Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are widely used across websites of all sizes, but many businesses install them without fully understanding what they actually do.

Both platforms provide the insight needed to understand website performance. However, they focus on completely different areas of your online presence. Without understanding that difference, it becomes difficult to interpret the data properly or make well-informed decisions about your website, your SEO, and your wider digital marketing efforts.

What Do Google Analytics and Google Search Console Actually Do?

At a glance, both tools track website data, but they answer very different questions.

Google Analytics focuses on what happens when someone lands on your website. It helps you understand who your visitors are, how they behave, and whether they take action. Google Search Console, on the other hand, focuses on how your website appears in Google Search, showing how people find you and how visible your pages are.

They don’t replace each other. They work together, each providing a different part of the bigger picture.

What Is Google Analytics?
Understanding Your Website Visitors

Google Analytics is designed to help you understand how people interact with your website once they arrive.

It gives you insight into how many people are visiting your site, where they came from, and how they move through your pages. You can see which content performs well, how long users stay on your site, and whether they take meaningful actions such as completing a form or making an enquiry.

This kind of data is essential when you’re trying to improve your website’s performance. It helps you identify which pages are engaging users, where people are dropping off, and what might be preventing conversions. Over time, the data you receive allows you to refine your website experience so it better supports your goals.

In simple terms, Google Analytics helps you understand what your visitors are doing and how your website is performing from their perspective.

What Is Google Search Console?
Understanding Your Search Performance

While Google Analytics focuses on activity within your website, Google Search Console focuses on what happens before a user even gets there.

It provides insight into how your website performs in Google Search, including what people are searching for, how often your site appears in results, and how many users click through to your pages. It also highlights your average ranking positions, giving you a clearer idea of where you stand for specific search terms.

Beyond this, Search Console plays an important role in identifying technical issues that could be affecting your visibility. It can highlight problems with indexing, mobile usability, and site performance, all of which can prevent your pages from appearing as they should.

This makes it a key tool for improving your SEO. Google Search Console helps you understand not just how visible your website is, but what might be holding it back.

The Key Difference: Visitors vs Visibility

The simplest way to understand the difference between these two tools is this.

Google Analytics focuses on your visitors.

Google Search Console focuses on your visibility in search.

Analytics shows you what users do after they arrive on your website. Search Console shows you how they found you in the first place.

Without Analytics, you have no clear understanding of how your website is performing once people land on it. Without Search Console, you don’t know how effectively your site is being discovered.

Both perspectives are essential if you want to make informed decisions.

A Simple Way to Think About It

A useful way to visualise the difference is through a simple analogy.

Google Analytics is like CCTV inside a shop. It shows how customers move around, what they look at, how long they stay, and whether they make a purchase.

Google Search Console is more like a traffic report. It shows how people found the shop, which routes they took to get there, and whether there were any obstacles along the way.

One focuses on behaviour inside the space. The other focuses on the journey before arrival.

Why You Need Both Tools

Using just one of these tools will only ever give you part of the story.

If you rely solely on Google Analytics, you can see how users behave on your website, but you won’t understand how to improve your visibility in search. On the other hand, if you only use Google Search Console, you can see how people are finding your site, but you won’t know what happens once they arrive.

When used together, they allow you to connect the full journey.

For example, you might notice that your website is appearing frequently in search results but not attracting clicks. This would point to an issue with how your pages are presented in search. Alternatively, you might see strong traffic levels but low conversions, suggesting that your website experience needs improvement.

These insights become far more valuable when they are viewed together rather than in isolation.

Common Mistakes Businesses Make

Despite having access to these tools, many businesses fail to get real value from them.

A common issue is installing Google Analytics but rarely checking it, or ignoring Google Search Console entirely. In other cases, businesses may look at the data but find it difficult to interpret what it actually means, leading to decisions based on assumptions rather than evidence.

Another frequent mistake is focusing too heavily on surface-level metrics without taking action. Data on its own does very little. It’s how that data is understood and applied that makes the difference.

How These Tools Fit Into Your Digital Strategy

Google Analytics and Google Search Console form the foundation of a strong digital marketing strategy.

They provide the insights required to improve your website, refine your SEO approach, and better understand your audience. Whether you are looking to increase visibility, improve engagement, or generate more enquiries, these tools help guide your decisions with real data.

Without them, it becomes much harder to measure progress or identify areas for improvement. With them, you can take a better-informed and planned approach to growing your online presence.

Conclusion

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are both essential tools, but they serve very different purposes.

One helps you understand how users interact with your website. The other helps you understand how your website is discovered in search. When used together, they provide a complete view of your performance, allowing you to make better, more well-informed decisions.

If you’re looking to better understand your website data or need support setting these tools up and interpreting the insights they provide, our team is always happy to talk through it with you.

For many businesses, Google Reviews are seen as a simple reputation tool. A place where customers leave feedback, give a star rating, and help build reputation and trust with potential buyers. While that is true, it only scratches the surface of their real value.

Google Reviews can actually play a much bigger role in how your business is understood online. They directly influence how visible you are in local search, how trustworthy you appear, and can be the deciding factor when potential customers choose you over a competitor. When used properly, the possibility of them becoming a part of your wider digital marketing strategy is much more apparent, rather than just a passive collection of testimonials.

Understanding how they work and what actually makes a difference can help businesses across Wolverhampton and the West Midlands strengthen their local presence and improve their digital presence and SEO performance over time.

Rather than being a ranking trick, reviews act as a signal. They help Google understand that your business is legitimate, active, and delivering value to customers.

Do Google Reviews Actually Help SEO?

The short answer is yes, but not in the way you might assume. Google Reviews don’t act like traditional website content, where adding keywords directly boosts rankings. Instead, they contribute to how Google evaluates your business profile as a whole, including factors such as relevance, prominence, and trust. This is why time and time again, we say it’s of utmost importance for your business to have one (a Google Business Profile that is).

Reviews can influence local search visibility in plenty of ways. The number of reviews you have, how recent they are, and the overall summary these reviews create all play a role in how your business appears in the local pack and map listings. A business with consistent, high-quality reviews is more likely to be seen as active and trustworthy. Avid users of reputable online e-commerce stores and well-known takeaway apps will know this inherently.

Rather than being a ranking trick, reviews act as a signal. They help Google understand that your business is legitimate, active, and delivering value to customers.

How Google Uses Reviews to Understand Your Business

Google doesn’t just look at star ratings; it also looks at what the reviews say about your business or services.

Through natural language processing, Google can analyse review content to identify patterns. This includes the services customers mention, the locations referenced, and the outcomes they describe. Over time, this builds a clearer picture of what your business does, why it does it and who it serves.

For example, if our reviews mention web design, SEO support, or digital marketing services, it reinforces our relevance for those areas. If those same reviews naturally reference the surrounding area or where the work was done, it strengthens our association with that location, hence why these metrics can directly influence visibility in local search and map packs.

This isn’t about optimisation in the traditional sense. It is about consistency. The more your reviews reflect what your business genuinely does, the easier it is for Google to connect you with the right searches.

The Role of Keywords in Google Reviews

Does this all sound too good to be true? Are you ready to approach your customers with a tailored review template that hits all the marks…

Well, stop right there (please).

This is often where the topic becomes misunderstood.

Keywords in Google Reviews can support SEO, but only when they appear naturally. They aren’t something that should be forced or engineered. Instead, they act as a byproduct of real customer experiences, and in the current climate of AI implementation, you really do need to take care in how your reviews materialise.

A vague review such as “Great service” provides very little context, but multiple of these in their variances from actual people are much more rewarding than constructed and rehearsed reviews. The issue with vague reviews is that they tell Google or potential customers almost nothing, which is where these types of feedback can become unstuck.

On the other hand, a more descriptive review like “Great web design service in Wolverhampton, helped us improve our online presence” gives clear signals about the service, location, and outcome.

The difference isn’t about keyword optimisation. It’s about clarity.

When customers naturally describe what you do, where you do it, and the results they achieved, it reinforces your relevance.

Over time, this builds a stronger association between your business and those services in local search.

Google Reviews shouldn’t be treated as a standalone activity. They are one part of a much wider digital ecosystem.

Why This Matters for Local Search

Local SEO is driven by a combination of relevance, distance, and prominence. Google Reviews supports all three. They help confirm what your business offers, where it operates, and how well it performs. This becomes particularly important in competitive areas like Wolverhampton and the wider area, Birmingham and then the West Midlands, where multiple businesses may offer similar services.

A strong review profile can improve your visibility for searches such as ‘website designer near me’ or ‘digital marketing agency Wolverhampton’. It also increases the likelihood that users will click on your listing once they see it.

Reviews won’t work in isolation, but they will strengthen everything around them. When combined with a well-structured website and a clear digital marketing strategy, they contribute to a more complete and credible online presence.

What Makes a High-Impact Google Review?

Not all reviews carry the same weight, either for users or for search engines.

A strong review ideally includes a few key elements. It mentions the service provided, gives context about the experience, and highlights the outcome. It often reflects a genuine tone rather than something overly polished or generic.

For example:

• A weaker review might say: “Great company, highly recommend.”
• A stronger review might say: “VOiD Applications redesigned our website and helped improve our visibility in Wolverhampton. The process was clear, and the results have made a real difference.”

The second example fits the criteria, ‘service, experience, outcome’. It builds trust with potential customers and reinforces relevance for search engines at the same time.

You can also clearly see that the example review itself isn’t lengthy, keyword-stuffed or goes out of its way to use uncommon or complicated language. Personally speaking, hitting 2 out of 3 review criteria is a realistic target, needs less thinking and will still give a clear picture to onlookers interested in your service.

How Google Reviews Fit Into Your Wider Digital Strategy

Google Reviews shouldn’t be treated as a standalone activity. They are one part of a much wider digital ecosystem. They support SEO by reinforcing relevance rather than creating it. They support website performance by improving trust, in turn positively affecting conversion rates.

They also complement content marketing by providing real-world validation of your services, allowing you to document your authority within your market.

When aligned with a strong website and clear messaging, reviews become far more powerful. They help ensure that when someone finds your business, they have a reason to trust it and become your next customer.

Conclusion

Google Reviews, when utilised properly, can be much more than a collection of star ratings. They help shape how your business is understood by both search engines and potential customers.

When they reflect real experiences, clear outcomes, and genuine feedback, they reinforce your relevance, strengthen your local presence, and support long-term growth. For businesses in Wolverhampton and the West Midlands, this can make a meaningful difference in both visibility and performance.

If you’re looking to improve your local visibility and make better use of your digital presence, it’s worth understanding how every element works together, including your reviews.

A strong online presence has become essential for businesses across Wolverhampton and the wider West Midlands. Whether a company is trying to win new customers, improve visibility in local search, or present itself professionally, its website is often the first impression a potential customer experiences. Yet many local businesses still begin with template-based websites because they seem quick, cheap, and convenient. The reality is that these templates are rarely aligned with the goals of a growing organisation and often hold businesses back at the very stage when they are trying to move forward.

Bespoke web design offers a different path. It brings strategy, clarity, and purpose to every part of a site, ensuring it reflects the uniqueness of the business it represents. This post takes a behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative process that helps local organisations achieve better results, and why Wolverhampton businesses increasingly benefit from websites built around their needs rather than forced into a one-size-fits-all template.

The Problem with Templates for Growing Wolverhampton Businesses

Templates are built to appeal to as many people as possible, which means they are rarely designed with the needs of West Midlands businesses in mind. Whether a company operates in manufacturing, professional services, construction, hospitality or retail, each has different goals, audiences, and operational realities. A template, however attractive it may seem initially, cannot adapt itself to those nuances.

Templates often limit how you present information, how content is structured, and how user pathways flow through a site. They can restrict design choices, slow down performance, and make it harder to optimise a site for local search. Many businesses discover that once they start growing, their template becomes a bottleneck preventing them from improving lead quality, publishing content effectively, or integrating new systems. Our article titled How Web Design Influences Content Marketing Success explores this challenge in more detail.

