What Does Your Small Business Website Actually Need?

[00:00:00]

Matt: Your website doesn't need everything. If you've ever worked with a client that's done their homework, they'll often ask for specific website peaches. Pe- peaches?

Mikhail: Peaches?

Matt: it's

Mikhail: peach season. Yeah.

Matt: Specific website pieces such as social proofs, sliders, heroes, landing pages, and more. They've often seen these on competing websites or have discussed them with their colleagues, and these colleagues will usually have successful websites, and so they'll say, "Hey, I have a slider, and I have this, and I have that," and so they think naturally, "Hey, I need these things to have a successful website too." what if I told you that you don't need to have everything on your website? What works for some doesn't necessarily work for all. So in this episode, we are gonna be unpacking the parts of a website that users actually see when you visit the site. The reason why I wanna make that distinction is this isn't talking about the hosting and the PHPs and the, the nodes and all this other stuff.

This is [00:01:00] parts of the website that we are making for the actual website visitors or the website readers. So let's unpack that, but not before we tell you all about... You should go and check out Scrimba. If you wanna learn how to code, please go and check out Scrimba. Scrimba has an interactive media player code editor where you can go onto, go onto Scrimba and watch a lesson on how to code, see what the, the instructor is writing right there.

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Off to the races. We have a 20% off a Scrimba Pro, uh, plan link. That'll be in the RSS description as well as in the show notes on htmlallthethings.com So let's, uh, let's, let's, let's, let's kick this, uh, episode off. But Mike, I actually wanna bring back something really quick before we kick this episode off.

We, we, we brought back segments for [00:02:00] one episode, then didn't for, like, two or three. So why don't we do this week's main A bit of a surprise. Why don't we do that? So Mike, what's your main takeaway for this week?

Mikhail: I mean, we're, we're screwed for security purposes. We'll probably have a full web news on this, uh, which would have aired before this episode came out. But, uh, yeah, I've been updating servers for hours. Um, there's w- there was a massive PHP vulnerability that came out that essentially allowed anyone to take over any server if there was no, like, firewalls and stuff in place, um, which affected all PHP installations, I believe I saw.

Um, not great. And then there was, uh, about 10 more other that I had to investigate to make sure that they weren't affecting any of the apps that I run. So, like, it just... That was my week so far. Uh, and it still is. I still, uh, there's still stuff coming out today. Like, there was still a few that came out today.

I think there's a Python one that came out today that I need to check still and... [00:03:00] Uh, yeah, that's my main takeaway is, uh, we're screwed

Matt: Um, well I'm, I'm in a, a similar boat, but it's, uh, for a bit of a different reason. So we definitely have some clients that are on some very old CMS and some very old sort of website frameworks, and, uh, unfortunately they also do not want new websites. They don't wanna upgrade the existing websites, and so I had to, uh, verse myself, which I have in the past as well, but I had to verse myself on how to upgrade, uh, update PHP, uh, to a level that was patched, but also had to update this older technology because it was not designed for modern versions of PHP. Now, I will say thankfully, our web host actually patched all versions down to PHP 5, and they mentioned that, hey, you probably shouldn't be on, like, old versions like PHP 5, but if you are and you have to be there, then this, uh, this latest exploit has actually been patched. It has been circumvented. So that's, uh, you know, great to know and, uh, helpful of course, [00:04:00] but I still wanted to get them on as, as modern of PHP as I could, and I got them onto a modern, onto a modern PHP Uh, it was like pulling teeth.

I had to change some core files. It was a big pain, but, uh, it is... It's done. And so that's my main takeaway as well. Uh, the whole industry, that might be their main takeaway. Well, I was looking at this PHP this, y- this week, and, you know, a- a- away we go. And if you're listening to this and you're like, "Matt, th- this was a few weeks ago," this is...

These are recorded in advance, just to let you know. You can actually see the recording date on htmlallthethings.com and see when we recorded these episodes. But now let's, let's get right to the, right down to brass tacks here. I wanna talk about websites. I wanna talk about making the bits and pieces of the website that the user actually sees and what you actually need. And I wanna preface all this with a bit of an introduction into talking about how websites are kinda like Lego. If you really think of it, websites consist of different building blocks, and many businesses request features because they've seen them elsewhere. So the thing is, is, is what happens is you... go to a website, even just [00:05:00] design-wise, and you go and you visually look at it, you'll see that there's kinda clear sections. On an average homepage, let's say the top part's a nice big hero with a big image in the background, maybe a video, and then the next part, there's, different section there where it'll have your social proofs, and it'll be distinguished.

The two sections will be distinguished by, you know, a different ba- different background or a slightly different format, things like that. And then you go further down past those social proofs, and you'll have another section also defined by its design, and there's something else under there. Maybe it's the, some pricing if it's applicable, or there's some content box or some blog posts or whatever it is, 'cause every business, of course, is different. And the whole thing here is, is that these kinda pieces from a development standpoint and realistically from a user standpoint as well, because we see this with page builders, is they're kinda like Lego blocks, right? You build each section. You build the top section, then you build the next section, then you build the next section, and you kinda go around.

And if you want one of those sections on another page, usually it's as simple as copying and pasting it over. Sometimes it isn't, but generally speaking, it's as, it's simple like that. And so you're kinda clicking your website together with these sections [00:06:00] kinda like you would clicking together Lego blocks. And the whole thing is, the whole reason why I say this is because we have people that will contact us that get way, way carried away. They will talk to their colleagues. They will go look at their competitors, or they'll just look at not even their competitors but just cool websites online, and they will see, oh, they, they have this and they have that, and they have this and they have that. And then what happens is their website starts to bloat. They start to pay a lot for their website. They start to put a lot on their website, and they're looking at- Everything that they, they thought was cool or that they thought would lead to success with less of an objective mind and more of a, "Hey, someone's successful and they have this slider.

I better have a slider. Hey, someone's successful and they have this pricing chart. I better have this pricing chart. Hey, their calls to action are like this, and mine are like this. Even though mine work, theirs are probably better 'cause they're a multimillion-dollar industry. and I'm only in the, you know, whatever class they're in, whether they're small business or medium business or what have you, and so I better do this," right?

And they're not looking at the pieces of the website that they're [00:07:00] adding to their page objectively through what the, the website user, the website reader is actually, like, expecting and will hopefully, like, actually interact with. And so my point here, kinda sum up this introduction, is that what I want is t- for people to, at the end of this episode, start to realize the importance of and the intent of the different parts of a website, where you go to a website and you're like, "Okay, like, I have a pricing chart because my clients kept emailing me about pricing, and I need to have this pricing chart here," right? If you're a business where 99% of the time every person is getting a different deal because you're in such an abstract industry, a pricing chart is probably not gonna help you. You're still gonna have to do the manual work. So a pricing chart, even though your competitor might have one, if you're doing customized plans, customized deals with everybody, a pricing chart might not work for you.

