that. All right. All right. He map, da, da, da, da, da. Okay. Very valuable, loving it, really helpful. All golden nuggets, super valuable, never seen that website position chart. Okay. SEO can be over, here’s Raptors. Valuable content, SEO can be very overwhelming.
1:14:03
Some more help in this area would be great. Okay. SEO is my focus for Q1 2023, so all the gold nuggets make it feel like Christmas. Okay, that’s good. I’ve been sitting in meetings, can’t wait to watch this one. Okay, good. All right. I’m trying to figure out if we should bring in another site. I think we’ve done enough on this site, right? I showed you an example of a good article concept but poor execution and then we all know like what’s not, you know, a good one, right? The marriage of Pocahontas. Okay, so I don’t have to do keyword research to know that’s probably not going to ever rank for anything. Here you go. Is the story of Robin Hood true? We’ll just do this one as a final one. Because this is another you know potential concept So the way that you and we’ll just do a little keyword research tip right here, right?
1:14:57
So I want to write about Robin Hood. I can write a lot of things that not not me personally I don’t know anything about Robin Hood, but the author could write a lot of different things about Robin Hood Do you know how many angles you can take on Robin Hood. So the mistake would be, if you’re the author, the mistake would be let me sit down and brainstorm what I wanna say about Robin Hood. No, why are you brain, you don’t need to brainstorm. The SEO data will tell you what to write about Robin Hood. So we go over here and we type in Robin Hood. And we can do Robin Hood story.
1:15:36
Like let’s add one, we need to be a little specific in some regard. I mean, it depends on how much data you want to analyze. You’re going to get a ton of data here, all right? Let’s just go with it. Let’s just put in Robinhood. Now, here’s where you have free SEO tools. Everybody wants to, like, they’re getting into SEO and they’re like, where’s my free tools? They don’t want to spend any money, okay? The paid tools are insanely valuable.
1:16:00
And one of the reasons, I mean you’ve seen the charts, I just showed you some charts that we use to analyze specific terms and things like that. You don’t really get those in the free tools. But that’s really not even why the free tools or why the paid tools are valuable. It’s really the filtering and the matching, okay? The free tools don’t do filtering and matching. The paid tools do various types of filtering and matching. That’s where the money is, okay? So I type in Robin Hood. If you’re on the free tool, you got to type in like all these keywords you’re brainstorming and then get the volumes and the potential traffic and all this, you know, the keyword difficulty. But with a paid tool, I can just type in a really, this is called a head term, okay? A head term is like a broad term. And then I can go to matching terms. And then I can say I want it to phrase match or terms match in this regard right here, it doesn’t really matter either way.
1:16:52
But now you start to get all of your ideas. Now you can also filter from here, right? So you can say, well, look at this keyword difficulty number. Now keyword difficulty is a metric that is specific to Ahrefs and SEMrush has their own and all these tools have their own, okay? And they’re not set in stone. There are times where it will say it’s a KD of 45 and you’ve got a fairly, you know, low ranking domain which maybe your domain is like 5 or 10 or something like that and you just look at the number and be like, I can’t rank for that. But that’s actually not the case. There are times where this number is wrong and a manual analysis of going deeper into the data of that specific keyword can reveal that, oh, actually you could rank for this if you needed to or really wanted to.
1:17:43
So you can’t just rely on this number, but if you’re at the beginning point of your research and you just want to streamline things and not go through as much data at this point in time, maybe after you’ve published a lot and you’ve gotten a lot of good results and now things are getting more difficult to find ideas, now you want to go into more data, that’s kind of a situation that might happen. But if you don’t want to do that in the beginning, you use filters. So you can say, well, here’s my KD. So I want a max KD of 20. I don’t want to see any terms where the difficulty is higher than 20. And so I’m going to put that in as my filter.
1:18:18
Now I can also filter by traffic potential, because you have two things. You have volume, and then you have traffic potential. The volume is the volume of that� and this is different in all the tools, okay? So Ahrefs, what I�m about to explain to you is true in Ahrefs. It�s not true in SEMrush because SEMrush shows volume totals differently than Ahrefs does. And so you kind of do have to know the tool that you�re using. In Ahrefs, this volume is relative to this specific variation of the term. It means that that variation that we’re staring at right there was searched 55,000 times in the US over a monthly period. Okay? Now, Simrush will take multiple variations and combine them together when you’re looking at terms. At least that’s how they used to do it. I don’t have a Simrush subscription, so you know I don’t keep up with them, but that’s how they used to do it.