Why Bespoke Web Design Delivers Better Long-Term Value

A bespoke website begins with the business itself. Instead of squeezing goals into a template, the design is shaped around what the organisation is trying to achieve. This allows the site to support long-term growth rather than resist it.

Because every element is intentional, bespoke sites tend to load faster, convert better, and perform more effectively in search engines. They allow complete flexibility, whether adding new features, adjusting content, or refining user journeys. They also create a stronger foundation for digital marketing, meaning campaigns have a better chance of delivering results. Listeners of Into the VOiD Episode 4 will recognise how improved UX and clarity contribute directly to better-quality enquiries.

A Collaborative Process That Ensures Every Client Gets Exactly What They Need

Bespoke web design is not simply a design exercise; it is a collaborative process. The following steps illustrate the structured approach we use at VOiD Applications, and why this method ensures that every client receives a website shaped around their goals rather than generic assumptions.

1. Discovery: Understanding Goals, Challenges, and Opportunities

Every successful website begins with understanding. This phase allows us to explore the business, its audience, internal processes, competitors, and long-term goals. For Wolverhampton and West Midlands businesses, discovery often highlights insights unique to the region, such as customer expectations, differences between local and national competition, and sector-specific behaviour that would never be captured by a template.

2. Design: Creating a Tailored Experience Before Any Code Is Written

Design begins long before development. We create non-functioning layouts and visual concepts that show how the site will look and feel. This process allows clients to shape direction early, ensuring the website reflects the right tone, structure, and user pathways. It is during this stage that responsive considerations come into play, and our What Is Responsive Website Design article provides helpful detail on how adaptable layouts contribute to a better experience.

3. Development: Turning Strategy and Design into a Purpose-Built Website

Once designs are approved, development brings everything to life. Instead of dragging and dropping elements, each part of the build is constructed with intention. Bespoke development ensures the website performs quickly, integrates cleanly with business tools, and offers long-term flexibility. This approach is especially valuable for local companies planning to scale operations over time.

4. Testing: Ensuring Reliability Before Launch

Testing begins during development and continues after the build is complete. Multiple devices, browsers, and user scenarios are checked to ensure a consistent experience. This attention to detail is a major difference between bespoke websites and templates, which often look good only under ideal conditions. A reliable site builds trust, encourages enquiries, and supports long-term user engagement.

5. Training and Launch: Ensuring the Client Feels in Control

When the site is ready to go live, we work through a clear launch process with our clients. This includes training to ensure they can manage their site confidently without relying on support for basic tasks. For example, our Into the VOiD Episode 6 discussions show how empowering clients to use news and updates effectively can significantly improve search presence and keep customers engaged.

6. Maintenance and Aftercare: Supporting Long-Term Growth

A website is not a one-time project. Businesses evolve, markets shift, and user expectations change. Our aftercare ensures the website continues to perform well and remains aligned with business goals. Whether adding features, improving performance, or refining content, ongoing support ensures the site remains a valuable digital asset.

Why This Matters for Wolverhampton and the West Midlands

The West Midlands is an increasingly competitive business environment. Customers expect clarity, professionalism, and trust from the websites they visit. A bespoke site helps local organisations stand out and ensures they appear credible in a crowded market. It also supports local search performance, enabling companies to reach customers in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Dudley, Walsall, and surrounding areas more effectively.

Templates make it difficult to tailor messaging to specific audiences. Bespoke websites allow Wolverhampton businesses to reflect their identity, respond to customer behaviour, and adapt over time. This flexibility is crucial for organisations that want to remain competitive and maintain a strong local presence.

How to Decide If Your Business Is Ready for a Bespoke Website

A bespoke website becomes the right choice when a business feels limited by its current setup. Signs include difficulty updating content, poor mobile performance, lack of control over design, and challenges generating quality leads. As companies grow, their website must grow with them. If a business begins to feel that its website is slowing down progress, it is often a sign that a custom-built solution is overdue.

Conclusion

Bespoke web design is not simply about creating a unique look; it is about aligning a website with a business’s goals, audience, and long-term aspirations. Wolverhampton businesses benefit from websites that reflect their expertise, values, and individuality, rather than blending into the template-driven crowd. A collaborative design process ensures clarity, precision, and performance at every step, ultimately providing a digital presence that supports real business growth.

If you’re exploring the idea of having a new website or want to understand what a bespoke approach could achieve for your business, our team is always happy to talk through your ideas.

The way we interact with search engines is about to change dramatically. Google’s recent introduction of AI Mode represents the most significant transformation in over a decade. With AI Mode, powered by Google’s advanced Gemini AI model, the search experience is changing from a simple list of links to an interactive, conversational assistant capable of answering questions and queries within the same search, make recommendations, and even complete tasks on behalf of users.

But as with any technological leap, this innovation brings both opportunities and challenges, particularly for the content creators and businesses that not only rely on search engine traffic but provide the search engines that we use daily with the content we seek. In this post, we’ll explore what Google AI Mode means for both users and publishers, looking at its potential benefits and the challenges it might create.

What is Google AI Mode?

AI Mode uses Google’s Gemini AI right inside the search page. Instead of offering a list of links, the search results will now take on a chatbot-style format where users can ask questions, reminiscent of long-tail keyword searches1. This includes the ability of asking multi-layered queries and receiving direct answers back, along with curated links for further exploration or research. The hot debate right now is, whether or not the curated links that are given will be allowed to shine, or will they be completely ignored? As the AI Mode answers the query directly within the search, and current findings are showing that user behaviours aren’t necessarily clicking through and are finding what they need from the AI generated response.

In addition to these new capabilities, Google is still going to offer the option to view traditional search results, so users can choose to interact with the AI or continue to find links in what’s now considered the ‘old-fashioned way’, but it’s a likely guarantee that AI Mode Search will be at the forefront of the Google experience. Google’s move to AI-powered search comes as a response to competition from other AI-powered search tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have been gaining traction amongst avid search users.

Google’s Response to Competition from AI-Powered Search Tools

The swift rise of AI-powered search tools has prompted Google to accelerate its own AI integration, aiming to maintain its leadership in the search landscape. While platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and others have introduced more conversational and context-aware search experiences, the overall impact on Google’s dominance remains limited in terms of market share (Google still handles the vast majority of searches — approximately over 93% of the global search market). So why with such vigour and haste has Google set out to achieve such a complex AI driven, return of search?

Interested in finding out more? Read the rest of the article on our site.

Key topics in this episode:

• Why your News Section is crucial for SEO, trust, and growth
• The difference between news content and social media posts
• How to plan and schedule engaging news updates (including easy wins!)
• Common pitfalls (like outdated content) and how to avoid them
• Tips for businesses of any size to start leveraging news stories today

Connect with Osborn Communications:

• Visit the Osborn Communications Website: https://osbornpr.com/
• Chris Leggett on LinkedIn
• Osborn Communications on LinkedIn

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Leveraging Your News Section for Growth and Engagement | Into the VOiD Podcast (Episode 6)

Episode Transcript

Neil: Hello and welcome to episode six of Into the VOiD, a friendly guide to Digital Marketing. I’m your host, Neil Cooper, as always, joined by Chris Carter. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Carter: I’m good thanks. Yeah, Good. The sun’s shining.

Neil: Yeah. It is. The weather’s been nice, actually. Not to put a date on when we get these things done, because –

Chris Carter: Spoilers, the suns out, we’re normally cold.

Neil: Yeah i’m going to try and get this one out faster, but yeah let’s not talk about that, anyway!

However, today there is a change in format. If you watch the video versions of the podcast you’ll see we’re seated a bit differently, and it’s actually worked out for the better with lighting and stuff.

That’s because for this episode, we finally made the jump to having our first guest in order to tackle a subject that every website or business that uses a website should get familiar with right away, and that’s ‘Leveraging your news section for growth and engagement’, and in layman’s term, that’s to improve your online presence by blogging and content sharing.

So without further ado, we’d like to introduce our first guest on the Pod, Director and Founder of Osborn Communications. Experts in content and PR, Chris Leggett. Can we get a round of applause, please. There you go.

Chris Leggett: Thank you very much. That’s great, thank you Neil, thank you Chris, and i’m delighted to be your first guest. Known you guys a long time so thanks for having me.

Neil: Yeah, we’ll be getting into that. Yeah, it’s worked out well because — well, I suppose we’ll go over it in the podcast, but we was in a position where we needed to get ourselves out there and we ended up networking with yourself and now it’s come full circle and it’s nice to be able to be in a position where we can have that conversation on camera, on audio.

Yeah, so jumping into it right away, basically could you give a brief overview of your background and what it is you do — and anything else that you want to share at that point? Because we’re going to be quizzing you for the rest of the episode.

Chris Leggett: So, to say thanks again for the chance to talk not just to you guys, but to your audience out there. As you described Osborn Communications has been running for five years now. I launched the business to provide affordable expertise for businesses looking to reach new audiences, reach as many people as possible, but also do it in a targeted and strategic way.

So, my background’s in journalism. I started out as a trainee reporter, worked all my way up to working at the BBC news website in London before relocating to the Midlands. I was in publishing for about 22 years — 23 years, the latter part of that was in Marketing and Comms, and so it was a natural progression to launch my own business, offering those services for businesses who I think [if] there was a thread through them — I don’t know whether you guys would relate to this, its businesses that almost feel as if they’ve been overlooked or they feel like they’re underdogs in their sectors and they want to get the news and their successes out there in order to grow.

So, we see news sections of websites being really important to that, particularly in such a fast changing world but, myself and my team, we provide a range of SMEs and larger brands with some targeted expert, support around news writing, social media management, public affairs, dealing with people like local MPs or people in their ttrade organisations and then external media.

So it all starts with news and it all starts with stories and I think that’s where a lot of business owners, marketing leads and people out there who want to drive success and growth can use the new section of their website to really, reach a much wider audience and improve their search rankings.

Neil: Yeah. I think, if we talk about — a little bit about our relationship with them, we was in a position where we wanted to basically share what we’ve done, with our clients and we also wanted to, basically just win awards, which we went on to do anyway, and to do that, we had to leverage your services because obviously there’s a ways and means of writing PR, there’s a ways of means of advertising yourself to apply for these — it’s not just awards, but just to get in the public –

Chris Carter: To get the exposure I suppose.

Neil: To get the exposure yeah, and we was in a position where we was at a loss, we didn’t know what to do. We was obviously writing about ourselves but.

Chris Carter: I would also say we wanted to work — because we’ve been doing our own articles for a while. We also wanted to get some PR that were picked, was being picked up by news agencies out there and different websites to link back to our website. So we get that backlinks because we wanted to increase the Domain Authority of our website as well.

Neil: Yeah we’ll get into that in a bit but yeah, with regards to just — we’ve all worked with the Black Country Chamber of Commerce, for example. We in 2023 — So that was our first time actually, applying for an award and it was through yourselves, wasn’t it?

Chris Carter: So Chris (Leggett) wrote the award bid for us.

Neil: And in the lead up to that we had a few other news stories, because — at that point you looked at our news feed, it was more or less like, we were trying to hit the key points of ‘How To’s’, understanding in our sector.

Chris Carter: ‘X’ vs ‘Y’, that kind of stuff.

Neil: And then it was when we worked with yourselves that we then started putting PR out that was regarding, working with the businesses that we had and shining a light on basically that business and what the problem we were solving. Right?

Chris Carter:Case Study PR, I would say, Chris.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. I think, what [with] you guys particularly being a digital-led business, with the nature of what you do, you were building a really good community, got your followers on social media, people who knew you and engaged with you. The big headache we all have as business owners is, how do I reach people who don’t know who I am. How do I reach people who are probably looking for somebody like me or what my business offers, but they haven’t heard of us yet, or they haven’t realised that we can address the challenge or situation that they’re struggling with, and obviously with you guys, that’s about how do I have a, a really good website that’s found in search, that I have a partner that understands my needs and also can do an efficient service that I can afford, but can do it bespoke for me in anything specific.