So I want this to be objective for both you, your business, and the person reading the website is the point of [00:08:00] this whole kind of episode. And I'll c- finally get out of this introduction and talk about pages or, more specifically, landing pages. What's interesting here is you hear, like, people say landing pages, and they immediately think of dedicated landing pages, pages that are usually the thing that you click on if you, let's say, took a Google ad and then you, you wrote like, "Hey, I have a sale for 15% off of this service," and someone clicks on the link, and then it goes to the 15% off page and explains it. But the home page is also a landing page. The thing that you need to do here, in my opinion, and I've helped people steer their website like this, is you need to take a look at who those landing pages are for. These are for strangers. The the actual homepage is for a stranger, and I mean a stranger, not someone who's come to you via an ad or come to you via word of mouth or whatever. The page [00:09:00] should function for them, too. It should be efficient enough to function for them, too. But you need to introduce yourself here. This person might not even know what type of business sector you're in. Are you in ball valves? Are you in flooring? Are you in wall creation? Are you in something like that? W- you know, who are you? that person in the wrong place? They should be able to identify, "Oh, shoot, I didn't mean to look this up. I meant to look this other thing up," or, "Uh, this isn't what I meant. I meant these o- this other industry." You are talking to strangers with your homepage, and you're introducing yourself, and this goes with-- this goes for your SEO as well. The way I look at it is obviously the bot isn't necessarily coming to the landing page first, the crawlers and the things, but it's still an introduction. It's a place where you say, you set the record straight, "I do welding. This is the type of welding we do. This is where we service. This is how we, book appointments. Call us today or email us today or whatever," right? "This is how you get ahold of us. [00:10:00] is, this is the levels of experience we have. these are my social proofs," and we'll get into the little bits and pieces like social proofs and stuff later.

"But these are my social proofs. This is, this is how many reviews I have, and this is my star rating. This is how many testimonials I have, and this is how-- these are what my testimonials say," maybe a little sampling of other things like, "Here's a little sample of my la- my latest two projects. Click here to see my, latest 10 or whatever," right? So the whole point is that you are trying to introduce yourself to a complete stranger

Mikhail: Can I just jump in here? I think this is really important to understand and, and it's important to understand the higher up you are on the website. So the first thing that people see, you need to sell them on whatever you're trying to sell them on. They need to be sold on you, your business, your offering, your app, whatever the heck you're trying to sell them on.

The first two words, the first two lines of words, you know, the, the first CTA needs to be very clear. Just like Matt's saying, it needs to explain what the heck [00:11:00] they're looking at very clearly. I'm just looking at some statistics here, and to, to get people to scroll, it's about, like, a 60 to 70% of users will scroll down a page.

So that means you're gonna be losing potentially 40% of people that will never see below the fold, right? So you need to pack that top fold in very, very clearly. Now, as ... The more, the deeper down a page you go, the statistics keeps dropping, right? So the next thing that you show them has to make them either want to convert with a CTA or continue to scroll if you're looking at that, if you're looking to get more and more information for them.

So

Matt: Well, I was actually gonna say something there. When you

Mikhail: yeah

Matt: it, the pack should be like a hook. You

Mikhail: Yes

Matt: st- a, a Windows start menu of widgets in there. You don't

Mikhail: yeah

Matt: things in there 'cause they're gonna be like, "What is..." You know, "I'm not gonna sit here and read all this just 'cause it's above the fold."

Mikhail: Yeah, and, and it, o- one weird thing I'm seeing with AI specifically actually, AI-generated [00:12:00] websites and AI-generated posters, is they love to pack the, the d- the information density. Like, they have like sub- subtitles everywhere, and the third titles and fourth titles, and then they, they have these grid layouts all over the place.

Like, when I see an AI poster, I don't know what I'm looking at. Like, it, it's a well-designed thing, sure. Like, it, it looks like it's cool design. But like, there's like 100 or fif- or, or 200 words on that thing, and I, like, I'm reading a data sheet here. This is a poster for like a party. I don't need to know X, Y, and Z.

Like, I need to know where the party is

Matt: yeah

Mikhail: and what time it is. So like, putting too much information is almost worse than not putting enough information, in my opinion. You need to really, really consider every word you put above the fold, because every w- every extra word that doesn't sell or that doesn't explain your product properly is a word that's going to off-put the user, and it's going to make them

It, it's gonna make it look weird. So absolutely you are correct. Like, you have to consider that, like, structure of a website of a [00:13:00] user's journey

Matt: Well, the, it's a perfect analogy. Like, you, you're talking about having a packed poster, uh, or a packed menu. I've seen some menus be done by food trucks and things by

Mikhail: Hate that,

yeah

Matt: they're just, way too packed and stuff like that. And, and the thing here is, is, is that there's a tug of war happening. In the, in the context of a, an in-person menu, you're, you're, you wanna talk to everybody. Or at least, like, I, I always think that the AI is trying to think, "We need to talk to everybody." So what are they talking to? Who are they talking to? They're talking to some- to somebody who, they're trying to hook you.

So let's just say it's, it's tacos. We sell tacos out of this food truck. Fantastic. You ta- you sell tacos. Now it's like, okay, well now what type of tacos? Well, we have this taco, this taco, this taco. and they'll list out the ingredients.

And then they have, like, all their combos and things. But they s- they try to pack that information too densely. So I think that oftentimes they try to also talk to people where it's like, you know, "Beware of this food allergy, beware of this food allergy, beware of this.

Hey, are you aware that you can take these three things and put them into a combo," and this and that, this and that, and it's just, it- you're g- [00:14:00] too much information. Allergen information is great, you know, but you can have that in the ingredients. Like, if you're worried about someone who is potentially a, uh, allergic to peanut butter, you can say, "Peanut butter taco.

Underneath, made with peanut butter, ground beef, and this and that. Like, I don't know why you'd have peanut butter and ground gre- ground beef together, but the thing is, the point there is, is that you're getting the point across without you saying, "By the way, this is an allergen and this is a pro-" And I have seen that, where it's too, it's just too many bullet points, like, underneath.

It's like, oh, made with peanut butter. Allergens, peanut butter. It's like, okay, well hang on. it's in there already. Plus there's still a, a, a social part where you talk to the person. Like, you still go up to the food truck and you might say, "Yo, I'm allergic to peanut butter."