1:19:15
And so what Ahrefs did is it says, well, we’ll give people a traffic potential metric. And sometimes you’ll see that the traffic potential is substantially lower than the volume and sometimes it’s substantially higher than the volume. Now what determines whether it’s lower or higher? If you take a term like this, Robin Hood Men in Tights, okay, that is a brand, it’s a movie. And so when people search for the movie, they’re searching for it for various reasons. And we don’t really know what the intent is behind the search, which is a red flag right off the bat. But typically, when somebody types in Robin Hood Men in Tights, they’re looking and we can look at this too, Robin Hood Men in Tights, all right, so we’re going to see what comes up.
1:20:01
All right, so look at this. And Google, Google doesn’t even know what the intent is. So Google’s like, well, shit, let’s show them the cast. Let’s show them where they can watch it. Let’s show them a snippet from the, you know, the about on Wikipedia or wherever that’s from. This is called a knowledge panel. And then let’s give them obviously the IMDB link. Let’s give them the Wikipedia link. Let’s show them trailers and clips. Let’s show them people also ask. We have no idea why somebody is searching for this term. We don’t know what they want to see, so let’s show them everything we can possibly think of. Hey, it’s even on TV soon, near you, right? You can’t rank for this term. This is a term you cannot rank for. But what I want to prove is here’s the, or what I want to explain, why is the volume 55,000, this is a really good lesson for anybody doing SEO. Why is the volume 55,000, but the traffic potential is only 7,000.
1:20:53
And this proves that you cannot just look at volume metrics. Volume metrics are almost irrelevant, right? The most relevant thing is what’s the intent of the search. The second most relevant thing is what’s the real traffic potential of that search. So the reason this is so much lower is because when you Google it, it, that traffic potential is measured based on the actual websites that rank, not this, not this, not this stuff up here, not this, not this, not this, not this. Okay. Only websites that rank. Well, a lot of people care about the cast, so they’re going to click on this. Guess what?
1:21:36
That’s not a click going to an actual website. They’re going to click on this because they actually want to know where to watch it. That’s not a click going to a website. They might click up here. That’s not a click going to a website. They might click on these trailers and clips. That’s not a click going to a website. So you have 55,000 people searching for this every month, but the websites that rank for it are not getting clicked on much. So the actual traffic potential is significantly lower than that.
1:22:05
And that’s not just on a term like this. This will happen on all kinds of terms. So you have to be very careful that you’re not just looking at volume metrics. This is also part of a manual analysis. When you’re trying to figure out, is this a good term to rank for? Well, one of the best things to do is Google it, Google it and see what Google is trying to serve people here. If they’re not serving a lot of websites, they’re serving a lot of this other content, you’re in trouble. All right? If they’re only serving websites, then you’re probably good to go.
1:22:36
And then you need to see what kind of pages is Google serving in this regard. Because now you have to determine, should I write a list post about this? Should I write an in-depth, 3,000-word informative article about this? Should I, what should I do? What kind of content should I produce? That would be the next question. Alright, so anyway, back to what we were saying. So you take Robinhood, matching terms, let’s get all of our ideas. And then you start going down and you’re analyzing this list. I need ideas for articles.
1:23:06
I need ideas for articles. So I’m coming down, remember we’re only, oh, actually let me filter this. So show results. So I’m taking out, look, I took out everything that was over 20. And so now look at the results that I’ve got. Now you’re going to realize here, Robin Hood characters, okay, there’s not a lot. All right, Robin Hood and Little John, these are not specific enough to be keywords. difficult term for SEO because there’s so much media surrounding it and there’s so much like we’ve got a Disney in here, we’ve got characters, it’s hard to drill down to what somebody might be interested in related to history, okay?
1:23:53
And this is why SEO is expensive, right? You’re talking about the SEO research process. This takes a lot of time and a lot of manual analysis. Let’s go and choose something else. Let’s see, I do want to stick with this for just a minute. So Dead Sea Scrolls would probably be a better one to do. Alright, so we’re gonna do Dead Sea Scrolls. Alright, now we’re coming down and we’re gonna do our filter again, just so we can stay on the same line of thinking that we were on just a second ago. Okay, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? All right, now what I would probably start doing is these are just going to be, these are not things that I’m saying this is going to be good.
1:24:37
Let’s write this. I’m just saying, ooh, kind of intriguing. Okay. Dead Sea Scroll jars, Dead Sea Scrolls basket, Dead Sea Scroll, okay, okay, all right. Okay, I’m not seeing anything else that’s like standing out to me. Dead Sea Scrolls, okay. Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. But that looks like it’s, that might be like a book title or some sort of like specific title that people are searching for.
1:25:06
Oh, okay. New Dead Sea Scrolls 2021. That might be like a news kind of thing. Let’s take this one up here. There’s another, it’s another tough one. There’s just so many different angles on it. Who wrote the dead sea scrolls? So, Oh, and this is a book guys. This is a title of a book. So once again, but this is a good example of why you have to do manual analysis.