So talking about successes you’ve done with other businesses, explaining where you are, who you are, there’s always going to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people out there who haven’t heard of a business and we’ve all got short attention spans. You need to keep saying it not just once or twice, but again and again and again and again and that’s where it’s easy to perhaps think of the channels.

So we need to populate our LinkedIn feed, our business company page every day at 8 a.m. but if that’s not reflected on your website, you’re arguably sharing better stuff on one of your channels than your own website reflects. What’s going to happen when somebody’s three months down the line comes on and doesn’t know that, for example, with you guys — I mean, I think we had it on within a day that you’d won that award.

You know, because it’s a big thing, but it needs to have a home that’s permanent, because social media moves on so fast. So yeah, the situation you came to us with was really, really stimulating one for us to work on because you had all the material, you just didn’t have the time or perhaps the expertise to understand laterally.

It’s not just what can we say about ourselves on our channels, it’s what do people out there going to [want to] publish about us on theirs and how do we meet in the case of the awards, what the chamber’s looking for in order to honor a really good business, it’s obvious to say it in retrospect, but it all starts with that nub of we’ve got a challenge here about how we reach more people.

It’s easy nowadays to think, well, we’ll do it on every channel that’s going to and not do it on your own home, if you know what I mean. Your own website.

Chris Carter: Yeah, I would say it’s — PR is a specialist skill. Completely different to just writing a blog post. It’s not just about writing a blog post, it’s about writing a post and a piece of content that will be likely be picked up by the people that you want it to be picked up by and you have that experience to know what they’re looking for, and also submitting it to them as well, because, you know.

Neil: Yeah, the submission process. The times that we’ve tried to just, put something together.

Chris Carter: Yeah, back in the games days, we’d create our own press releases and they’re basically just, you know, dust in the wind.

Neil: Go into the ether.

Chris Leggett: And that’s a difficult thing for people particularly who’ve got the tools to write marketing copy. You know, if you’re using AI to write stuff about your business, you’ve got more tools than ever.

With earned coverage. So stuff that content that’s going to appear in — on a news website, on a trade sector website, even on the organisation like the Chamber of Commerce and industry sector; I mean, you guys work with lots of manufacturers who may be members of export organizations, whatever that is. There is a line that you need to cross, which is how does that content become suitable for them to publish under their name, and that’s the thing where, big claims, bold things that you can’t really back up. You know, “we’re the number one”, “We’re the best”, “We go above and beyond”.

That’s that’s not really editorial copy. So the reason, it’s great to talk to you about it today is that our business has evolved over those five years, and we are seeing more companies than ever. They want to get the News section of their website sorted. They want a plan, a program of content that really hits home. They want it to be shared through their social channels, shared through their partnerships and then if there is opportunities for earned coverage in a leading local business page of a — either on a website or a newspaper, that is important to them. But if you go back 15, 20, even 25 years, most people could only communicate about themselves to big audiences through external media and actually the process has flipped. We now start with your own channels and work out, but the thread that runs through it is; What are the best stories? What are the things that are of the most interest? What are the things that people are going to take the time to come andead? That bit doesn’t change.

But you need to have your game head on in terms of what is it I need to do that’s different for this, because just writing a story that reaffirms that we think we’re great is not — you know, everybody should be writing that or trying to be.

What has some substance and what is most important to your end audience and I think with you guys, the fact that you’d had the external endorsement, you know, because you’re a young business that’s growing, the fact that in the case of the Chamber of Commerce, which has been going since the 1880s, the fact that you are now…

Chris Carter: Has it?! Wow I didn’t know that. Congrats Chamber.

Chris Leggett: You are now an award winner from something as established as that. It’s a real badge of honor. But then we also had stories that we put out around, client wins you’d had, your growth, the fact that you were scaling up and taking on bigger clients or working with leading brands. When you’re kind of focusing on the day-to-day, sometimes you can lose sight of that.

So yeah, a bit of lateral thinking and a bit of expertise to see what those opportunities are in people. That’s what we enjoy because we can apply that.

Neil: Just to touch on that. Those are the things that then influenced us, with regards to what we share and what we put out and what we consider news and it’s something now that when we speak to clients, it’s like, what have you got? So when we’re working with clients, what new stories do they have? We need to do blog posts yes, yes, yes. But what about you and your business and what do you — What have you done? Is there been charity that’s taken place in your in your establishment? Have you won any awards? Is there anything we can pull [out]?

It’s influenced us directly to ask our clients, are they doing anything for occasions coming up and stuff, so yeah, it’s had a massive effect on us and how we deal with clients.

Chris Carter: Client Spotlights as well.

Neil: Yeah. Our client spotlights. Like, we know we should have been talking about clients anyway and what we’ve produced to help them solve their issues and problems with regards to the digital work that we do. But just understanding the fashion in how to put that together, and that’s came from working with yourselves and yeah, it’s really — it’s a nice carry isn’t it — sort of thing, and it’s nice to have that conversation with people.

Chris Carter: We can see the value of it.

So what are the businesses that you predominantly work with or who are the decision makers that you find you have the most — you can add the most value for.

Chris Leggett: So that’s a great question. I think where we — where we find a lot of commonality is people who are tasked with marketing for an organisation. So they may be head of marketing, director of marketing and communications, or even the one person in the business who’s looking after marketing in smaller companies or business owners, people who are looking to promote themselves across different channels.

Most people fall within those things but what they do have in common is a lack of resource in-house to be able to take on a project like planning a six month, communications strategy. Just as with you guys who [they] probably don’t have somebody who can do a really, really good job of a website, that they’re all going to be proud of.

Time poor, you know, they don’t have — they want somebody they can trust to get on with it, and they might well be feeling a little bit overwhelmed that in this day and age, you know, every six months there’s another channel, there’s another audience growing on another platform and I think there’s that anxiety about not wanting to miss out on an opportunity or feeling that they want to have something covered off.

And I think that’s where we add value, and I know that’s where we’ve been able to complement one another in introducing people we work with, who are able to open up new conversations because there’s definitely an audience out there for people who want to improve themselves, improve their lot of their business but sometimes it can drop down to like number 12 on the company to do list and it’s easy to give it another six months but it never goes away.

Chris Carter: I also think if that person is in that position and they bite off, too many — try and do too many things at once, bite off too much — more than you can chew. You said that to me about something different yesterday. You end up not doing any of it. So, getting help to do one thing and then doing the other thing, and then you’re doing four or five different things, it’s making a difference.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, it is a service there where we — to complement and make the business look as good as we can see it is but it needs time. It needs inputs. It needs — sometimes the material might not be obvious, but we can draw that out of them. But it never stands still. I mean, only yesterday, a long standing client who we’ve worked with for five years in facility services, said to me, “should we have a TikTok channel?” And you think that was impossible to predict even a couple of years ago, so I never feel like it stays the same.

But the stories, the value of is there something really good we should be saying about your business and sometimes it might be better to say less, but do it well and say the right things than it is trying to just have a constant feed of stuff. But where TikTok and other things get involved, it is interesting. Sorry go on.

Chris Carter: We always get the; when we’re building websites for people, and we say can you send us your social links and we’ll get like, “Oh, which ones do I need? I’ve got a Twitter, I’ve got a Facebook” and I always go back to them, well, are you using them. If you’re not using them don’t have them.

Neil: Yeah it’s a difficult one. I think that’s something that we might elaborate on later as well.

Chris Carter: Are your clients there as well. Because if your clients aren’t on TikTok, there’s no point in you wasting your time on TikTok.

Neil: It’s a double edged sword because if you don’t do it and your client does and then for whatever reason, they end up getting good. It’s it’s like us, we’re not on TikTok, but we’re starting to move into that short form content just to show what we do in a more consumable manner. Yeah.

Chris Carter: With reels.

Neil: Yeah, and it might get to a point that we have so many that it’s like, why not? But at the moment we can’t — I think it’s consistency. One and doning is not not the case.

Chris Carter: So yeah, I’d rather not have a channel than put one thing on there and not use it for six months. I think that was my point but yeah.

Neil: Okay. So I think we’ve started to answer some parts of the main discussion with that. So we’ve introduced yourself and what you do what you alleviate. We know you’re good at it because you’ve helped us. You’ve helped other people that we know of. So the main discussion being the crossover between us is why manage the news section effectively right.

And in previous episodes that we’ve had, we’ve talked about the strengths of relevant content [I am stuttering, sorry]. Relevant content and touched on how it can show authority within your businesses sector like we’ve just touched upon, right, so this may have been answered partially, but there’s other parts of the, question I want to try and coax out probably.

So with regards to what you do for your clients and what you’re trying to educate them on with regards to the use of their copy and PR, in your words could you explain, why you think it’s crucial for businesses to pay more attention to their News section?

Chris Leggett: Yeah. So there’s a whole series of answers but I think the most important one- couple, for this conversation are if you are going to invest the time and effort into having a website, doing it well, to then expect it to stand still — I mean, you guys are always launching new landing pages or new content sections for your clients because –

Neil: We’re trying to.

Chris Leggett: Google is always going to or search engines are always going to favor the principles of it no matter how much the algorithms change or the advice changes is… the big search engines favour websites that are authoritative, updated regularly. People are engaging with and linking back to and that are, quite frankly, where there’s some visible effort on them.

I think that’s really stripping it back to the basics. You are going to be quite lucky if you launch a new website on the 1st of January and your website grows incrementally by doing next to nothing. Just because it was so well searched up, set up with search, it’s going to have to be quite a big website with lots of things on it.

So the very key thing is making use of your investment and getting a return on your time. I think it’s having that, almost like a river of news and information that may just be once a month, twice a month, but you can see it flowing through so that the search engines pick up on the fact that the website is being updated, it then feeds your social media accounts and people most importantly like it and respond to it, which can be a real overlooked benefit of it.

But you actually have something that people like on social media. For many people, they’re just kind of rolling the dice and trying to think of something each week. I think there’s kind of the new arrivals risk that if your website, somebody lands on your website today and one of the most recent pieces of news you have is ‘we’re still operating under Covid 19 restrictions’.

So like are you — if you’ve had a referral or recommendation, you may persist. But I think on the law of averages that’s going to sow a seed of doubt of are these people still trading well? Is everything okay? Are the lights still on there? These are extremes, but they are things I think we can all see in our own habits. And I think it’s also that thing of as a team feeling more confident, no matter whether you’re a four, five, fifty, one hundred and fifty, a thousand people, employees, your suppliers, your clients, they want to know what’s going on in a positive way so that, that relationship, which is the key to them working with you, either buying from you, supplying you, or working within the business — could be stakeholders outside of it. It could be people who just just want to see, a business that they know and trust doing well. If you don’t use your News Section, answering it in other ways, you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into other places — We talked a moment ago about, you know, video led things like that takes time, takes editing.

You know, inviting people in, trying to do guided tours to explain how the business is changing. Why don’t you just use the news section of your website and tell as many people as possible and then watch that grow?

Chris Carter: And also reap the benefits of the SEO that you’re going to get from it as well.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, because if you are… a VOiD Applications customer would expect when they buy a website from you, that you’re going to put the time into their researching their search performance and seeing what other people in the sector are doing, and then the hard part, which is creating pages, you guys consider it par for the course, but for outsiders, how do I create a page that pulls all that together?

If you can create news that mirrors that, has the right search terms in, reflects what your business is about, this is keeping it to real basics. It’s going to compliment that and grow your authority, particularly if people like it and link back.

Chris Carter: On an SEO point of view. If your website’s got the foundational tick boxes checked, you’ve got good content for your services pages. You’ve got your Google My Business accounts and stuff like that. The the next step and the only step is to start adding content to your blog, alongside case studies, but you need that churn of constant new content, talking about like what we said earlier, ‘How To’s’, ‘X & Y’, good news stories.