Like, you know, what, what, what's

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: It's just, it... You're, you're, you're trying to cover your bases too much, especially in that, in that first part. It's like, "Hey, let's cover every single base ever," and it's too much. And the same thing can go with your website. It, it, it, it's a great analogy for people who want to have every single piece of a [00:15:00] website that they've seen that's successful. better have a CTA like this. We better have this like this. We better have a slider. We better have this. We better have that. We better have this. We better have that. These, these, this place, I have a client who calls me and will say stuff like, "The Hollywood Reporter has this. We better do this." It's like, you're not The Hollywood Reporter. It's like, "Okay, we better have it." Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So it's like a widget or something. We make a widget. Okay, fantastic. And then we, once we're done the widget, then it's like, "Well, The Hollywood Reporter got rid of it." Okay, so does that mean you want to get rid of it? And then usually the answer is yes. So it's like, okay, so we get rid of it. How many l- how many leads did it to generate? They don't track that stuff. They don't care. so

Mikhail: all you should be tracking, by the way

Matt: to, to an extent, to an extent, obviously, like, your, your website is your, is your space as well. Like, there's a human element. It's, it's part of the tug-of-war here.

You're, you're having a tug-of-war between trying to be human, also trying to talk to the bots in terms of SEO and things, but also trying to be appealing. Like, if we go back to that menu and we take the website out of it for a second, it's like humans want information quickly in a [00:16:00] menu. They want information quickly.

They don't want to read, a terms of service. Obviously, that's being exaggerated, but, They want to go in and be like, "Oh, I like this, I like that, I like this. I might be allergic to this."

Mikhail: I, I'd argue that you can't get good leads without being human. Like, if you, i- if your goal is to generate leads and you become robotic in that sense, your website's probably not gonna convert very well. So you need to have elements of yourself, your business, but the goal of those elements is to generate leads.

I think that, like, the, the human element has to come into it to, to bring in people. And, and the human element, what it does is it brings trust, right? Like a robotic, website doesn't provide trust. Whereas like you putting in your face on the website sometimes or your attributes, your, you know, what you're passionate about, your testimonials, all that builds trust.

So it- it's like you need [00:17:00] one for the other

Matt: that's the tug of war because you... I don't, I don't mean to make your website robotic, but you need to talk to the... I, I, I tell my

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: need to talk to the robots. I need to... Google has to understand what it

Mikhail: Угу

Matt: here i- in order for it to rank," And then that's your tug of war.

All these people then show up. Let's say you rank well and you get a bunch of people to click. Now we can't be too robotic or else the humans that have clicked are not gonna wanna be there, right? It's the tug of wars. I talk to, one of our clients a lot about design stuff. So he's obsessed, obsessed with performance. And I tell him, I said, "You know, we can strip this right down." And I said, "This can be just, like a, just a white page or, or a, a dark page, depending on light mode, dark mode." And I was like, "We can just have text." And I said, "Really, as long as that text is formatted, you might get some decent SEO out of that."

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: He then, of course, he says, "Well, that's gonna look like garbage." I said, "Right, so there's your tug of war." time we add something to the page, even a [00:18:00] letter, now it's negligible really, but even a letter, that letter has to be rendered And so I said, "We have a tug of war here." We're trying to make it look good, to make it perform well, trying to make it look good for humans, and trying to make it readable for robots, and obviously readable for humans as well. So it's a tug of war. And so places that are very, very up on the art, uh, years ago we quoted out a, uh... It was an art gallery, um, or a photo gallery, I don't remember now. But it was very, very, very specific on art. They did not care at all about the SEO stuff. It was all about, you know, if people come to my gallery and they scan my QR code, like that thing better look like my art gallery, right?

Very much into the art side of things and the design side of things. Because they didn't care about Google. They wanted people to scan their QR code when they got there. been a number of years, I don't remember exactly. Like, we didn't end up winning the job, [00:19:00] so it's, you know, I sent out a quote and we moved on with our lives.

But I do remember that. It's, there's different, you know, different functions and, and their tug of war was, "Yo, this has to look good." for the general populace, like if we come back to the episode here, the homepage is talking strangers, you need to, talk to them. And Mike, you've kind of touched on some of this, but, what your business does, who does it serve. Explain, why would someone choose you, establish trust and credibility, right? Try to help visitors find what they want. If you're running, like, a website that has, like, a web app. So for example, the Google Photos marketing site has a button that just says, like, "Go to Google Photos," 'cause it's like, oh yeah, like, you're already a sold customer, you just wanna quickly get to your Google Photos.

Like, you know, go ahead, click this button, go ahead, right? Golf courses. I already know I want to golf at this place. Where's that book a tee time button? oftentimes it's frigging down in some page, and it sucks. Uh, but many are getting smarter. Many have a floating thing at the bottom or a sticky bottom bar there.

Uh, there's a, a plugin that many use. I don't remember the name. I think it might be [00:20:00] CronoGolf. That might not be right, but... And then there's, like, you know, book tee time, and I can book it right there, and it's perfect, right? Easy, easy-peasy and all that. The, the homepage is talking to a stranger, but still acknowledging that we might be talking to someone who's established, who's here. But that's what, that's what the homepage is for Dedicated landing pages though are talking more like you're talking to an acquaintance. So what's the difference here? Well, I don't need to say, let's just say you run a photo place. You take photos, you take wedding photos. It's like, okay. Someone who shows up and then let's just say it's like, you know, my wed- like let's just say it's, you know, digitaldynasty.ca, right?

Let's just say we take wedding photos. We don't, but let's just say we do. Here, here's the thing. Digitaldynasty.ca, it's not very descriptive, so someone goes there and they go like, "Oh," like goes to the homepage like, "Oh, this is, these are wedding photos." And then they're like, "Oh, shoot, I went to the wrong place." But our landing pages are for our ads, so this is where the acquaintance comes in. we took out an ad that said, "Wedding photos from [00:21:00] $250," it's a promotion, "$250 for wedding photos," it's like, oh, okay, okay. So someone on Facebook where we advertised went and they would click on that ad. Now they already know who we are.

Who do they, they, they know that we're, they know that we are a, a photo place that takes wedding photos and there's a promotion on for $250. So I don't necessarily need to introduce myself like a, like a, a, like a stranger. I don't need to introduce myself the same way I would on the homepage. I go on that page and I can hit the ground running.

Click, click here to claim your $250 photos. There's nine left. There's 10 slots total. There's nine left, you know, get in here, hurry up, you know, yada, yada, whatever, right? And the idea here, the analogy here is that the visitor already knows something about what you're offering. The biggest mistake that I've seen people make with the landing pages is they copy their homepage. The second-biggest mistake is I've seen people make really good landing pages, so they'll take out an ad to land on that page, and then they take the same style of that landing [00:22:00] page, that like dedicated landing page, and they try to apply that to their homepage. They're two separate purposes. One, again, is talking to a stranger.

One is talking to an acquaintance And mistake I see made is also you don't talk about the thing that was in the ad. So I'm talking about this $250 promotion. I better not have, have a thing where an ad, you click on it, then it says like, "Welcome to the Digital Dynasty Wedding Studio." And then I have to click on services,

Mikhail: get to that $250 hand

Matt: see the $250 promotion. This better be one, like one-to-one, they better be connected because the acquaintance is gonna show up. Remember, they're an acquaintance, they're not a, they're not a super warm lead yet. They're not a dedicated person that's gonna look around necessarily.