1:25:30
You might think when you come across this term, wow, that would be a good article to write. I should write an article answering that question. But then you realize, oh, there’s already been a book written on it and everything, book preview, here’s images from the book, here’s a snippet from National Geographic. Am I ever going to rank for this? I’m never going to rank for this. This is impossible. Okay? And I click on the term, even though the KD, guys, is 13, right? And then we see, oh volume is 8, oh traffic potential only 350, okay that’s a red flag. But I come down, okay, oh there’s a little bit of volatility. But once again, am I going to beat National Geographic? That’s a no. Am I going to beat Smithsonian? No. Biblicalarchaeology.org? No. None of these. Alright, now history.com, livescience.com, 10 is completely absorbed with DR 90 sites.
1:26:27
It’s just not, it’s, this is not going to happen. Don’t write this article. Okay. Now I got to keep going in my analysis of all these other ideas and terms that I would come across. And now I would have to start getting specific. There’s ways to get specific like dead sea scrolls. Okay. Here’s an example. And we are not take off the min KD.
1:26:46
Let’s show results here and then I can include any word like what, when, how, why, all these kinds of like content marketing type questions. So what, when, how, why, is, where, all right, and then hit apply and I show results and now look at what I’m starting to get. Oh wow, okay, I got a lot of content ideas here. When were the Dead Sea Scrolls found? What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Okay, we already saw that. How old are the Dead Sea Scrolls? But look, these are all Dead Sea Scrolls Israel.
1:27:19
They’re all in one parent topic. Oh, this is a good one right here. What do the Dead Sea Scrolls prove? So now I’m seeing a parent topic that matches the keyword. This is a really good sign. I see, you know, not huge traffic potential, but there’s some commercial value here. I’m going to go in and I’m going to analyze it a little bit further. I’m going to see volatility here in the charts. I see, okay, this is a, there’s some red flags here. But I see this blueletterbible.org.
1:27:52
Okay, that’s interesting. So we’re going to say a little site analysis here. Blue, what was that? Blue, where did it go? Blueletterbible.org. All right. Blueletterbible.org. Womp womp, 82. Okay. So even though I didn’t recognize it, it’s a very obviously high domain rank. I’m guessing the rest of these are as well. So this is once again, it’s like, oh man, I was so close to having a good one and the womp womp comes back in, right?
1:28:29
Just almost never going to rank for that. So now I can even filter this even further. And see this is what you guys cannot do in these free tools. Let’s do our DR20 filter again. And then we come down and we’re just not left with a lot here, okay? See this, this is a different variation of that keyword we were just looking at. There’s just too much content online around these terms. I’ve got to find a different angle to come after. This is not a topic that I want to waste my time with right now. I’ve got to find a better topic, a better angle.
1:29:04
So this is why SEO research is not easy. It’s a little frustrating at times, especially when you’re in a very competitive niche. I mean, you’ve got to remember, people all around the globe are talking about Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s probably a gazillion websites that talk about this. So the likelihood that yours is going to rank in the top ten, very slim to none. We already see who all is ranking. So we’ve got to do deeper work, deeper research, find better topics, find stuff that we can actually rank for. This is not going to be one of them. All right, let’s go ahead and move on.
1:29:34
We are coming down to our last 30 minutes. I want to get another site in here. We’ve done a little bit of an SEO jaunt. And now we’ll get back to what we were here for. Well we’re kind of here for it all, aren’t we? Alright, let’s bring up this one. Let’s see if we can get Dynamite back. I don’t know if this is a… Let’s refresh, give it one more chance. I’m going to give you one more chance to try…
1:29:59
There it goes. It translated. Okay. Alright, before we do this, let’s hop over and see. I have a major itch to do SEO on this website. We’ve tried to initiate SEO with this client, but they don’t want to spend the money and would rather just put out a ton of content and let something magically stick. Yeah, well, as you saw, SEO is not going to be easy for that site. Can you do SEO keyword research on an Ahrefs Lite subscription plan? I believe so.
1:30:26
I haven’t used the light plan and so long it’s been years and years and years I don’t even know what it includes anymore. I don’t know anything about it Okay, all right good So let’s go over Dynamite I’m gonna say right off the bat. I’m not a fan of the name. I’m not a fan of the name I’m not a fan of the logo So I would consider cleaning all of that up. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know how to pronounce it.
1:30:55
I think it’s Dynam IT, like information technology, right? But I’m not sure. Don’t know. We’ve got some spacing issues. I don’t know if this relates to the translation or what. It’s going to be hard to do copy analysis because I don’t know if the translation is accurate. So, I’m going to not do so much copy analysis on this one. I’ll do call to action analysis and DOM analysis and things like that. So discover the solution, make an appointment.