We’ve just done a post about — sorry, we’ve just done a website for X, Y and Z. Those things all feed through to your news and it helps show that your website is alive.

Neil: Alive, up to date.

Chris Carter: It’s an authority as well. It’s an authoritative place to be.

Neil: Yeah. With that being said as well, looking at the numbers with regards to our site, the high engagement areas are, our Portfolio, Case Studies and the News Section and it goes to show that they are important. They are like your end game. You have to keep my maintaining these parts in order to draw people in.

And just on the topic of seeing things that are out of date, we’ve took over a website and — not that it’s the same level or to do with it, but in the footer, the copyright was 2016 and you look at that and you immediately — if somebody knows — if somebody is just like looking at the website and they scroll and see that immediately, they’re going to think, are these guys still even in business?

And then if your news is out of date as well, it’s like — so there’s there’s little bits and bobs.

Chris Carter: Yeah the last news post you put was, you know, 2021 or something. It’s not a great look. Now a lot of people do take the dates off of them as well.

Neil: It’s slightly cheating but it’s just those things that you need to look at. Because then when you couple that with your social accounts or where people can find you, it’s all moving, then they can see you’re updating, you’re alive, and you’re reaching out. So yeah, that was a great answer. Thank you.

Chris Leggett: I mean we’re gonna talk about some of the things — I mean, the big question for anybody watching this is what sort of things should I be putting on [your website]. We’re going to do that in a moment but yeah, I think that a lot of companies kind of know the sort of things they should be doing because they’re doing it on their socials already.

But to follow, I mean, I’ve seen examples where, they have been regularly, updating LinkedIn, taking on this new person, got this new manager, and then when I did a video call with a prospect who I had met two years earlier, and I said — you know, I was going through the new section to prepare to this.

“It’s great to see that the young apprentice who I met is still in the business.”, and they went, “Oh no, he left about 18 months ago”, I said, but he’s in like, number three on your News Stories and they went, “Oh no, it didn’t work out. That probably shouldn’t be there”, and it’s like, it should have been superseded by something else.

But this is — I felt really awkward because I’d spent about 15 minutes talking to this chap and he’d long gone, and they said, actually, a lot of the things on there are now wrong and you think, well, okay, you’re going to have to sort that at some point.

Neil: It only takes a glimpse, doesn’t it, to just just scan that area, that page –

Chris Carter: To put you off a little bit.

Neil: Yeah, I mean, just from, if you’re the website owner as well, and you’re minding your own yard, basically. I mean, you can do all the work in the front garden, but if your back gardens overgrown, or even the reverse actually.

Chris Carter: Don’t bring my garden into this please.

Neil: But yeah that is the point, and it only takes a glimpse if you have access to your own site, you can hide those things. I mean, it’s not the answer, but just understanding what people are going to see as soon as they come onto these landing pages or News Sections.

Chris Leggett: And I think, you know, it’s so hard to get people’s attention nowadays. So if you do go to a networking event — I mean, so many people are still putting a lot of time and money into trade shows, but they don’t kind of do enough to say, we’re going to be at this show in February.

Your News Section of your website should do reflect some of that, but then, you know, you’re not kind of… if the website or your, wherever you host your news is not being updated regularly and we’ll come on to that later, It’s proportionate to how much news you’ve got and how much you want to do it.

But you can’t really blame people if then they get the wrong end of the stick or they overlook you, or they think, I’m not going to stop here for long, I’ll just have a skim about it because you’re not putting on as you’ve just alluded to — I always go by the rule that people are pretty superficial in that they can only judge you by what they can see.

And if it’s something that just confuses them, jars them, they think I’m pretty sure that, that person’s left in there or in the most recent things they’re telling me about their business, you’ve probably probably just sown seeds of doubt.

I don’t think we should dwell too much on the negatives, because there’s so many good things that businesses have to say about them. We’re going to come onto that. It’s a massive opportunity to almost have like a fantastic place to say all the best things about your business on your own terms. It’s just a time issue. It’s a planning issue, and it’s just doing it to a certain quality and then thinking it through to where you going to share it. After that, you can build it up but if you guys have done a great website for them and they’ve got the right home for it, I’d almost say it’s set up to go really.

Neil: So some of the follow up questions with regards to that discussion, like we alluded to earlier; with regards to helping your clients understand news, what do you tell them qualifies as news? What should be considered or what should be the goal when writing content for your site’s news section, as opposed to social media, for example? Because everything goes on social media and it’s about taking those things and also applying it to your website.

So what do you say to your clients is news? What do you — how do you let them know that what they think isn’t news, like so-and-so got a promotion the other week and they just candidly say it, how do you get them to understand that, that is news and we should be shouting about it?

Chris Leggett: That’s a brilliant question and it can open up into all sorts of avenues. I think to keep it really simple. I think you have to make it relatable to what the business is all about, what your values are, what it is that you’re delivering to people and where it fits in. Sometimes time is tight, you just need to to do it.

But if, for example, someone’s been promoted. Was that the example we talked about there? Okay without overstepping that, but… that that’s an achievement. So it’s something to, on a real practical basis. If employee A was manager of and he’s now head of, or has gone from an, you know, a junior level, up to a, supervisor in possibly a managerial level.

It’s a basic piece of information. Say this person’s job title has changed. They’ve progressed, but if you think about it laterally from a new side that shows you’re investing in developing your staff, you’re promoting from within. So they’re good enough to take the next step, there’s an opportunity there to celebrate what they’ve achieved so far. Perhaps, align it with what the company’s values are in terms of recruiting from a local community, from a particular background, from a particular, skill set.

It could be that, that person is now bringing in a totally different offering for the clients and the customers. That means that there’s something new to share there. So the actual thing of… you guys are much younger than me, but there used to be real basic, like memos that go round that would be pinned on a company noticeboard that would say, “We are pleased to say that employee A, is now this, they will report into this person, ee wish them every well every success in their role”.

Yeah, that was okay, because you probably would be reading that physically in the building. But I think if you’re going to do it externally, it needs to be put into a different context. It could be that you open up an opportunity to recruit. It could be that you’re looking to take on apprentices or somebody younger to help, you know, bring somebody in to take on the next generation…

And that’s just one example. That’s just one example. But I would expect over the course of a year, an average business to have not necessarily average in what they do, but in typical businesses to have some set pieces around activity they’re doing in the community, whether that’s Christmas jumpers through to volunteering, through to climbing, jumping off, abseiling, any of these things for a good cause.

Chris Carter: Running 10Ks.

Chris Leggett: Running 10Ks, sorry I didn’t realise. Yes of course, yes, yes, yes of course. Exactly. So the fact that I know exactly what you mean there.

Neil: Thanks guys.

Chris Leggett: That could have been, well i’ll just put that on my own personal thing.

Neil: Which I didn’t actually do. I put it in the newsletter, I didn’t — yeah I gotta learn fom that.

Chris Leggett: There we go. So there’s stuff you’re doing in the community. There’s the progress of the business. Client wins that don’t necessarily have to be we’re not going to give you the name of the business, but you can describe them in a description.

Anniversary of the business. Visits from people from, who are either clients or perhaps from overseas coming in. You going somewhere else. You taking your business to a trade show, local opportunity, national, international, all of these things. If you’re thinking of a content calendar or things you can plan in, I think we’ve gone from almost where do we start to 9 or 10 things there and none of those are necessarily bespoke to your business or are going to apply to everybody.

You may well be working with a local authority to access some grants because you want to invest, you want to grow, you want to make yourself more sustainable. We’re going to put dimmers on on all our stuff. We’re going to move to electric vehicless.

All of these things are part of a bigger strategy. What you can’t expect people to do is figure it out for themselves or notice it for themselves, if you don’t tell them, and that’s where your website becomes an asset rather than a headache, because you have got a plan that you’re working to.

Chris Carter: So would you say that the most important part of this is, from our point of view, when we’re doing SEO, we don’t just jump in two feet first without doing the research, without doing the plan. Content planning is one of the most important parts of this for you?

Chris Leggett: It is because otherwise you are probably going to do the last minute shoot from the hip. What’s the best thing we can think of job? Which going back to some of the things we’ve talked about. First impressions. People come on the website think that doesn’t look finished, but they’ve put it up there anyway, you know, that that doesn’t help.

I think that if you are going to use an outside partner, they should be coming to you with almost some vehicles or opportunities that work for others that you can expect. I think that if you’re going to do it in-house, you should with a couple of short brainstorming ideas, sessions, because it’s very hard to say on, you know, the beginning of a given month, right let’s write 12 months of what our company news looks like.

Just as it’s hard to most predict any, you know, sales exactly to the last pound for the next 12 years or what your costs are going to be, things are going to come in. But you’ve got to start somewhere and I think that’s the hardest part for busy business people is where do I start? It’s overwhelming. Should I just do what everyone else is doing?

Not if you’re not confident with it, and not if you don’t think it’s going to cut through to your audience. So I would say based on some of the things that we’ve worked together on, had the best spikes in traffic, whether that’s social media likes, because there’s got to be a visible result of it.

The things you should be looking for might be social media likes. So you guys putting your photo up in the news piece about the award wins, really well received. Lots of people engaging with that and then coming through to your site. The news things we do, really good photos, taking photos of you as a team, which again, not everybody wants to come into work and have their picture taken, but if you know it’s coming, you’ve got the photos for it.

I would say if you — to begin set yourself one piece a month, possibly two a month.

Neil: So yeah that was the follow up question with regards to this. We have our own answer with regards to how often should something be posted on a site. So when we have this conversation with clients, we try and say –

Chris Carter: As much as humanly possible.

Neil: I mean, yeah, to an extent, but it’s also at least once a month if you want your website to be alive in that sense, and you actually want to start to get other keywords from our point of view.

Chris Carter: We have seen the research, anecdotal research from people that we’ve worked with who have gone from nothing to one a month to two a month to one a week and you can see that hockey stick of engagement.

Neil: So yeah, with regards to yourselves, the question is, how in your opinion, how often should news be added as, as a minimum, as most, as like — as naturally possible.

Chris Leggett: I think if we’re starting from from zero let’s start from there. I think it’s like all the best habits. If you say one month, that’s going to end up once every two months, that’s going to end up once every quarter.

Human nature is what it is. So if you start with two a month and lock into that and plan three months of that. I think it gets easier, not harder, because you can see the results yourself. You’re putting yourself through a process. It’s going to be front loaded, like arguably all the hardest but most rewarding things in life.

You kind of have to figure it out and then apply it and learn from it rather than thinking I’m sure we’ll think of something in three weeks time or we’ll think of something like that. So yeah, I think that minimum of of if we’re talking about a company of say 5 to 50 people, if you think about the combined efforts of all those people, how many hours they do a week combined, if you’re seriously saying there’s nothing interesting going on, enough to document it without being contrary about it, but I think you got to back yourself that you’re going to find getting to some ways of seeing your business, because it’s hard. We’ve talked about this getting people’s attention and holding it is really difficult.

But if they can see that there’s evidence that you’re changing, your evolving, you’re improving. If the flip side is they listen to gossip or they listen to misunderstandings or, you know, I’ve noticed that they didn’t attend this or that and they’ve read stuff into it. They they might make up their own minds. So I think twice a month is a really good one to build off.

I think if you are a business of… I’d hate to put like a revenue level to it or to set a thing, but I think more than twice a month for most businesses except micro businesses, startups or sole traders. I think that you’ve got to back yourself. You should be able to do 24 things a year, possibly 36. Some of those could be Christmas jumper days. They don’t have to be –

Neil: Essay like news.

Chris Carter: Yeah they don’t have to be fiteen hundred to two and a half thousand words.