They might be, but they're not, not necessarily. They're gonna show up and be like, "Where's the $250 photos?" And what are they gonna tell their friends? "I couldn't find it on there." They're not gonna look. So that's another big, another [00:23:00] big mistake, is confusing the two type of landing pages, the homepage and the dedicated landing page, and then also not tailoring the dedicated landing page to its dedicated purpose. Make sure that you talk about that stuff, right? Reduce distractions. You're trying to get people to come in for this promotion. Now, you can have ads that are very generic, and if you have a generic ad, then sure, bring them to your homepage. Some people will just say, "Web development services available here." That's your ad? Great. Then yeah, come to the homepage. You're expecting people, even though they're not a stranger, they're an acquaintance, there's not a specific purpose in mind. So maybe your homepage will surface, like will suffice for that. There is al- always nuance to these things, but in general, again, homepage, meeting a stranger, dedicated landing page is you're talking to an acquaintance I wanna move into what's actually on the pages now.

I wanna talk into the website building blocks, these Lego blocks as I refer to them, as like, you know, what, what are they and like, you know, what, what, what should we be doing with them? Like, who are they for? You know, et cetera. And I wanna start with something that's usually at the top [00:24:00] of the webpage, like physically on the top, which is the navigation. And here's the thing. I've had people who have had websites where it's quite literally a digital business card, there is no, you know, below the fold, or if there is, it's like a tiny bit on the smallest of screens. they'll say, "Do I need navigation?" No. There's no scrolling. You're using this just to get people to come and look at the hero effectively. You do not need that. Again, look objectively here, not just 'cause everybody else has a navi- navigation. Look objectively here. What is a navigation bar, a nav bar commonly called, what is it for? Well, it is for helping visitors get around, obviously, but it's also something that they may use as a tool. What I mean by that is, is your website really complicated and your user's needs really complicated? An example would be, say you run like an absolutely massive warehouse and you sell direct-to-consumer [00:25:00] products. And when I say products, I mean like a wide range. Like you're like a department store, but it's direct to consumer. That's a c- that's a complicated navigation bar. Are they looking for beauty products?

Are they looking for car parts? Are they looking for asphalt? Are they landscapers? Are they, you know, are they beauticians, welders, repair? Like what, who are they? So your nav bar now should... it needs to be complicated. Like you need to have a thing where you go, okay. We got all these people coming here. We gotta have this be easy, but we need to have a complicated nav bar." We can't have like a minimalistic two-button thing where it just says products, you know? We, we want a good, you know, hefty nav bar. Again, you're looking at this thing like a tool. Let's have a products button that opens up like a dropdown, and then you select like, you know, beauty products or landscaping supplies or whatever it is. And then you can adjust this based upon what you find is popular and, and that, that comes down the road with analytics and things like that. But the idea here is that you're trying to help people get around. [00:26:00] Now, if you're a person that runs a warehouse, the same type of business, but you're only landscapers.

You're only selling to landscapers. You're not selling across the board. You don't need a complicated navigation necessarily You could have a more minimalistic one because you're not selling across as many categories. So if you see somebody in the warehouse selling space, the direct-to-consumer wholesale space, and you see somebody doing it and you're like, "Man, they have like 300 buttons, 300 nav, uh, links in their nav bar and I have 40," it's like, yeah, 'cause you're only selling to one niche. Now, you can take some inspiration and you could say, "You know what? Maybe I will break down so that it's like, you know, these are... This is my, uh, bag, like the, the landscaping bags that we use for yard cleanup." So we'll have like a yard, you know, bags. We'll have a, like a tool section maybe, maybe a lawnmower section.

We'll, we'll add some. You can take some inspiration, but again, we want to make sure our navigation bar is useful for who is reading it. And we also [00:27:00] don't wanna completely overwhelm Google and the AI bots when they index, crawl, et cetera, our websites. want them to think, like, you can break a category down too much, and you don't wanna do that effectively, right? So that, that is extremely important. Another thing that's extremely important with a nav bar too, make it work on both freaking mobile and, and desktop, and try to have all the same options in there. Obviously, the layout's gotta change sometimes, and I get it, and sometimes you do have to cut stuff. I also get that. But man, oh man, is it annoying when I'm like, oh, like on this website I just click like, you know, products and then video games, and then when I go to mobile, it's products and then electronics. Dumb. Hate it. Don't do that. It's a pet peeve, but it's bad. It's bad UX

Mikhail: It's also annoying from the perspective of someone, like, sharing the website to their friends. I've had that situation where, like, I'm like, "Hey, go look at this," and they're like, "I can't find it." But I'm looking at it on the computer and they're looking at it on mobile and, like, you know, it's, it's a small thing, and I don't know how many, like, how often that [00:28:00] happens, but if you do have a pretty different website from mobile to desktop, I could see that being an issue.

I could see you losing sales because of that, 'cause the person that they're sharing with is not getting the same experience as the person that's sharing, and they're, they're losing trust right away on that, on that note. So just a small thing that I've noticed,

Matt: I 100% agree, and I've done that too, 'cause especially in this day and age, it's like, what device are they using? You know, are they using a tablet, or are they using a foldable phone, or are they using a, you know, are they, are they on some crazy, like, AR headset? Like, what are they on? And, you know, if it's, if it's different everywhere for no good reason, and sometimes there are good reasons, but if it's different everywhere, you know, it's, it's, it's a problem. Another really big one, and you're gonna hear SEO personnel, SEO professionals talk about this a lot, and it is really important, are CTAs, otherwise known as call to actions. The thing here is that your call to action is not a call to have someone fill out a census, is the way I like to put it. It's a call [00:29:00] to action. So think about exactly what action you want your visitors to take and be clear with it. us now. Contact us. Get a quote, right? Purchase, click here to purchase. Click here to subscribe. Not click here to contact us, here's a field form just to ask when I should, when, uh, they want me to cut their lawn. What type of grass is it? How big's the property? Where are we going? How are we do- No. Have your f- have your form be easy, but ha- do have some, uh, some, um, some vetting in there. If you only serve three cities and you refuse to go outside those cities, yeah, make it a dropdown or make it, make it so that they can fill in their location, and if they're out, then, like, you just don't, you know, that, like, that's not a lead for you.

You refuse to go out there. Sure

Mikhail: Uh, I, yeah, there is a balance to it, right? Like you, i- i- depending on what, where you're going, like you might just wanna capture an email, [00:30:00] right? But that will get you more customer, or that will get you more subscriptions, quote unquote, or, or forms, forms filled out for sure. If it's just an email, 100% you're gonna get more than if you have email, phone number, reason, and like a note, right?