1:31:23
Okay. Here’s one right off the bat, guys. I said this a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time ago, but it should be said over and over and over again. site and you use the word solution I Give you an F right away anywhere on this. I don’t want to use anywhere Don’t if you this is like a number one Copywriting just like what is the most beginner? 101 if you’re gonna write copy for a service or a product Don’t use the word solution. It is the most overused word in marketing. It is the most like zero value term.
1:32:09
It means absolutely nothing to anybody. Okay. Yes, you’re trying to provide a solution, but don’t use the word solution when you do it. Stop using the word solution. All right. Call to action button text. So it is an F because it has the word solution in it, but I also don’t want to discover the solution. Like what is it? It’s always an opportunity.
1:32:31
Anytime you use the word solution, you should have used the specific thing you’re talking about. So web design. This should say web design service, or our web design process, or how web design. I don’t know. Use the word web design. Don’t use the word solution. Make an appointment.
1:32:50
OK. Let’s click that. All right. That’s a problem. All of that’s a problem. We’ll come back to that in just a second though. All right. Budget friendly, customization, quality, completely. Okay. Again, we’re not, I don’t think we’re translating properly here.
1:32:59
One thing I don’t like about the UX that I’ll critique right off the bat is I don’t like things that hover when they’re not clickable. Like it’s trying to indicate to me like, oh, I’m going to click this button, and I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button.
1:33:09
I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I’m going to click that button. I don’t like things that hover when they’re not clickable. Like it’s trying to indicate to me like this could be clicked on because it’s moving when I hover it, but it’s not clickable.
1:33:28
So it’s like what? Am I just supposed to have fun with it? Am I just supposed to play with it? Like ooh, I can put the thing in the box. Oh, look at that. But like it doesn’t, what value is it providing? It doesn’t help me focus on your copy. It doesn’t help get the message across. It just kind of indicates, hey, this might be clickable, why don’t you try? And then I click and it’s, you know, I can’t actually click it.
1:33:43
So it’s just a kind of a distraction a little bit. If they were clickable, I like the effect, but they’re not clickable, so I don’t think they need the effect. You could actually just have them be like that and just not move. If it’s not clickable, if it’s clickable, make it do that. But if it’s not clickable, just let it be how it is right now. I think that’s, because I like the uniqueness of like the, oh, it’s shifted out of the box kind of, you know.
1:34:09
Some people may not like that. I like it, whatever. But I don’t like the fact that it’s interactive when it’s not clickable. A cheap website, is that possible? Well, I can’t really critique the copy. I don’t know if it’s accurate. Okay. All right. So you’ve got your social proof here More features. So see these are clickable See now we’ve created confusion. It’s like well up here. They weren’t clickable. So what if I learned? Oh, these things aren’t clickable I just learned this from you. You just told me This effect does not mean that the boxes are clickable. So I see them down here. Maybe I don’t realize Now yeah, I get the hand. Okay, but I do this for a living right so I know the hand means it’s clickable but like you got to make these things for dummies Not dummies for actual dummies. You have to design these for actual dummies So you’ve kind of taught me up here that these are not clickable but down here they are clickable So we’ve got a little disconnect going on there View the formulas. I don’t know what the formulas are don’t know if I should care about formulas I I think this means pricing, maybe that’s a bad translation.
1:35:16
So if it said like view the pricing or really you can just say pricing. Your new website in four steps, okay, I like the process, area, how it’s designed. Make an appointment as a better call to action. That’s not step one though. Step one you said is project discussion. So you can’t say step one is project, well, I guess you’re going to discuss it at the project. Why don’t you say step one, make an appointment. But then step two is not development. You don’t go from, yeah, this is just, take out the step one here.
1:35:46
Just make this button say make an appointment. Okay, more social proof. Time to tackle your website. I don’t want to tackle my website. I’m not playing football or soccer or anything else. I don’t know what you got. You guys probably call it football, soccer. This is just again, maybe a translation thing. I don’t know, but I think you need a stronger call to action here. All right, let’s view the DOM. Let’s see what we’ve got going on. So inspect, show me your DOM. We have LIs. Oh, this is frames.