Chris Leggett: No, no, no, i’m talking like — what you reckon 350 to 500 words, is something that would –

Chris Carter: We would say, if you can get close to that 500, as a minimum for SEO. Then its a good blog post, as long as its actually you know, contents decent…

Neil: You can’t you can’t force content, right, in that sense? But a 350 word piece, that is, if it’s a company update and you’re updating on something significant in the business, then that’s — that’s a lot better than a 1000 word, i’m just going to- NO WAY IS THIS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

At least we caught this on camera if it does happen.

[Discussion regarding Fire Alarm ensues and Intermission plays]

Neil: Okay, so we’re back. Are we? We’re rolling yeah? We’re all hot from the sun. You’ve caught a tan, it’s all good.

Chris Carter:Two minutes in the sun. Sun burnt.

Neil: Right, so I think we were talking about basically how often [should you post] and I think we got to a point where we answered that with regards to what it is we should be talking about, how regular. You made a point 24 to 36 times in a year is like what your aim is and when you’ve got 365 days in a year, and that’s the amount that you need to hit, it actually makes it a super easy and reachable goal when you put it in that vacuum.

Chris Carter: Yeah, chop it up into one a week, isn’t it really or one and a bit in a week.

Chris Leggett: Yeah and on the back of that, you’ve then got 24 or 36 good quality social media posts to do there, which you can include amongst other activity what that might be, but it all matches up. There’s a consistency, there’s a tone of voice there, and I think you have to back yourselves that if you put the effort into it or your partner does, or whoever’s tasked with this it’s probably going to stand up better than something that was rushed or was last minute because you thought, oh yeah, we’d better just think of something.

Neil: Yeah, so with regards to that, something that we do on all these episodes is obviously we’ve been speaking about the ‘whys’ and it’d be nice to just move on if we can is to the ‘hows’, especially if — we try and pose the question, if somebody needs help, but they’re not in a position where they can approach us, at the moment because obviously services cost etcetera, what can they do?

So, the question that I have written down is like, what are some effective [strategies] strategies and tips — I always trip up on — it was that word last time.

Chris Carter: Strategy?

Neil: Strat-Er-Gies.

Anyway, what are some effective strategies and tips for doing this in order to create and maintain engaging or impactful content, specifically within the News Section of a website?

Chris Leggett: So if we cut it back to the real basics and work it up from there, because the principles are the same, whether you’re a marketing lead tasked with making maximum value, reaching the most relevant or largest audiences, or you’re a business owner, sole trader, somebody who’s wants to be active, I think you need to put your website on your business agenda, right?

That’s an easy thing to think there’s other more important things, that well may be the case, but your website isn’t going to go away. You need to make it something that you factor into your thinking because it’s going to get easier when you have it on your radar and it’s something that you’ve factored in each month, each quarter.

I think you need to, simply have 2 or 3, 4 ideas on the go. Not everything you think of is going to be coming on it, and you need to be anticipating the mechanics of it. So what is the story? What’s new about it? How are you going to show it? What format is that going to take?

You might be able to get a video clip, you might have some really nice photos or it might be some audio. Who knows? But if it’s just simple words, a photo and text, I think you need to factor in when you’re going to do it. What’s the substance of it? But the overriding thing is how is this going to be relevant to my end audience?

And if some of it is about enhancing your reputation, it’s not necessarily going to be a sales driven thing. That’s good. If it’s so, that could be. We’ve recruited a new member of team. It could be we have, past our fifth anniversary. Any of those sorts of things. Is it something that’s got some sales activity and is it something that’s going to be previewing something else?

So just give it some thought as to where it’s going to fit in and I would just have a regular document. Could just be a Google doc or a shared spreadsheet where you’ve got the months of the year and then what the story ideas are and then which what you’re going to be working on and what the contents are going to be, so that you then push yourselves or self to have that assembled.

In terms of what the mechanics of it are, and I’ll defer to you guys in terms of how this appears in the CMS and how it appears to get most impact on the the digital channels, but I think there’s some shared understanding. It’s got to have a really relevant key word led, if possible, headline.

So a headline on an appointment, ‘Three cheers for Dave’, is probably a bit cryptic when it comes to search, but ‘Name of the business appoints or promotes, new manager or new technical manager’, suddenly that’s [or new technical manager for exports] or something like that. That is particular. We’re up and running, aren’t we? And you guys would have a word — list of what you want to make it about.

A nice structured photo is always great and then the text needs to be written with an eye on SEO, but not so that the person reading it thinks, I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean, so that is probably worth another podcast another day. But in principle, something that’s done in a formal or semi conversational style that includes all the relevant info about the business and possibly quotes from the people involved, possibly case studies and you know, some references to the people you work with and I think you’re up and running then.

There’s a lot to unpick from there and it’s easy for me to say those things because obviously we’ve been trained to do. But the principle of news, whether it’s 10 o’clock news, a news alert on your phone, a TikTok video, a YouTube video or a written story in the newspaper is ‘who, what, where, why and when’, and then you expand on those points to make it relevant to your audience.

Neil: Great answer. Yeah. There’s always something [take away]. With regards to, just planning. I think you was — you didn’t necessarily use the word, but the word(s) we use is ‘Content Calendar’.

To simplify it for somebody if you want to plan, like for us as well, we have in one of the marketing sheets, we also have like a hashtag list or list of events.

When I say list of events, I mean holidays or celebrations like Pancake Day and stuff, just we use that as an example recently with a client, like it might seem silly, but if your you or your business does anything as an activity, like if you made pancakes that day or whatever not to — I like pancakes, but just to use that as an example.

Chris Carter: I was gonna say, you do use that example alot.

Neil: Just to use that as an example or like the Easter Holidays coming up or something along the lines. If you have these things in a sheet, as you said, then you can either plan to do something or if you do something, and you know it’s there. You can share that whether it’s raising your business’s profile because you did an event that had something to do with those things or on your socials if you want, like if it’s a smaller, smaller task in that regard and you just did something with your family or something, you want to share it that way.

[A] Content Calendar allows you to scan what’s coming up and plan for those things, especially the larger events, because there’s always something that abusiness — like say for example, Red Nose Day being on there and you want to get into charity work, how can you do that? You have time to plan. That is something that can raise the profile of the business if you plan for it and if you’re getting all your employees involved as well and that can start from a content calendar if you have no idea what you’re doing.

Chris Carter: And also another example, if you know, you’re going to a trade show in September, don’t leave until you know the end of August to start telling people, you’re attending, that kind of stuff that.

Neil: Yeah, events — planning for your events and stuff. Yeah.

Chris Leggett: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, Content Calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. What we’re seeing amongst our clients and amongst businesses, we engage with is, these people tasked with marketing or promoting a business have never perhaps been more or felt more overworked than they are now. Not necessarily in the volume of work, but just because they are expected to be across so much.

So your content calendar should have structured properly and you visit it, revisit it every couple of weeks, should take a little bit of that pressure off because you can anticipate stuff that’s in the calendar when in advance, but also you can look at what’s out there. So particularly as people are being asked to work or have an eye on so many things, what could be better than to have one resource that tells you the months or the key weeks, key dates, and you work back from there?

And I strongly feel that maybe people are focusing too much on the channels or the outputs and not the source of it. And that content calendar can be a simple, yeah, structured document that simply says January, return to work or outlook for for the next year. Really easy one to overlook. We know we’ve had a positive or we’ve had a challenging previous year, but we are looking ahead for this.

You can do that on your own terms, but if you don’t say what the outlook is for your business, you’re asking a lot for people to assume that they’re going to find out about it. It could be that there’s stuff to do with stuff that’s in the calendar for January. February depends if your business is tied to some of the seasonal things, or if some of your activities as staff or as a business is done to it.

So one of the things that we know is that for many of our clients, the lead in might be 2 or 3 years for some of the products they do. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be talking about stuff that’s coming up in the future. Say this March, we’re looking ahead to, summer of the following year. Or if you’re a business that tied heavily to Christmas, might be hospitality, announcing you can now book Christmas parties, Christmas events, all of those things are there. It’s just trying to improvise them or see them without a simple place to do it.

So that content can, that could simply be month of the year, 2 or 3 ideas, where we’re going to put the news and it could be some of that is not appropriate for LinkedIn. It’s perhaps more for your Facebook or it’s more visual.

I’d add a couple to that, anniversary of when the business was formed. I mean, it must be great if you were to take out a photo from 2012 of where you started and where you are on your anniversary month. I don’t know which is that June…?

Chris Carter: August.

Chris Leggett: August. So you could say, you know, we’re marking this great [milestone] content on socials. People love to see, progress. They like people led stuff. It’s a really easy one for a small business to overlook, because you’re always looking forward or you’re looking around. Where we started we’re in our — doesn’t have to be a round number, doesn’t have to be 5 or 10, 12, 13th. and this is where we’re going. Suddenly your Content Calendars filling up.

That’s the bit that you, you need to — and I think if you share out the responsibility and talk to people around the business, you get some good ideas. It doesn’t necessarily sit with that overworked or overstressed marketing lead. Who could be the business owner. Sometimes other people will be able to bring that stuff to it, and if some stuff doesn’t work out, it drops off the calendar or you put it ahead for next year, then you’re there.

But I think trying to, just think of stuff off the cuff when it arises. It’s particularly if you’re starting from zero. That time’s probably not going to happen. Just because you’ve got other focus.

Neil: Yeah. So I think with with regards to that, if you’re able to stay on top of those things and you’ve got your content calendar, you’re creating content, your news is updating. You’re looking out for more things to add. You understand that news… news isn’t just — news doesn’t necessarily need to be just like news as in informative, it can be about your business, it can be about you, it can be about the surroundings, it can be what or where you’re helping and what you’re trying to do community wise and you’ve got that grasped.

So that sections up and running, you’re adding content, you’ve started off consistent. Is there at any point — have you seen any pitfalls to this. Is there any downside? Have you… is there an opposite of this at all?

Have you ever I don’t know, is there something to be wary of if you’re hyper focused on the news? Is there anything you can overlook?

Chris Leggett: There’s a whole host of things. It’s a great question, Neil, because it can become… it can become a part of the website that is possibly even undermining what you’re trying to do and what I mean by that is there’s a lot of studies in digital marketing around echo chambers and around, content that is actually irritating your target audience.

So it says news, but it’s actually just a load of marketing messages. We have continued to show how great we are and how we’re the number one at being [brilliant] — I mean, you know, okay, you’d hope that most people would say they they’re good at what they do. Otherwise the business isn’t going anywhere. But you know, you need you need to make sure that it isn’t just marketing copy that has that tone of yeah…

Chris Carter: It’s not clickbait.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, quite. It needs to be something that has a base in reality. Now that doesn’t mean that you run yourself down or you scare yourself that we don’t have that sort of material. We don’t have that stuff, but — if you think of what news has been since before people could write or shared printed information, has been about people, places, things that have occurred.

That’s not to say dramas and crises, but let’s be real that’s possibly a topic that’s worth doing in about what to put on if you do have one. But if we we assume it’s about good news. It is about that stuff that — we was trained at journalism college. ‘How would you tell someone if you were in the pub? What’s happened?’

And that isn’t necessarily, I saw a house on fire. It could be, a business that we both know has appointed somebody into a new role. It could be that they’ve just got their first client overseas or, they’ve now doubled their workforce in ten years is probably realistic. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a very short, extraordinary amount of time. But what’s the landmark for people?

And I think sometimes it can be, the News Section, you don’t necessarily want it to be that the boss has brought their dog in, and we had a really nice day. That’s good on socials.

It could be that the boss bought in a really nice pile of pancakes. You know, it depends what you’re –

Chris Carter: He didn’t bring any pancakes.

Chris Leggett: There’s a lot of pancake talk around here, i’ve not seen any pancakes yet.

Neil: This stigma is being dropped immediately.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, that’s really nice, warm stuff that some people can respond to on LinkedIn. But your general and especially somebody whose new to you, they’re not not going to get the in-jokes of it. So that echo chamber thing is perhaps something not to scare yourself about, you can talk yourself out of doing it, but you do need to remember it’s not a social club.