Like y- you, you know that as, uh, the more you add, like essentially every single one you add, you are lowering the amount of completions. Now, having said that, if you want serious leads, a lot of times what companies will do is they will intentionally make a form four fields or five fields with very intentional points, and they're willing to sacrifice the non-serious people that, that would not fill it out, right?

So there is a little bit of balance there.

Matt: Uh, uh, that tug of war comes back,

Mikhail: the tug of war absolutely comes back.

Matt: and that, but

Mikhail: Yeah.

Matt: a bit of a functional

Mikhail: And, and you can, you can change it. That's the other thing is like if you have access to a good develop- Like if you're a developer and you're doing this yourself, [00:31:00] like depending on who we're talking to right now, what audience we're talking to, if you have a developer, you're a developer.

You can adapt. So you could start with less, right? You could start with just an email, get all those leads, call those leads. If only 10% of them or 1% of them work, maybe you start adding some, you know, fields. If you have too many leads, then you wanna lower the amount of bad leads, so then you, you add some fields and all of a sudden you, you only have to call, you know, instead of 1,000 people, 100 people, but you get like 5% conversion on those 100 people.

So like these things you need to play around with, and the website, a- and the website's part of that, is like the building blocks need to change as you adapt to what your industry is and what, what you're seeing from your website's input. So it really should never be like a static thing. Websites at least nowadays should not be like super static.

You should have an ability to see what's going on, an ability to analyze the statistics, and then you should contac- you should either develop it yourself or you should contact your developer, um, [00:32:00] to continually update based on that, based on the feedback loop so that you get the most. Yes

Matt: have changed, like we, we work with a ton of small businesses and it'll be like we service two cities, but the two cities is because there's two p- two employees. One work- lives in one city and one lives in the other. That other s- that maybe one of the employees retires or quits. Okay, so now we only service one city. You know, be dynamic based upon all the things that you were saying, but also some practical things as well. And, and, and understand the needs and the wants and the, the requirements of your, of your business, of course The, uh, another thing that you're also gonna hear a lot of SEO professionals say is social proof. Now, what's a social proof? A tr- a social, social proof is something where you're, you're sort of, you're proving yourself. So a social proof would be, "I'm proving myself, but I'm not telling you about it." What I mean by that is, I'm not going to Mike and being like, "Hey, man, I'm a trustworthy guy. I do a lot of really good work."

Social proof would be, "Look at all my Google reviews. [00:33:00] I didn't write them. My customers wrote them. They decided to come voluntarily and write these Google reviews, and I have a four and a half or a five-star," or whatever it is, right? "Look at how good my Google reviews are. Look at how good my Facebook reviews are."

It's a social proof. What you're doing there is you're getting some trust. You're putting out what a lot of people will call as trust signals, right? So things like, you know, customer reviews, testimonials, client logos, case studies. Uh, if there's any certifications or awards that are applicable to your, to your niche, you can talk about those, of course, because, you know, "I went to college for this, so I did this, so I did that," I...

You know, et cetera, et cetera. photography, the proof's in the pudding. Take a picture of what you did, show it off. "Hey, I d- I built this and l- take a look at it," right? So someone could, like, really, if they're really getting into the research on you, they could really take a look and be like, "Oh, yeah," like, "I like his sculptures," or whatever it is, right?

Video demonstrations showcasing your work, where you really show off your [00:34:00] expertise and maybe show off a, a result of something cool. If you're a carpenter, that's, a lot of people will like that, where you can show little snippets of the, building process.

So it'll be like, "Hey," "I'm building, uh, I'm building this, bookshelf." It's like, okay, great, I'm building this bookshelf. And it's like, "Okay, I'm building it up," uh, you know, "Here, here's this, here's this stage, here's this stage, here's this stage, and here's the final stage." You don't need to have a six-hour video of you doing, the whole process or however long it took you.

But little check-ins, that's showing expertise, where you're like, "Hey, look at this," and then you could even bring up little things like, you have to apply the stain in this certain way, otherwise it bubbles," or whatever it is, right? Little things like that. And it's trust signals, 'cause then people are like, "Oh," "he knows his stuff.

He knows little things," and, this and that. And these are social proofs. And the lowest hanging fruit of which is usually reviews, like I mentioned, Google and Facebook reviews, but then there's also gonna be other social proofs. People will have, previous or current customer carousels, where they'll have the logos.

Like, we've worked with Microsoft, you know. We've worked with, we've worked with Autodesk. We've worked [00:35:00] with Digital Dynasty Design. We've worked with HTML all the things. things like that. They will have those as social proofs, and if you're a fan of Microsoft or whatever, then you might be like, "Oh, shoot," these guys know what they're doing.

They've, they've worked with some big, big names or some trustworthy names." The thing here is what you're doing, and this is really, really helpful on, like, a homepage, is you're, you're establishing trust. 'Cause someone, who clicks on your thing, even a- even on a landing page, dedicated landing page, that person is, again, an acquaintance or a stranger depending on the page that they're landing on, and they just, they don't know you yet, right?

It's like, "Who is this person?" It's like, well, there's 10,000 r- Google reviews and they're getting a 4.8. I mean, that's pretty good, right? So something like that, would work. something like that would like, convey, let's say, convey good trust signals and they can click on them. make it very easy to click.

Here, click here, take a look at my reviews. read them for yourself, see what's up. This is another one that I see all the time. It's more of on the design side of things. [00:36:00] It's more of a design preference, or at least it come- usually comes down to that, but it can be used functionally as well, and they are sliders and carousels. Now, the thing is, a lot of businesses request these, right? What they're supposed to do is they're supposed to, uh, a- allow, like, allow you to fit more the page in one area. You don't wanna have, like, a page that's, you know, you scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, scroll. So you have it kind of scroll left and right, but it's in the same, spot.

It's in the same rectangle, let's say. And sliders and carousels are great. I'm not saying they're good, bad, or whatever, but I do think that you need to look at them objectively personally. I've had people, and thankfully this has kinda gone away, but I'd say, like, five, six years ago, I was having people trying to put on, the third slide, vital information on slide two and above, hide, a contact form, like a mini contact form, or a subscribe form, like, which is basically a mini contact form, a subscribe form on, like, slide [00:37:00] six.

And I was like, "Who's gonna sit here and wait?" You know, you have your slides either autoplay or the user has to click or, maybe swipe, through your slides, and who's gonna necessarily do that? The, the instinct is to scroll down, not scroll left and right. Sliders are great. Some people really want interactivity on their website, and that's cool, but we have to have that information in a few places, right?

If it's really vital information, it better be on slide one. Here's the, here's the kicker, though. a d- it's a double-edged sword. It better be on slide one, but if you autoplay in 30 seconds and the person hasn't read slide one, they might be on slide three. They went to your website, they looked away for a second, they're on their phone. They look back, they're on slide four. they're getting, a part of your story and not the whole thing. So that's why I'm really hesitant on sliders and carousels. Now, some carousels are just functional for design. Sometimes it's like, hey, my content boxes, I want them to be a specific size. I want them to be 400 pixels wide.