1:36:26
Okay, it was built with frames. So, guys, this is a good example of like, hey, built with frames. The frames don’t look like this, okay? They made the frames look like this. I didn’t know it was frames until I inspected it, and I like that. I like somebody asked about that the other day, won’t all the sites look the same? No, because people don’t style things the same way. I mean, they can, but most people put their unique flair on it. So you start with a frame as a starting point, it’s like a blueprint, right? It’s a wireframe, and then you create anything you want out of it. So this was kind of a unique way that they designed these frames to the point that I didn’t even know they were frames until I looked down here and I see, wow, they’re frames. And because they’re frames, they use all the correct styling, right? Look at this. Look at the difference in these cards versus the cards we inspected before. So you can tell right off the bat, here’s the card itself and it’s got testimonial card alpha on it. Now you added something else, card 1BG, okay? That’s that effect that’s going on there, I’m guessing. But we have FR testimonial card alpha and then you have the header, you have the body, you have the footer and then we look inside the header, and we’ve got your SVGs for your stars.
1:37:42
We have our body, and we have down here in our footer gives you the name, and we see name wrapper. Everything is like all of the classes are organized. We see exactly what each thing is. We see the styling attached to those specific classes. So good here by default, right? Okay, let’s look at your services page because I want to know what you actually do, okay? So, custom web design, web hosting and domain names, WordPress support, Joomla! Transfer website to WordPress, all right, all the standard stuff. If I click on custom web design, I get taken to another page. All right, these pages for sure. But you know this may be still under development, I don’t really know what all is going on here.
1:38:35
I’m guessing all these are the same exact template, yeah. I mean this is, it’s like, alright we threw the pages together to get them done but I’m guessing you’re going to come back at some point and make them much more visual and much more robust and more interesting because really you are a design firm, right? So we’ve got to show off some talent here and some creativity and stuff like that. Here’s your pricing. Let’s take a look. And this is interesting. We’ve got website as a service, okay? You can tell right off the bat that this is a WAAS process going on here.
1:39:11
No startup costs. That’s an interesting thing. Because most website as a service pricing models have a startup cost. They have a deposit that you have to make before this monthly amount kicks in. And with no startup cost, I’m a little concerned for your business model. I mean website as a service concerns me by itself, but the fact that we also have no startup cost, that’s a concern as well. But I get up to three pages. I get a basic contact form and up to three hours of content adjustments per month. I don’t like these kinds of things, right?
1:39:45
Ten hours, three hours, four dynamic content types, evaluation every four months. Why don’t I like these things? I don’t like these things because the people who are coming to your website to hire you have no idea what the heck they mean. See, I censored myself right there. I don’t know how many hours do I need? Is three a lot? Is three a little? What does three get me? Don’t really know.
1:40:13
What is a dynamic content type? Now you give me examples of blog, a review, a team, but then like, where’s the rest of the list? Because I don’t know what else might be included or not included. I suddenly have a lot of questions. Up to 10 hours of substantive changes per month. Well, what is that? What’s a substantive change versus any other type of change? This is another reason. See, website as a service, they have to have a pricing.
1:40:41
You don’t have to. They all put the pricing though. They all put the pricing on the site. And then it becomes this long list of, it’s this and it’s that and it’s this and it’s three hours, five hours, and dynamic, and then as a visitor, it’s like, what the heck does all this stuff mean? What do I even need, right? Imagine going to a mechanic, and they’re like, well, and it’s like, sir, my car is running rough, and the brakes are a little shaky, and I just, I need you to check out what’s going on.
1:41:08
Okay, okay, well, here’s our pricing sheet. Well, for this pricing, you just pay a little monthly fee and you know every single month will give you three hours of this and that and this and that and you can get a carburetor I don’t know dude I don’t know just look at my car and tell me what I need and then tell me how much it costs and then I pay you and you do those things okay like that makes sense you’re this is a very technical field and like where is the the way I see it in the way I’ve presented it right in my sales trainings and all of that is these people don’t know what they need. They don’t know how many pages they need. They don’t know what needs to be on those pages.
1:41:47
You’re the expert. You come in and you say, oh, here are the goals that you have for your business. Here’s the type of service or product you have. Here’s how it needs to be marketed. Here’s what the strategy is going to be. Here’s how many pages we need in order to execute that strategy. There’s going to be copywriting involved. Okay, all these things have to happen. Here’s how much all of this stuff costs. Now, you have that model is like the expert tells me what needs to happen and then I pay them. And then you have this model where it’s like, well, I don’t know you decide what you need. Like, I know you don’t know what you need, but you decide which one of these do you need?
1:42:25
Here’s all the things you can get. And then you don’t even know what each specific line item means. So you can’t even make a choice. It’s not even possible to make a choice without guessing. The only way I could really just make a choice is say, well, I can afford 129. So I hope I get what I need for that 129 a month. But that’s the only way I can make this decision because I don’t know what this other stuff is. I don’t really know what I need, but I know what I can afford. And so now you have a person making a decision on price and price alone and then you come in and I don’t, are you just going to template this thing up, give them the most generic thing that you can possibly do because you, you’re not making a lot of money.