It’s your professional arm, and I think if you kind of push yourself for what are the momentous things, all the things that we would find of interest in other businesses. You should probably back yourself again, have something good to say rather than it just being a quote, a feeling, here’s another reason why we’re great.

Which you might want to do in a different way, in an insight section or more of a blog and a thought piece. Nothing wrong with showing your expertise, your relevance, how you address the challenges that your target audience need. But perhaps do that more as a thought piece or a demonstration of knowledge.

Chris Carter: Adding to that. It’s the same thing when we’re talking about creating blog posts to talk about website speed or we talk about, SEO, why’s it important to, we don’t talk in those blogs about, you know, we’re amazing at making websites and they’re always quick and, you know, they convert and they — you find yourself top of the Google.

We don’t do that. We don’t say that do we.

Neil: No.

Chris Carter: We always — approach it from the point of view you need to know about this and this is the same point.

Neil: Because you can always put in call to [action] — like with regards to those topics for example, that’s why we put call to actions in, but the call to actions are more than likely separate to the text and it’s literally a call to action. If you would like to do this, it’s there. We’re not forcing that within the text, especially if you trying to be an authority and you’re trying to inform people because that’s the difference between — for us, informational and commercial Keywords and that creates the difference, yeah.

So that’s a good point as well, and with that being said, the… how do I phrase it? There’s something there with regards to splitting that content. This is for social. This is for the news. There is also a cross pollination. But understanding that helps you out in the long run with regards to what you share and how you share it.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. I mean I think… it could be that on your content calendar, you segment things for a certain audience. So a lot of the manufacturing businesses we work with, some of their staff might not be on LinkedIn, but they’ll be on Facebook. So we talked earlier about the, anxiety businesses have to have some presence on every social media channel.

But if they’re not doing it well, they’re not doing it regularly. But Facebook is an easy one to overlook as LinkedIn being the only place to promote your business. But there could be a tranche of your staff who don’t use LinkedIn, but who use Facebook, in which case, there could be some content on there that sits really nicely, that might be more social, might be more fun, you know, might be more stuff that that people think, yeah, good on them isn’t necessarily trying to [be] a message, and that might be where you pull that away from the News Section of your website and you apply it there. There is a risk that we kind of add to the stress of people think i’ve then got to feed that, but I think that, that might actually get a better response or a click through rate to your website.

Chris Carter: I always find that the better content on LinkedIn is the you know, this might be going on a tangent, but it’s the stuff that feels organic and genuine about what that person has been doing or what that person has been — what’s happening in the business? You know what I mean?

Whereas the spammy stuff, you know. Oh, you know, I was just sitting here thinking about this really profound thinking that…

Neil: Read More. Hit the button to read more.

Chris Carter: Yeah and its like that long. A lot of the content that I find engaging comes from stuff they’ve put on the website. That’s that’s personal for me.

Neil: Yeah, I think that’s — everybody wants to get clicks and you have to — There’s I mean recently, not to have a rant, but with LinkedIn, in regards to seeing some people say certain things in a certain manner, I’ve just started like [unfollowing], not, losing them as a connection, but unfollowing, just because it doesn’t come across as natural and I don’t know –

Chris Carter: It’s spammy clickbaity, but in a very strange, weird way, it needs to feel like your content that you created for your website and your social media, it’s coming from you. Like, would you talk like that in this setting? If you don’t then why are you putting it in your socials.

Neil: I think that’s where we — not to go into it on this episode — But that’s where like the use of AI comes into play, where people have plugged in what they want to say into there and it’s giving you something and they’re not — In that instance, you could just write the stats yourself, especially if it’s going on your social account, but then they’re not proofing it. They’re not thinking about it from like an emotional or yeah, perspective and stuff just to — And then you end up with these long statuses.

Chris Carter: I think we’re going off on a tangent.

Chris Leggett: I think if you if you follow that down the line, if everybody — So I think it’s really important not to expect everybody to communicate in a very formal news at ten, like, you know, like broadsheet kind of way. But that said, if we all message each other effectively through LinkedIn using AI because we say, can you write me a blog that makes me look authoritative about this thing?

And then we get AI to create a photo of it, and it just goes on and on and on. There is going to come a point where exactly as you described there, we all, even if we’re not conscious of it, we’re thinking, this doesn’t ring true, and I think I’d extend that the thread throughout all of the conversation we’ve had through all of this is the content we see people, on behalf of our clients that people respond to better is still people, places, faces.

And if you put a link through to your website so they’re encouraged to then read the full story as things stand and I would say that those sort of posts will perform as well, if not better than some of the AI content that you might have spent ages on, you haven’t just said, write me 500 words on it.

But it just doesn’t quite — It’s not quite rooted in the things that on a human level, we still look for in the people we want to work with or people we want to follow. Is it a face of someone I know? And you guys know this when we see with our clients and named as an award finalist, they put a piece on social media, photos of them and their team, and people say, that’s brilliant, well done.

I would argue that those sorts of things where there’s something new of some substance to share, will do better than something that says, you know, we’re having a great — “we’re having a great quarter and that’s made me think about the big issues facing the world.” And the more you read you think, I don’t know this person really well, but I’ve never heard him talk like these.

They’ve really thought this through in some quite, equally written bursts.

Where I know that when I see them outside of this, they’ve generally got 2 or 3 things that they talk about at length, but they seem to be doing it in like bullet points.

I didn’t know they were from America, but they use a lot of Zs in their content. All of those things will get ironed out as AI improves and AI is an amazing tool, whatever it is, as a general thing. If you’re trying to write content and you’re time poor and you know what to put in the prompts, and there’s some very good people in our networks who can help you with that.

It is an efficiency, a time saver, and it hits some marks there that might take you even as someone who’s trained to write for a living, it would perhaps take me some time to get to those points, but it doesn’t take care of everything and I think if you were to say we’re going to create a News Section, do the bare minimum, and let AI just generate stuff for us, just as the same as you wouldn’t ask AI to generate all your — you wouldn’t ask it to do your payroll, for example, or your other stuff without really going through it in some detail. I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but I’m loath to say, it will get better and better.

Chris Carter: It might be tomorrow. Either way its going.

Chris Leggett: But I think we can all — the frustrations — I think if we were to all you know, write on a piece of paper each three things that annoy us that we’ve seen, I think we’re all probably seeing the same things. But there’s that anxiety that, got to have something on there tomorrow because I haven’t put anything on there for a week. I’ll quickly go on ChatGPT or Gemini and that’ll be good won’t it.

Chris Carter: I do want to do a, an episode on, Prompt engineerinG, I think that’s the key to this and when to use it and when not to use it and stuff. But yeah, that’s for a different day.

Chris Leggett: I think that’s the bit where people can add real value, is to understand what they need to put in for the prompts… But marketing communications, they’re written based things, you know, if it’s a case of that’ll do, then if you’ve got other stuff to do, I’m not going to judge you for that. But is it going to grow incrementally?

I think that, we’re not a million miles of Google and other search engines being ahead of the person generating this stuff. We’ve been able to clock it. I mean, some of the readers on it now are really, really strong as to what they do and if everybody’s using AI…

Chris Carter: It’s pattern recognition I think.

Chris Leggett: Yeah — That will only get worse the more it’s used and if everything that, bar, for some very small posts that you did were written with AI, I think that’s gaming the search engines who want to know that it’s useful content. They want to know that it’s rooted in something and if it’s not resonating with people and there’s no backlinks, there’s no engagement, it’s only a short term fix if you’re not, if you’re not sure what you’re doing it for.

Neil: Great. I think we’re we’re coming to the end now and that’s been a really insightful conversation and hopefully everybody’s — anybody that’s been listening has been able to take away something, even us. I feel like I’ve refreshed on our News Section.

It’s reinforced what we learned previously and what we need to do going forward, especially talking about the marketing calendar stuff. It’s like you say, I’ve been overrun — We’ve all been overrun in the business. We’ve all got a lot going on sort of thing and the — just being able to look at it, even on a quarterly to know what’s coming up, it gives a clarity that you can’t — you won’t get if you don’t just check up you know what I mean? So even that for me is like, okay, you’ve been slacking in that regard, like get back on it sort of thing.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, and I think the message for people is not you have to have one. You have to keep feeding it. You need to have a good one. If you’re going to have a News Section on your website, make it a good one. How do you make it a good one? You anticipate what your audience is going to like, and that is trial and error, because you should be able to track in your own social media analytics and your web analytics.

If you’ve posted four things over, say, two months and there’s not been one spike of interest, it might be chance to come at it a different way. But it’s better — you got to start somewhere and if that means getting a third party to come and help you get up and running — and we coach a few people and train people, either through workshops or through, you know, projects for clients, you’ve got to start somewhere and I think that you need to apply the same rigor as you would to anything else to do with your business, that you make it as good as possible. But there’s some simple things that you can follow there and almost follow the end rule of thumb of what do you value in other people’s websites? What website news do you like about the people that you either buy from or you want to aspire to be?

Chris Carter: Yeah, or your competition.

Chris Leggett: Yeah. Let’s let’s be blunt about it. They may be performing better because they’re putting the time into it. It might just be an hour a week. It might be half a day, every two weeks but they are doing something. They may be using a third party, but there’s no, there’s no substitute for making a start with it, but also having the confidence that we can do a good job of this, we’ve got some really interesting things to share and we’ve got to back ourselves that we’ve got the material. It’s just a process, like anything else, to want to get the best out of it. But yeah.

Neil: Yeah, thank you. So yeah, it’s our first guest. It’s a milestone and really insightful conversation, as I said. So before we wrap up, if people want to learn more about what you do at Osborn Communications — I’m going to start that again. Tongue twisters. If people want to learn more about what you do at Osborne Communications or want to get in touch, where’s the best place to find you?

Chris Leggett: So URL is www.Osbornpr.com. You can find me Chris Leggett on LinkedIn — We post a lot on LinkedIn. That’s our preferred channel. You can find us on there at Osborn Communications.

Neil: Great. Thank you. We’ll drop those links in the episode description. So if you’re listening that’ll be in the summary. If you’re on YouTube that’ll be in the Read More section as well. So please check those out. As we’ve said we can vouch for Osborn Communications. We’ve worked with them over the past few years. We’ve managed to… help me out.

Chris Carter: I think Chris, wrap it up. You’ve written us 6 or 7 award entries, and we’ve been finalist for six of them.

Neil: Yeah. There you go. That’s it, that’s it.

Chris Carter: We won two and got highly commended for two, so.

Chris Leggett: Well thank you. Thank you very much for having me on here We value working with you guys. It’s been great to follow your journey and to be able to celebrate that and I think almost that little snapshot of what you give there is we haven’t made you winners. The material was there. What you wanted to do was get some external help to communicate that.

Chris Carter: You also gave us the confidence to actually put, an application in, because we probably wouldn’t have written an application ourselves. We’d have gone, “I don’t know what to do here”, and ended up not doing it.

Chris Leggett: Yeah, we recognize that it’s a service. It’s a time issue. But what we love is to meet a business like you guys or so many of the businesses we work with who quite frankly don’t know how good they are or where they fit in or what’s great about them, or unusual about them, or different about them because they’re wrapped up in the day to day and that’s a great thing about the News Section, is you can make it look like the best of your business, but you need to put yourself through the process.

Chris Carter: Brilliant, thank you Chris.

Neil: We’ll leave it there yeah, thank you Chris.

Chris Leggett: Thank you so much for having me, guys. It’s an honor to be your first guest, and means a lot to me here.

Neil: I mean — we’re sorry about the fire alarm and it’s going to be associated with us for a while.

Chris Carter: They won’t know in the edit.

Neil: Yeah they will because [inaudible].