I like that design aesthetic. And because of that, of that, I want them to be side by [00:38:00] side. I don't wanna have multiple rows, and so I need to have, be able to scroll back and forth. I think that that's totally practical. sometimes stuff like this is just, is just practical.

It just makes sense, right? This is why I brought this up. A lot of small businesses that we talk to will say, "I really, I really want a slider," right? "I really want a carousel." And it's like, okay, again, let's, let's think of this objectively. Just because someone near you has a slider, it doesn't mean that you should have a slider. I'll give a, a very recent example. We had an example of a guy who, who wanted to have a hero section, and he wanted to have his site look really interactive and really kinda, hopping, I think is what he said. So okay, that's fine. he, he said, "Okay, I have a, I have a media team. They've taken a whole bunch of pictures." And this person had... was very into media. They had a, some television commercials and things like this, so it was a medium-sized business. And they said, "Okay, I wanna have a video background." Okay, that's great. Let's make things look interactive. But then he requested after, he said, "You know what? Let's have, multiple video [00:39:00] backgrounds.

Let's have a slider, and let's have all these different pieces of information." And I, I said, "Okay, well, like, this is gonna affect loading times, and I can have mechanisms in there to help with the loading times. Like, sure, we could do it." But I, I had, like, a serious conversation with him and I said, "Well, what's the point of showing the different videos?" And his whole thing was, "Well, I want them to be able to see the various aspects of the business." This, this business was a multifaceted business where there was multiple steps, so if you signed up with them, you were going on a ride. I have to anonymize the details, 'cause I don't have permission to share who it was. But the thing is, is it was a multifaceted business. You sign up, and you're, you're working with them for years on a big project. I'll just say that. And so I said, "Well, here's the issue with this, though, is that someone who's really into this and, like, is really interested, they're not gonna sit on your homepage and look and stay, stay staring at your hero and then slide through the slides." I said, "Why don't we add a bit of SEO to this, and why don't we, put our, kind of money where our mouth is and use these videos and let's use this eye candy and everything [00:40:00] else, and let's make a page where someone who's really interested in this that is now entering exiting the stranger era and becoming more of an acquaintance, they're doing research.

Let's have a page where it's, like, our process or your process or whatever, and have them go through effectively a timeline these stages. Forget the slider Timeline of these stages, lots of information there, really information rich, like just really nice. of the best pages in terms of ranking on that pa- on, on that, on that website.

One of the best pa- one of the best ones. Very interactive, was hopping as the person said. But then the homepage saved that loading time, right? It saved that loading time, and then we directed it, so it was kind of like a, you know, one door closes and another opens. I said, "Okay, I still want there to be a video on that homepage.

I agree with making everything hopping," you know, as it were. So choose out of those, I think it might have been five or six steps, choose out of those five or six videos the [00:41:00] number one video. Choose the number one video, the mo- most important, where if you, if you were, you know, just talking to someone on the street and a video is gonna convince them, put that in there.

And it was just like a background one, like there wasn't any talking or anything like that. It was just like a, again, eye candy. And so then we got the best video, right? Arguably the best video for the homepage. Now the be- now the homepage is a, has a, a better first impression. And that site converted, man. That site converted like crazy to the point where they outgrew us. say that. So It worked, right? And so the thing is, is look at stuff objectively, not just because someone else has a slider. And I, and I am glad most, thankfully, most small businesses I shouldn't say most. getting less asks, not none.

I'm getting less asks for sliders, I would say. Less, not zero.

Mikhail: Especially especially sliders on the f- like the cover, right? Like the c- the, [00:42:00] the, the landing c- page cover. Like that, that used to be a thing, you're right, but I feel like that hasn't been a thing for a very, very long time. Sliders in a sense of for example, like the, your logos sliding by, right?

Matt: that'd be more inf- I call it inficar- infinite

Mikhail: sure, a carousel, yeah. Sliders and yeah, yeah. So there... I, I have seen carousels pretty often. I will warn with carousels is like I think they're good like elements to break up a page, but they're not good for information sharing.

Matt: It's to make, it's to make the page hot.

Mikhail: It is, it is kind of to make the page like more dynamic and more like just, you know, less static, less,

They just add some flair to a page, but they're not really ... If you, if you're hid- like if you're, if you're hiding a social proof in the fourth slide and you can only see three, uh, in the carousel, you might wanna think about displaying it a little bit differently. That's, uh, that's all I'm saying. But if you're having like just a, a bunch of pictures that show the, of like, you know, let's say you paint, paint houses, and you ha- you wanna show your work, and [00:43:00] you have like 10 pictures and you show the first four, and then if someone's interested, they can continue down the carousel, that's okay in my opinion.

You know what I mean? Like as long as you show the first four best ones.

Matt: it

Mikhail: Yeah. Exactly

Matt: They didn't, they're not, they're not completely lost on... They're not starting on episode five.

Mikhail: Mm-hmm

Matt: Like, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter where they started

Mikhail: Exactly

Matt: The final Lego brick, there's a ton of Lego bricks we could cover here.

We could talk for like three freaking hours. The final one that I hear, and I'd say this is very, very common, even though there's dim- People say there's diminishing SEO, and I haven't experienced this. for this, I know there's like a... So this is FAQs, frequently asked questions, to be clear, and I know that there is diminishing FAQ SEO benefit from an FAQ schema or schema. however, if the FAQs are good, it's just good content, and I still find them to be good. And if you actually wrote your FAQs with more than just SEO in mind, and you actually try to take in your user [00:44:00] intent, it ends up becoming like a good page for users and also a good SEO tool, and th- that's what I find. So let me get into it. Frequently asked questions, right? These are answering, like, time are you open till? What do you-- What's your business do? How many years experience you got?" You know, "What type of pudding do you like?" Like, whatever. And it's, it applies to your niche.

That was a joke, by the way. Don't start putting that type of personal stuff on there. But it, you know, it applies to your niche. And what these FAQs do is they help your users get information that they would otherwise need to reach out to you for or look elsewhere. You're trying to keep them on your website, right? You're trying to keep them on your website. So, you know, what are, what are the hours? Don't make them jump back to Google Maps. Like have your hours in your FAQ or on your footer or something like that, right? go in and, like, with, with your frequently asked questions, like have literally frequently asked questions.

When I say that, it sounds obvious. I mean real ones though. Have stuff in there that's like, [00:45:00] let's just say you have a, a bronze, silver, and a gold pricing tier, and people are overrunning that, so you add a platinum, and the platinum tier is like, "You have to contact us." That's a question. Someone's gonna say, "Why do I have to contact you for platinum tier?"