1:43:04
I just, does the model feel good to anybody? Like let me know. And the, am I, am I, am I wrong? I don’t know. Okay. Let’s look at some comments. Oh, look at this. Look at this. Here we go. See?
1:43:22
This wasn’t even in my top ten, like, potentials of what this would be. Dynamite. Okay. Dynamite. I get it now. I never, that wasn’t even in my top ten potentials for what I was going to assume that it was. All right. Right, stick a dynamite. Can you check my design? Yeah, go in the description of this video and there’s a link where you can fill out a form to get your website critiqued.
1:43:55
Flying Web Solutions says, oh my God, my web agency is called Flying Web Solutions. All right, I don’t know what was that related to, what part of that was related to. Give me your thoughts right now, website as a service. Do you guys get what I’m saying? There’s a bit of a delay. It’s always awkward waiting for the comments to just flood in after I ask a question like ten minutes ago. Does it make sense when I say like the person can’t choose a package because they don’t know what they need and then they don’t even know what some of the line items mean or is it just me? All right, I’m going to fit, while those questions come in, we got 15 minutes, I’m going to fit one more site in.
1:44:39
We’re going to do this one right here. Okay, I can get rid of our dead sea scrolls. All right, NV Organics, NV organics. The V here is a little bit hard to see that that’s a V. Okay. Initial thoughts. I’m not… Okay. I want to see a person, right? Seeing grapes faded into the background. If I took out this text right here, guys, what the visuals communicate is very important, right? Imagine looking at this section without any copy and then being asked, what’s this about? And I’m like, well, it’s a vineyard. It’s a wine. It’s a, I don’t know, it could be a lot of things. It could be someone who sells roadside grapes. I don’t know. The visual doesn’t really give me anything.
1:45:41
It doesn’t help my case. I’m trying to make my case with copy. The visual is not helping me make my case in this regard. So this whole visual needs to get swapped out. I’m wondering what the giant blank area here, like the wasted spaces here. So this right off the bat needs to be something. 25 plus years of organic grape seed products. You’re speaking, let’s go back to top funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. You are speaking to bottom of the funnel people right here and right here. Grape seed oil, body hair and skin care.
1:46:22
And this is a perfect example. I have to know what grapeseed oil is. I have to know the benefits of grapeseed oil, and I have to know that I want grapeseed oil products for any of this copy to matter to me whatsoever. If I don’t know what grapeseed oil is, why I should care about it, or the fact that, like, why is it made into products, if I don’t know any of those things, none of this copy says anything to me. You have excluded everybody at the top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel. Because what you have to realize here is people don’t want grape seed oil products.
1:47:00
That’s not what they want. They want soft skin. They want glowing hair. They want all these things. The outcome is what they want. They don’t want the product. By talking specifically about the product, I got to know what that thing is, why it matters, or I don’t care about it. Plain and simple. So, anybody that doesn’t already, isn’t already, maybe grapeseed oil is a huge industry, it’s a huge market. All these people, you know, I don’t know about it, but all these other people know about grapeseed oil and they’re seeking it out. Okay, good, that may be very well and factual.
1:47:33
However, those are the only people you’re going to sell to. You’re not going to sell this to anybody that doesn’t already know what this is. So let’s change our copy and let’s start talking about the outcomes that people actually want, right? So, and then you reveal at some point down the road in your other copy down here that grapeseed oil is the magic part of the formula, right? That’s going to get them those results, but they don’t need to know about grapeseed oil yet. They need to know that you’re gonna get them the outcome Okay, so let’s imagine for a second that this headline said The most glowing hair you’ve ever had in your life I don’t know this I’m just making stuff up off the top of my head in like a split second But imagine I care about my hair glowing. Okay, I don’t I don’t have any I don’t actually care about my hair glowing, but imagine that I did, right?
1:48:27
And I see that headline like the most glowing hair that I’ve ever had in my life How is that gonna happen now? I’m like at least I know what’s going on here. I’m interested I’m like give me the secret sauce, right? So then I start reading more and then you can introduce this concept of why grapeseed is so Magnificent for glowing hair or whatever, okay, you get the point But you can’t just be like, buy grape seed oil, body hair and skin care. Okay? It’s not enticing me. There’s no—nothing triggering me to really care about what’s going on here. So we have a poor visual.
1:49:00
We have poor copy. We have a lot of wasted space. So this hero section in general, we got to go back to the drawing board with this hero section. This could be a lot better. All right. Now we come down here. Our organic grapeseed oil products. So, copy violation number two. And you violated it here as well. Let’s talk about us. Let’s talk about me. Let’s talk about us. Let’s talk about me. Okay, when are you going to talk about the visitor that’s here? Because it’s almost like somebody walks into your shop and you’re just like, hey, I’m Joe and I’ll just give you my whole life story and my products are awesome and I’m the best that’s ever done this and it’s not like, Hey, what are you looking for?