But, other than that, if you’re on YouTube, then please think about liking the video and subscribing to keep up to date with the rest of the podcast episodes that are coming and also we’re on, I think the majority of popular, podcast platforms. So please subscribe and follow there and listen to the audio version if you prefer.

So yeah, I’ve been Neil Cooper, this is Chris Carter. Thank you Chris Leggett. Everybody say bye.

Byeee.

Chris Leggett: Thank you very much, guys. Thanks a lot for watching.

Key topics in this episode:

• What is a CMS and why use one?
• Popular CMS platforms: WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and more
• Choosing the right CMS for your business needs
• E-commerce considerations: WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart and Shopify
• Security, maintenance, and performance pitfalls
• Why your CMS choice can make or break your SEO strategy
• Real-world advice for managing content and scaling over time

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Navigating CMS: Simplifying Website Management | Into the VOiD Podcast: Episode 5

Episode Transcript

Neil: Hello and welcome to episode five of Into the VOiD, a friendly guide to Digital Marketing. As always, I’m your host, Neil Cooper here at VOiD Applications, and with me is the MD of the same business and co-host of the Pod, Chris Carter. How are you doing?

Chris: I’m good, thanks. You?

Neil: Yeah, all good. It’s been a while.

Chris: New Year, new me.

Neil: I don’t wan- I don’t want to… I don’t want to timestamp the…

Chris: Okay. So, peek behind the curtain, it’s now 2025.

Neil: It is now 2025, and it’s been a while since we sat down and got to do a podcast. It’s been a learning experience in that every episode we’ve done, we’ve added something, we’ve learned something, like the way things work and whatnot.

Chris: More cameras, more lights.

Neil: More cameras, more lights, more consistency. Even did a bit of colour grading on one of the episodes previous as well, which I’m happy about, but yeah, being able to sit there and actually record an episode is nice because we’ve been very, very busy. So not as consistent with it as we would like to be, but we’re getting there.

And also, more importantly, we haven’t put it down and just left it, so yeah.

Chris: No — keep doing it when we can.

Yeah I’m good, like you said busy, but working on some really cool projects at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next couple of months has in store for us.

Neil:Yeah onwards and upwards as always, a good start to the year and… Well, next episode, depending on the order, these come out, probably going to get our first guest as well. So that’s something to look out for.

Chris: Really looking forward to that.

Neil:Really happy about that and then hopefully in the future we’ll get some more in the pipeline too. But with regards to today’s episode, we are be going to… well, we are be going.

Chris: I R Baboon.

Neil: Yeah, in today’s episode we are going to look at CMS a bit more in-depth and understand how they can simplify website management basically.

So, we primarily work in WordPress, which is a CMS. But not all CMS are the same and for me, like my CMS experience for the most part starts and ends with WordPress. I’ve worked on a few bits and bobs, but having WordPress is basically my bread and butter when it comes to project work.

Obviously for you and Nathan, that’s different. So I’m not necessarily a leading expertise on what CMS — what the different CMS, can do and so, i’m definitely not the only person in that spot, especially with people that are looking at websites or what websites do and what they need from one.

So I suppose to kick off the start of this episode, what is a CMS and why would you opt to use one?

Chris: Yeah, okay. So a CMS is a very commonly used word when it comes to websites. If you’re looking to get a website developed, you’ll probably be told that we use ‘x’ CMS or ‘y’ CMS. CMS basically stands for ‘Content Management System’ and it’s a fancy way of saying you can control your website using a nice little portal, in a nutshell.

Traditionally websites were created using HTML and CSS and maybe JavaScript and PHP, and you needed to be a web developer to really understand how to add content to your website. So if you want to add a new page, you’d have to create a new page in HTML, add it to the menus in HTML.

Neil:That’s like when we was at school using — what was it, Microsoft suite.

Chris: What was it called? Nath?

Nathan: Dreamweaver.

Neil: There was Dreamweaver but then we also used to do it in something… Yeah, there was Dreamweaver and there was another one that we would do, but yeah, it was all tables and yeah…

Chris: HTML code from the get go.

CMS like WordPress allow you to create posts, pages, menus. They’ve gone — it’s got really sophisticated now where you can, put page builders in there and different things like that, that’s a CMS. You are managing the content on your website using a system, essentially.

So the differences between that and a traditional website is you probably need less understanding of how to actually build a website from, in terms of the coding. CMS still allow you to put HTML in, to make your website look and feel how you want it to feel, but when it comes to the content, you can add a page quickly. You can add content quickly. You can change an image, add some more text, add a blog post, add a testimonial, that kind of stuff.

It’s quicker than it would be traditionally.

Neil: It’s kind of like you’re in a system that signposts everything for you for the most part. So, dashboards, you can jump in somewhere along the lines. There’s your pages, your posts, products depending on what your specialisation is for that website and stuff.

And you mentioned the differences between that and a traditional website and it’s probably why when we started like our first website, even before VOiD Applications, which when we was VOiD Games, we’ll touch on that in a later episode.

When I was at university, we got to grips with WordPress a little bit, so I had a little bit of that knowledge and that allows you to jump into the Web Design world quite quickly. So, especially in comparison to learning the traditional website where you build it from scratch per say, you’ve already got the framework there with a CMS, right?

Chris: We were on the other side of things where we were creating websites using ‘Notepad’. That was one of the core fundamental parts of that module was you need to create this using ‘Notepad’. So that was a traditional way, no CMS.

Neil: So now we’ve established the what and the why. What are the factors that we need to consider when choosing a CMS for a website? Because obviously we’ve more or less kind of said, it’s a content management system, so it allows you to manage your project from the inside quite quickly, especially for those that aren’t trained on creating websites or creating content for websites. As I said, things are signposted in, but what would be the reason for somebody to use a CMS, i.e can it be dictated by what sector the user works in for example, commerce, data management, hobbyist?

Chris: Yeah, I would say when you want to make a brochure website, there’s quite a lot of different CMS you can use, you can use WordPress, you can use Squarespace, you could use Wix. There’s Drupal, Joomla — you can get them custom built. There’s some obscure ones out there that you can use as well.

When it comes to e-commerce, that’s where it probably differs in most people’s minds for a CMS. WordPress, for WooCommerce. So WooCommerce attaches to WordPress, allows a WordPress website to become a e-commerce platform.

Neil: So it’s an expansion on…

Chris: So the CMS is still WordPress, but you’re expanding the capabilities of that CMS by adding WooCommerce, but then you’ve got Magento, which is a CMS, you’ve got Shopify, which a lot of people are moving to when it comes to the e-commerce space. But I think — going back to your original question, what should you look at or look for in a CMS when you’re picking one? It’s probably learning curve as much as anything, because-

Neil: Agreed yeah.

Chris: If you’ve got experience in WordPress, use WordPress. We don’t have any experience in Drupal or Joomla, for example. We could do because it’s probably pretty straightforward with the skillsets we’ve got.

Neil: Similar as well, yeah.

Chris: But we don’t use that because that’s not our expertise but we do — we have worked on other people’s websites that are in Wix and in Squarespace. My personal opinion, they’re not as good as WordPress, but they have a — they do have a — an area in the market and it’s for people that want a page builder website quick and easy, something that they can just pay…

I think Squarespace or Wix is like £150 a year. If you want to do it yourself, great. I don’t think after (that) the point of doing it yourself, that Squarespace and Wix is the best platform. That’s my opinion.

So you move to WordPress, but WordPress, you’ll have levels of learning curve with WordPress.

You can go in with traditional WordPress and build your own theme, not many people do that, they get a theme off the shelf. They change it. You can get a theme off the shelf and not change it much. Just change your colours using the CMS options that come with that theme.

But you can also install page builder plugins for WordPress, which again extend that functionality of the CMS to allow it to be drag and drop. So for example, elemental, which is the one that we use.

Probably — I would say it’s the best out there. It’s the quickest out there, it’s easiest to use and the documentation out there is fantastic if you wanted to use it yourself. But there’s also WP Bakery, which we used heavily for many years.

Neil: That’s what we initially started with I beleive. Yeah something along the lines… Visual Composer -

Chris: When we moved to page builders, Visual Composer as it was or WP Bakery. But there’s Divi, there’s other things. So it just depends on your level of appetite — when it comes to the learning curve.

Neil: How much you want to to be able to — because obviously there — for as much as WordPress is WordPress, these builders are all different in the sense of like the way they function. Some of them have front end development where you can jump on the front of the website and actually drag and drop and see the modules in real time, whereas some of them opt to just use the frameworks in the back ends, which all of these different options, we’ll go into it in more detail in a while, but they can have effect on speed and performance because of how much they’re trying to load and stuff, so — yeah go on.

Chris: I would also say that, if you’re getting a website built by an agency like ours, the learning curve is going to be different as well, because you could get, a WordPress website built in Elementor from a digital agency, like us, and only need a small learning curve to understand how to, add pages, how to add posts, FAQs that kind of stuff because all of that foundation will be set up.

It’s going to be different to choosing WordPress, as your CMS and Elementor as your page builder and start it from scratch yourself, that is definitely a different world.

But… it’s all about what you want — how easy you want it to be.

Neil: So we’ve mentioned WordPress quite a lot because obviously that’s our go-to, what’s like, synonymous with WordPress? What other names would these go by off the top of your head? Can you think of any is there -

Chris: Different CMS? Like I said there’s Wix.

Neil:Yeah so you mention them. So there’s the -

Chris: There’s quite a lot.

Neil: Because when we talk about WordPress, we don’t necessarily…

I wouldn’t — based on what I know and what I work with, I wouldn’t necessarily associate Wix to WordPress, but I associate Wix to, what’s another one?

Chris: Squarespace.

Neil: Those are the brands of that. Is there a brand of WordPress or is there not — like it’s WordPress and then there’s just something else.

Chris: Technically, yes, because you can go to WordPress.com and you can, create a website on WordPress.com that is WordPress, but it’s not the WordPress that we would use.

It looks the same. It feels the same. It works very much the same, but what you’re working — when you’re working with WordPress on WordPress.com, you’re working with WordPress.coms version of WordPress.

I would say you’ve got so many CMS out there now because you’ll have big hosting providers that will create their own to get you on board and lock you into their hosting platform. So Squarespace and Wix are the two biggest, I would say probably GoDaddy, is the next one.

But I know IONOS do their own CMS page builder and then there’s also (what’s the other one).

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, IONOS. I can’t remember the other one, but yeah it will probably come to me in a bit.

Neil: The name escapes ya. okay.

Chris: But yeah, there’s all of — when these companies get big and they want more people to come on to the hosting, they want you to start using their CMS and then you’re locked in. The good thing with WordPress is it’s the CMS that’s open source. So you can move it to any host you want. Whereas if you’re paying for Wix or Squarespace, you have to pay for them.

Neil: It’s part of that package and you can’t necessarily come out of them.

Chris: That would be the same with Shopify as well.

Neil: Okay. Good to know. Great. So that’s a quick overview. Just with regards to those — what pulls them together with regards to common features, like what are the common features that CMS platforms offer?

What makes them sought after for development to use when providing a website for someone to use?

Chris: Every single one of them’s goals is to help you manage the content on your website. Quick and easy, and a lot of them is to build your own websites. The GoDaddy one, the Wix, the Squarespace ones, all of those ones are the — [those] they want you to build your own websites. Whereas WordPress, you can get Digital Agencies (to build) and Shopify and all that stuff. It’s the same. Magento you need a Digital Agency if you don’t have any, coding experience for Magento, you’re not going to get very far.

But they all allow you to add pages, add posts, add content to things like FAQs or Testimonials, different things like that. I think when it comes to what pulls them all together, it’s that management of content. That’s it, and it’s about what’s the best tool for the job you’ve got at hand. I think we’ll probably talk a little bit about the differences between the e-commerce platforms, because that’s where it does kind of widen a little bit.