That's something that is like a real user intent that you, you throw that in there. And you have that information in a couple places. You can have that on your FAQ page if you have a dedicated FAQ page, but you can also have that on your pricing page, right? Have that information out there. So it's a, it's a real question. I look at it is FAQs should prevent people from you if you don't want them to call. Obviously, you're trying to get people to call for leads and stuff, it's a bit different. So you can put, you can even put some CTAs inside of your FAQs, of course. you can say "Hey, call us here," you know, uh, you know, do this, do that.

You can put that in there. The point of it is, though, is it's supposed to be almost like a glanceable question, answer. Just a quick I had a quick question, you answered it really quick, okay, great, right? Type of thing. why I'm being kinda like, I feel like I'm [00:46:00] being weird with this, but people, like, really, really don't use the FAQs properly. People put stuff like, seen people put the really basic stuff, like what is my business name? I feel like they're trying to get, like, an SEO play where it's like, what's my business name? But it's like, well, it's on the nav bar, dude. it's on the nav bar. It's oftentimes the URL you typed in. Come on, don't do stuff like that. Real user intent, real, real FAQs an example of, someone who doesn't want people to call, so they're not a lead gener- generation business. They run events, and these people are already, like, you know, they're going to these events.

They're charity events. They're already going to the events. And so the thing is, is they... Sometimes they'll just post, an event that they have every year. let's just... I'll- And again, I'm gonna anonymize details. Let's just say it's a potluck. "Hey, we have a community potluck," small town. Let's, let's do this. It's a community potluck. Okay, fantastic. they just put that, and they just put, like, oh, the date sometimes or whatever, won't have the time. Now often, now you should [00:47:00] have the time, but the point is, is in your FAQ, you could say, like, "Hey," like, "when does your potluck start?"

And you could have, like, you know, A, it starts, you know, any event that doesn't have a time listed, it assumes we start at 9:00 AM. Some stuff like that, Not the greatest example because, like, obviously you should probably just put 9:00 AM in your actual event page, but you can see what I mean. Any- anything where you would want the user to be able to find that answer on your website and not have to call you, you don't want them to call and be like, "Hey, when's the potluck?"

And then you're fielding 80 calls, "Hey, when's the potluck? Hey, when's the potluck? Hey, when's the potluck?" Um, an example of, like a real, a real example based upon that company that does do events is they will post information about tickets when there's tickets that are required, but they won't post information about tickets at all if tickets are not required. So a, a frequently asked question is, "Are tickets required for all your events?" And then the answer to that question is, "No, any event that doesn't have tickets listed does [00:48:00] not need a ticket. It's considered free admission." And that's it, right? Very, very simple. so y- your FAQs really should answer frequently asked questions. In the beginning of your website, though, you can absolutely have FAQs that are a little bit more generic, and then you'll slowly start to learn, "God, people keep emailing me about this. People keep calling me about this." And you can add FAQs. And you can add FAQs in the classic Lego block sect- uh, s- uh, sort of of the Lego block, I guess. You can add it anywhere. I have, on some of my clients, I have a FAQ page, so they have, some generic FAQs that many of the website users will want, and a lot of them are more generic business questions that people may have that you want, again, to g- you want the per- the website readers to get it off of the website. You don't want them to have to go to Google Maps and other things. And then you have FAQs on really detailed pages. If you have a page that's really, really detailed, you can have a little [00:49:00] FAQ section if it's, a blog post, and there's a whole bunch of information in there, like a big old technical guide. You can have another FAQ section in there, right? And yes, again, people say, "Oh, the s- you know, the schema doesn't have the, uh, the, the same SEO benefits that it did." It hasn't had that in a long, long time. I still do an FAQ and I will still do an FAQ schema if I can. Like, I- it's, to me it's just another cross a T, dot an I.

It's not like Google's gonna be like, "Th- this guy's got FAQs, get outta here." That's, you know, that, that's foolishness. The, the FAQs that have really been killed have been the listicles of FAQs, if you will. You don't want like a listicle FAQ where you're just making an SEO play. This should be for your listeners or your, for your readers And there's a bunch of other components that we could talk about. I'm not gonna, like, get into it again, but things like, you know, pop-ups, you know, whether you want them, you know, trust badges, you know, feature comparisons, pricing tables, live chats, footers. You

Mikhail: Угу.

Matt: goes on and on and on and on and on. [00:50:00] But I think to, to sort of wind down the episode, what you really wanna do is you wanna start to think about putting these Lego bricks together, right? What you wanna do is you wanna think about y- visitor intent. You want, you wanna think about the visitor intent, who the page is for, what the page is for, and you're in that sort of of war again. So I have an example here, an emergency plumber. Not just a plumber, an emergency plumber, okay? here's the thing. What's the person, what, what's the person need to know? Are you available immediately? Are you 24/7? What's your service area? Are you trustworthy? How do I call you or contact you? Gen- generally it's gonna be call 'cause it's, this is an emergency plumber.

You do not wanna have, "Our plumbing services are available 24/7. Here's our, here's our Facebook ads. Click here to look at our service page. here to look at [00:51:00] our contact page and see if you wanna email us." No. Emergency plumber. So that's it. you might even wanna skip, a pricing chart or something.

This person needs to re- this person has found a leak. They are probably panicking. The user intent is person needs help. And so that page, that emergency plumber page, is less about the bot and less about the SEO, although you need SEO 'cause obviously you need to rank, whatever. But it-- you have to... You... The bot is not in a panic, and it, it didn't find a leak. The reader found a leak and needs help immediately. Tailor to that. things easy to find. They shouldn't have to browse around your website. There should be a big old Call Now button Makes sense. Here's a, here's something that's more relaxed. A landscaping company, okay? So if we think about all the Lego blocks you wanna click there together, well, let's have a nice like little photo gallery. Let's have a portfolio of our work. have, [00:52:00] our service descriptions. 'Cause someone's looking at it and is like, "Oh, I wouldn't mind my front garden being done." It's not like, "Oh my God, I found out I don't have a front garden. What am I gonna do? W- I gotta call... Okay, hang on. We gotta call the landsca-" Right? It's a different intent. Let's take a look at this. Are these guys any good? Let's look at their social proofs. Let's look at their trust signals. Oh, they have pictures all over their website. It looks great. I'd lo- I'd love a quote.

Let's get a quote. Oh, there's a CTA here that has a quote for me. Different user intents. Different user intents. Very, very, very important. SaaS product, this drives me nuts, by the way, this is why I left it to last. products with a homepage that assumes I know what you're talking about. You can't come at me and be like, "This is an L3 cache of an asphalt product that used to be down in the river." Why don't you just say, "We sell ads"? Like, what are you talking about? Or we, we, "We help with website caches." Like, what are you doing? tell me [00:53:00] what... S- Don't assume I'm an acquaintance. Don't assume I know what I'm talking about.