1:49:45
Hey, what are you trying to accomplish? What’s your pain point? Right? Let me help you solve that pain point. You’re just, you brought the visitor in and you’re just like, Hey, us, our, we, you’re just all talking about yourself. So they don’t care. They don’t care about your, you haven’t made them care about your products yet, you can’t talk about them. You need to be talking about them, right? Now, you can definitely list your products for sure, but the headline needs to give them a reason to read about these products. So, once again, we need to be talking about their pain point here. We’re also missing a bunch of stuff on this page right off the bat. So, we have a quote, we have like one, one quote, and it says if you want some amazing body butter and other Napa great grapeseed oil products organic products try Jeanette’s products, okay Again, it’s a testimonial that doesn’t do you a lot of good because it’s not like hey I had I had nappy hair and I was like, oh now my hair is amazing and I went to my wedding Let’s go back to the DJ thing, right?
1:50:44
I go to my wedding and it’s like I that was the best hair I ever had and it’s all thanks to Jeanette’s. And then instead of products actually calling out what the actual product is, that’s a testimony that actually helps you. That’s a copy direction that actually helps you. It was like, my hair was terrible, use this product, now I have awesome hair, right? My nails were terrible, now I use this product, now I have awesome nails. That’s like the basic formula. It’s not just let’s just talk about our products. All right. So we need more social proof. We need, you know, five, six testimonials here. And then we need to get into education on grapeseed oil. So let’s, this is a secret sauce. Obviously you made every product that you have with grapeseed oil. Why? Give me the why. Alright, nope, I just have products.
1:51:41
Okay, let’s go to skin, I’m just guessing these are all products. Nope, okay, so let’s go to about. Alright, so Napa California based organic skin scares, okay, it’s all about you again. It’s all about me, alright. And I’m picking on you, this is a common, common violation of copy. Almost everybody does this. If they’re not a copywriter, they always make this mistake. It’s like, let’s talk about me, me, me, me, me. Your about page should actually be about the visitor. It’s about you, but it’s formatted in a way, it’s from the angle of how you help the visitor, right?
1:52:22
It’s not actually about you. So it’s about them, it’s about their problems. So obviously you have body care. So skin issues, hair issues, I don’t know if there’s anything else that we have to hit on, but you’ve got a whole opportunity here. Here’s your opportunity. The opportunity is take somebody that has no idea why you created all this stuff with grapeseed oil, talk about all the problems that they have, agitate those problems so that they really are like, yeah, yeah, that’s the problem. Stop talking about it. I live with it every day. I don’t need to hear anymore about it. Tell me what the solution is. And then you’re like, okay, here’s the solution. And then you introduce the concept of grapeseed oil.
1:52:58
Why is this the secret ingredient in all of your stuff? What does it do for the person? Why is it better than other ingredients? How is your stuff organic? How is it all natural? Where is it produced? Give me the whole story, right? And then I’m going to care. And then I’m probably going to buy stuff. But if you’re just like, oh, Envy Organics, I make the best stuff with grapeseed oil and I’m not going to tell you why, but just trust me, we have one testimonial, go ahead and buy. That’s not going to get the job done, all right? So we need a whole narrative developed here. We need a lot more visuals. We need less me-focused copy and more you-focused copy.
1:53:34
That can create dramatic improvements here. Let’s do a quick little DOM analysis. Let’s just do this right here. Inspect. Okay. Div ID. All right. So this is built in Oxygen. We’re using automatic CSS, but we are using this is what we call utility class littering. Right? So we just have utility classes kind of littered all over the place. So the downside of this is, you know, you’ve got three of these cards basically. There’s one, there’s two, there’s three. And if you decide that you want to change the design of this card, you’re going to have to go and, well, you do kind of have a custom class going on here. But anything that’s controlled by these utility classes, those utility classes have to be removed and replaced.
1:54:25
And then removed and replaced on every instance of this card. And we see this too, it’s like if you’re going to use a custom class, then do everything through the custom class. Don’t combine custom classes and utility classes because you’re defeating the purpose of the custom class. Anything that’s accomplished with the utility class is going to cause the scalability and maintainability problem, the littering problem, right? You don’t want to litter. None of us want to litter. And this is, you’re organic, don’t litter. You’re organic, you’re California, don’t litter.
1:54:55
I know you guys don’t like littering in California, right? Don’t litter then. Don’t litter your utility classes throughout here. You’ve got a custom class, let’s use that. Here’s your, you’re using BIM. Now this is a misapplication of BIM, but I do applaud you for attempting BIM. And this is a common problem with BIM, so we’ll point it out. And we’re not pointing it out to nitpick. We’re pointing it out because we’re all here to learn. And the only way to learn is to point this kind of stuff out, right? So BIM, it’s a violation of BIM to use two sets of underscores, right?