I need to know what it is you do. I don't need to... You know what I mean? Tell me what you do c- plain, in plain English, and then you can tell me your story. And then you can be a little more complex with me.

If I go to your features thing, then you can talk about your L3 cache made down in the river with asphalt or whatever the hell you're doing. I don't care. Be direct, right? Feature explanations, demonstrations

Mikhail: Yeah, demos is good

Matt: Demonstrations, holy crap. Pricing, tell me how much it is. Don't tell me to contact you unless it's...

I know some niches need it. me the price. Compare yourself to others, if I'm brand new, remember, I'm a stranger. If I'm brand new, I might ha- I might- you might be the first stop, and I wanna go to other stops, but I might come back. Comparisons. If you can, signups, and if you can, free trials. I know that s- some of these things don't [00:54:00] work for some SaaS businesses. run your SaaS business as you do. But please, I get so many cold emails, and sometimes I'm interested. "Oh, man, that, that sounds like an interesting service." Click here, and it's like, it's like, "Man, did you know this cra- this thing..." No, I didn't know all this about ads. What do you do? "Well, did you know that ads have been blowing up for the last five years, and there's footers.

There's footers on websites." You don't need to tell me all this nonsense. What do you do? "Oh, we sell ads that are on sidebars. We have the best sidebar ads in, in town." Say that, and then on the sur- then on other pages, you can be like, "The reason why we do this is because ads on footers blew up two years ago," or yada, yada, yada, and you hate that, and you wanted ads on sidebars.

Go ahead. Like, don't... life story. No assuming I'm in this industry, and I'm like, "Man, you're, you're right." know? "You're, you're right. The footer, footer ads, you know, were doing horrible years ago." Just explain it. Explain what you do, how to sign up. [00:55:00] Do you... Really the question is, you wanna sign up, how do you convince somebody? But I think, I think that's the episode. I have a little bit more on the, in the show notes if you're interested. I have some common website mistakes, just a few bullet points there. Just a few other bullet points that we didn't cover in, today's episode. But, that's the episode for this week, at least for me.

Mike, I don't know if you have anything else to add

Mikhail: Uh, no. You know what? I, I'll add one more kind of suggestion that I'm not seeing a lot of that I think would help, is being reactive to your industry's trends. So landscaping is a good one, right? Landscaping, in the summer, y- you know, your l- your f- your front page might be all about lawn and maintenance care, obviously.

But in the winter, you're doing snow removal, so you might want to change your landing page, like change your homepage to reflect the season that you're in for the business that you're doing. Because if someone comes in and there's like, obviously on the, uh, somewhere on the landscaping page, you're probably gonna have winter services [00:56:00] there.

But if it's the first thing they see versus your competitors where it's like below the fold or like the third thing or i- it buried in a menu, you have a higher chance of converting because that's what people are looking for at that specific time. So just little things like it's, it's building blocks, but you can shift them around, you can adapt to the current environment

Matt: It, it, it'd literally be like, if you had a slider, you don't necessarily have to have a slider, but if you had a slider, it's like slide one and two, you know, you can swap them. If one of them is like, you

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: cleanup and the other one is snow removal and, you could swap them. Like, "Oh, it's winter, I better put the snow removal one as slide one right now."

Like, you could, you could do that. Or you could reword your hero stuff that says, "We do yard cleanup and snow removal." just straight up easy, like, "Oh, okay, they do both. Okay." Like immediately you just, you just know it right away. a very good point. I've seen on, Facebook, it's a, a little rough, but like I've seen people on Facebook will...

They'll have like, "Oh, you know, these are all our main services." That's all [00:57:00] fine. But then you find out that they do seasonal services. Like they do things like, "Yeah, we do also hang, Christmas lights in your house." And it's like that should be a big prominent part of your website and not just one Facebook post.

That one Facebook post, usually gets a fair bit of likes or whatever, and like yada, yada, like great, but that should be probably a landing page on your site, or it should be more prominent in the, in the appropriate season. 100%, 100% agree. It's a very good point

Mikhail: Yeah. I, I think too many people leave their sites too static. That's, that's where I'm trying to, like, come in and be like, "Hey,

Matt: It's

Mikhail: the environment r- Yes, sh- shit's changing." Like, AI is coming in and making stuff a lot more competitive, right? Even for small businesses. You're gonna see, your competitors update their sites a lot more often.

it's gonna be costing probably less nowadays to update your site and maintain it and update, and, like, and get it to a point where it's, uh, you know, more dynamic. So if your competitors are doing that, you should start thinking ahead, getting ahead of that, and potentially, if you had a site seven years [00:58:00] ago or five years ago, you probably wanna reach out to your web guy and be like, "Hey, we're looking to stay ahead of the curve here."

That's all I'm saying

Matt: I mean, yeah, like the websites that are dynamic to the, to the, the needs of the business, uh, are gonna win out. Y- you don't need to change it every day.

Mikhail: No

Matt: need to obsess over it, and we do have some clients that obsess over it. You don't need to obsess over it. The idea here though is like, you said, if the business has a different need in a different time of year or a different month... We got a sh- like an absolute crap load of clicks on an accounter, an accounting person's website, an accountant's website. I don't know why I said accounting person. And an accountant's website, one of our clients. Because the person was like, "We're getting a bunch of phone calls these forms that every person that has a certain..."

That, I think it's anyone who gets a T4, which is like our tax slip if you're traditionally employed. In Canada, you get a T4. And they, they need these like, other forms during income tax. I said, "Okay, take that tax [00:59:00] form. You're allowed to upload it. It's public. You're not, you didn't fill it in. It's, it's blank. Make it so that you fill it in and, or make it so it's not filled in, and have the blank one on your website. "And then you can, when you have a meeting with people, you just say, 'Go to my website,' whatever the website is, /documents. Now they're not calling you, now they're not bugging you, and you can have a little SEO in there." Oh, someone looks up the form, they find your website. Oh man, there's an accountant office here. That's a side thing. It happened less. The thing is though is it made his business way faster. Way faster, the point where we update it every single year now.

New documents, and we've updated different areas. There's inheritance taxes and all kinds of stuff in Canada. And so they, they updated, like that, that document center is like a proper document center now. It was like two PDFs originally. It's a dynamic part of the business. It's a dynamic part of the website, and it's important to have it, 100%. But that's it. That is the episode. Remember that if you wanna support episodes like this, can do so on patreon.com at [01:00:00] patreon.com/htmlallthethings, and many thanks to our $3 tier patrons. Tim from the Web Hacker at webhacker.com, Jason from Geek Life Radio via geekliferadio.com, Garrett Segall, Level Up Financial Planning via www.levelupfinancialplanning.com, Magnus from Yes Web via yesweb.se, Syntaxify from the HTML All the Things Discord server, and Stacy Mosteller from the website swoonworthydesigns.com.

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