1:55:30
So you have the block, which, and this is another BIM violation, is nobody knows what TM means. So you don’t want to use like insider terms, you don’t want to use abbreviations, you want to use very explicit terms, okay? That everybody reads it and everybody know what it means. So TM needs to be changed to something else and then you have product card title. The TM doesn’t, I don’t, yeah, and because it’s, I don’t know what it means. I can’t say why it’s there because I don’t know what it means. But you have product card which is really the block. This is a product card. And then the title is the element, is an element. So you have block, that’s the B, E for element.
1:56:14
The title is the element inside the block. So that’s all good. But then we look up here, we have product card, product grid. What am I actually highlighting here? Where is my, why isn’t that showing me on the screen? There we go. Okay, let’s find, okay, there’s the grid. Okay, that’s like more like a row. All right, so you’re using a grid with spans it looks like. And then we come down here.
1:56:41
See, I look at all, this is all a product card to me. So this should have been designed as a card and the card can actually be the grid structure right and then these are all elements of the card because they’re all the same every card has a product on the left and a product on the right or like it an image on the left and an image on the right so the card itself can be the grid the way this is structured it’s very confusing and I say it’s confusing not just because and like what’s the what’s why do we care that it’s confusing? Again, three month rule. You leave this site, you come back in three months, you’re trying to figure out how everything was created, and you’re trying to do a scan, and instead of being able to scan and be like, ooh, there’s my product card, and it’s one component, right, and it’s designed with grid, I can work with that.
1:57:32
But now I’ve got to figure out, well, hold on, what’s the grid, what’s the card, oh, shoot, what’s, there’s utility classes on here, are those utility classes on this one up here? Now you’re, instead of just knowing how it was built and you can just get to work, you’ve got to do all this deciphering. You’re like analyzing and like how was this accomplished? It just becomes a lot of wasted time. So it can be, it serves you to clean it up, make it more efficient, make it more clean. This grid should be the card. And then you’ve got your elements inside the card that are all part of the grid.
1:58:08
And then you get rid of all the utility classes. Now, this is the clickable element. So we see that is correct, age three. The thing is, it’s OK in this regard, because you don’t have generic text. It’s not like, read more, or something like that the button actually says hair care products Okay, which is which is good, so that’s not a huge violation Yeah, I think that’s all fine, but you could use a clickable parent make the whole thing clickable, but it’s it’s it is fine There’s nothing technically wrong with the way that it is Okay, so that was a little Dom analysis there on that to show some issues.
1:58:52
We can also probably see some of the same things going on here. Okay, entire card, that’s all clickable here. Let’s see if we’ve got, yeah, okay. This is all WooCommerce stuff which is always a lot more complicated and fun. Okay. There’s your LI and your UL. This is good. I’m looking for your product tag. Okay. I don’t see any of your classes.
1:59:23
These all look like… Okay. I don’t know. I have to do more looking. But I do see… See? See, we’re styling at the ID level with width, which means we’re using flex instead of grid. Not really a big fan of that. Look at this styling at the ID level. Okay.
1:59:53
Yeah, so some issues there. Definitely, definitely some issues there. Scalability, maintainability. Okay. All right. We got to wind this down. It’s been a while. Let me go to the comments real quick. Any final questions? Final questions? Final thoughts? Let’s get it all in right now.
2:00:09
I think TM is to identify a developer just like CT in Oxygen or BRX in Bricks. Okay, that might be. That might be. If it is a prefix, then it needs to be a dash, not an underscore. Okay, what is this? Phrase all of Polish for language options. I don’t speak it, so I’m not sure how extensive it is. I assume it’s functional. Okay, that’s an answer to somebody else’s question. Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever tuned into this. Should be illegal to be free.
2:00:43
So much value I’m getting from this. That’s what I want. That’s what I like to hear. That’s the whole goal. Alright, last call for questions, comments before we get out of here today. And guys this is the last live stream I believe of, I’ll look at my calendar in a minute. I believe it’s the last live stream of the year and then we’ll be back in 2023. We’re going to be alternating web design for dummies and digital agency table talk every Wednesday. Ali says, can you please review? You got to submit your site Ali. So go to the description of this video, this stream, and you’re going to find the link to the form.
2:01:25
You can fill out the form and submit your link for review. All right, that’s going to be it for today guys. Thank you so much for joining in. I hope you got a lot of value out of it. Drop your comments below. Hit your likes before you leave and I will be back very soon. Thank you guys, Merry Christmas, peace.