Neil: I think if anything, to touch on that right now would make sense because there’s Shopify, Magento -

Chris: WooCommerce, there’s also BigCommerce and there’s OpenCart.

Neil: Okay. So there’s multiple — there’s a lot there basically and depending on your expertise at the time — obviously WooCommerce just to touch on that and we’ll talk about the others, but WooCommerce. It’s an expansion of WordPress, you add it, and then immediately you can add products, and you sort them like you would post and pages of content.

It tells you add an image, add content, add your price.

Chris: Yeah. If you’re very familiar with the way that WordPress CMS works, its dashboard. WooCommerce is great for you because it’s very similar, a post and a page and a product. They’re all very similar. They all use the same editing view. It’s a Wysiwyg basically.

Neil:Yeah and the more you use that in, the more you work with it, and the more you add to it, the more you train yourself on it. All of those become the same. You know where to look, you know. So, how does that differ when it comes to these other brands or other platforms/technologies? How does that…

Chris: In essence, it doesn’t differ really. It’s the way that it differs between, let’s say — Shopify and WordPress, for example. They’re both CMS. They both allow you to manage the content on your website, because it’s a commerce platform, you can manage your products, you can manage your shipping streams, you can manage variations of products. You can get your orders, you can manage your stock. All of that stuff is done through CMS.

So Shopify, WooCommerce, the difference between WordPress and Shopify is WordPress is open source. So you get WordPress, install it on any host you want, install, WooCommerce and you’re done. You get developer updates. You don’t necessarily need to pay WooCommerce for any of that, because WordPress is free.

WooCommerce is free to a certain extent. If you want to then start to integrate more advanced functionality like abandoned cart reminders or…

Neil:Those are what the plugin providers make their money off basically.

Chris: You would have to pay for plugins from woocommerce.com for example. Whereas Shopify, most of the stuff is in already. You don’t need a host because you pay Shopify $19 or $49 or $250, a month to use their platform. You can use — you can pull in themes, you can plug in, you can extend that functionality using, what they — they call it a different name, but basically plugins, if you want to — what are they called?

Nathan: Apps.

Chris: Shopify apps, but they will charge you a monthly fee as well.

But a lot of the stuff is out of the box with Shopify and the key is it’s not open source. So the security of Shopify is controlled by Shopify, not by — you’re not responsible for it. So Shopify’s platform will — their developers will be finding out where the security holes are, and they’ll fix them and they’ll push an update out to all customers.

Neil: And all Shopify customers are covered by that.

Chris: The downside to Shopify is if you don’t pay Shopify the fee, you don’t have a website anymore. It’s as simple as that.

Whereas if you brought a website off us and decided you wanted to host it yourself after 12 months or whatever, we can give you the files and the database and you can go and host it yourself.

Neil: If that was produced in WordPress?

Chris: So those are the two major points. But again it is — Shopify is a fantastic platform. WooCommerce is a fantastic platform. If you’ve got a bigger shop, probably Shopify.

Neil: Yeah. You’ve got to understand your needs and how much you’re actually providing, right?

Chris: We manage shops for clients and they’re absolutely massive and they’re on WooCommerce so the platform’s fine. The one thing I wouldn’t — we don’t have much experience in Magento. We do have some experience in Magento and the CMS is good, but it’s very complicated and it takes a long time for you to do things.

Therefore, the developer fees are more expensive. So you’ll be looking at like 5 to 10 times more in development fees than you would with, Magento than you probably would with WooCommerce or Shopify. Yeah. So those are the those are the differences.

Neil: Great. Yeah. I mean, we did focus quite a bit on the, the commerce side of things because I think that’s the part where it — that’s a big differential for a lot of businesses in that, if you’re doing more than just, posting, you’ve got your static pages, etc., it’s when products are involved and the range and the amount of products that you sell can be the difference maker in what platform you decide to choose.

So just dialing it back to more basic tools. With regards to CMS, we’ve got a few other bits and bobs that we can mention with regards to, posting, but like the the benefits of it, it’s the scheduling of content that you can plan ahead, like, much like people do with their social media where they create content and then then schedule it.

You can do that with these releases right. So — when we’re working on our client’s blog posts for example, just for simplicity’s sake, you can then schedule it for future. You set it up, you leave it and then you can do your social media runs in tandem with that.

User management as well. You did touch on. So for all the platforms with regards to overseeing, customer accounts, but as well as if you are in a team of designers, developers or you’ve got a website, etc., being able to delegate user roles and quickly change those things. So, it’s the security aspect.

Chris: Also CMS aren’t necessarily always off the shelf. So we’ve got a client that we work with, they’ve got their own custom-built CMS. We’re building their frontend website and the content from their CMS is being supplied to our frontend via APIs. So you can do that. You can also use WordPress — and this is a bit more advanced, and I won’t go into too much but it’s called headless WordPress.

Where basically you can create your own front end using something else and use WordPress CMS as the content management system, but not the frontend and the API send the information to your other websit so yeah, you don’t necessarily have to use it in a traditional way, but that’s very advanced.

Neil: Yeah, it goes to show the ways that you can take it and we’ll go into the next point now, but you can do as little or as much as you want within the realms of reason, obviously, you can’t just like create I don’t know… Yeah. I don’t know where I’m going with this point.

So as we discussed, CMS can be quite robust, but like all things in that regard, because of that, it can come with quite a few challenges.

So I’m going to ask a few questions. We’ve probably already covered and touched on them, but just reiterate the fact that — because obviously some people are completely new to this, whereas others might need a refresher.

So the first being, security concerns and carrying out security checks and maintenance, is it as straightforward as any other website? And if not, what’s the best practice to safeguard against threats?

You mentioned something that I didn’t know, Shopify maintaining itself basically. We definitely don’t have the luxury of that with WordPress. So if you could just talk on what the complications are and what the solution to that is.

Chris: Yeah. So security’s always a big issue when it comes to websites because, people are always looking at different ways to exploit your website to find holes in it, to inject some code or take it down or steal the information that’s on there. So it’s massive. It’s a really important part of the choice when you’re doing a CMS.

If you work on a WordPress site, again, as we discussed earlier, a WordPress site is open source, so WordPress will — there’s people out there managing the WordPress ‘Core’ files, those will need updating, your plugins will need updating all separately. That can be challenging when it comes to the security, because if you don’t necessarily have that experience, it might be worth getting somebody like us to understand and look at the security updates on a monthly basis, especially if you don’t have the time.

If you’re time poor, it’s really difficult to get that in on a regular basis and if you miss a couple, you might be okay. If you miss a couple again and again and again and again, you might — your website might be opened up to a security hole. Not all security holes will be exploited.

But my experience is once your website gets hacked once and you fix it, you are — somehow no evidence for this — but you are on a list, and they will keep coming back. So WordPress is really important, getting somebody to do the security updates on a monthly basis is really important, and using plugins like, Defender or Sucuri or something like that to tell you which plugins need updating more critically than others.

So our process here is everybody that’s on a maintenance contract with us, we’ll update them every month. But if there is a critical plugin flaw — hole — we’re told about via automated emails and different things like that, we’ll fix that as soon as we can — within a day or so.

When it comes to Shopify, they’ll have the same problems, but you don’t have to deal with it because the developers will deal with it. With Shopify, the developers will deal with it, and they will push that update out automatically. You don’t even have to think about it. You’ll be sleeping and your website will update.

However, when it comes to things like OpenCart or BigCommerce, OpenCart especially, they will do those updates for you, they’ll be ready, but you do have to trigger them yourself and again, that can cause issues with if you’re moving from [i d’kno] version one to version two. If you’ve not made those changes that version two needs, your website could be updated and completely go offline.

So there’s those things you need to look at. Magento being one of the biggest culprits of that. They usually send a big update out once a year, and then developers need to get paid to do that job because there’s so many different checklists that you have to go through to make sure that your website is compatible.

The other things I would look at is — and this is not necessarily a CMS thing, but your PHP versions that you’re running on your host.

So PHP versions, if you’re running ‘PHP 7’ now’s a good time to move it to ‘PHP 8’. Probably should have done that a while back, but do it as soon as you can because as your CMS updates, they’ll require the use of PHP 8 or 8.2 or whatever it is. Where Shopify again. Don’t need it, because they do it all. So that’s quite a few positives in the Shopify box.

Neil: Yeah definitely, like the more I’m hearing about it and the more I’m being educated on it… it’s that part that’s — especially if you’re in a position where you’re not necessarily working with a developer or you worked with a developer to be put on that road. It does sound a bit safer, just in that regard. But then obviously when you want ready to come out of that, or if you don’t warrant that support because you haven’t — your shop isn’t that stature or you don’t make that much money from it, to get out of it sounds like a real, real hassle. So pros and cons of each.

Chris: One thing we do see a lot, is — is the thought that maintenance contracts for WordPress is just another way of us making money. It’s really — it’s a way of extending the life and your return on investment on your website. If you do your maintenance on your car on a regular basis, it’s going to last longer. It’s the same analogy with WordPress.

I also see quite a lot, “nah, it’s OK, I can do it myself”, and that’s great if you do it yourself, because a lot of people are time poor and they don’t do it themselves.

Neil: And then it only takes that one compliance issue to spiral if you’re doing it yourself. We’ve ran into that a few times. It’s great when a client can take control and do what they need to. It’s just not so great when -

Chris: Yeah, we’re massive advocates of when we deliver a website, we want you to be able to use it.

Neil: …So that clears up the security concerns. But I suppose security concerns, they go hand in hand with performance optimisation right? So, what are the common reasons a CMS might slow down a website?

Chris: Yeah, there’s a few. So, when it comes to WordPress, if you’re using a bad web host, there’s not enough resources, we’ve talked about why web speed is important on a previous episode as well. But also bad plugins. So there’s plugins out there for everything. If you want a function- some functionality, you can pretty much find it using a plugin, but not all plugins are the same.

Neil: Yeah, not all plugins are made equal.

Chris: Exactly, yes. If a plugin has not been updated for, six months, it’s probably no longer supported. It’s not going to be a good one. There are businesses out there that make plugins and that’s all they do. They will charge you a license fee on an annual basis to get updates. Those are the ones you should be using because they’re going to be the ones that are constantly developed.

If there’s any bugs, if there’s anything in that code that is slowing your website down, they’ll find it because more and more people are using them, they’ll find those issues. They’ll resolve them, they’ll update them. Whereas other ones…

…Using the right page builder. Going on to why we stopped using WPBakery a while back now. Is because it was just having a real impact on the speed of WordPress websites that we were building. We also used, a set of themes that we would constantly use. We would pick a theme and then we would edit that theme, design on top of it. We stopped using that theme as well because it started to slow everything down. It’s a knock-on effect.

Neil: Yeah, especially when the integrations into the theme and you’re designing for it and then you make changes and then they send out an update for that theme because it needs it but then it reverts changes because of what you’re doing. Even if you’re working in the child theme, all these things come together to create a not very great environment when you need to push out, an update or make changes.

Chris: So when you’re looking at CMS, it’s important to pick one that’s quick. But also if you’re looking at a page builder to add on to it, make sure that’s quick as well. But plugins, themes, make sure that the theme is lightweight. Nine times out of ten, you don’t need a fancy theme from Themeforest that does all these different — pieces of functionality.

Neil: Has 1000 plus purposes and you literally use five.

Chris: Exactly, because there’s just no point. There’s a lot of plugins out there, like there’s jetpack plugins, which are great, but you can install everything that Jetpacks ever done and you don’t need it if you’re only using it for testimonials. Just install testimonials.

That kind of thing. But when it comes to, all of the others they’re pretty much hosted themselves. So you should be in a place where they’re okay as long as you’ve got the right tier. Wix and SquareSpace will be okay but if you start getting like 10,000 people on your website a month… might start to creak. It’ll be a bit slow.

But you might- you’ll have outgrown that by that point.

Neil: Yeah and at that point it’s like everything else if you’ve outgrown that and your site’s doing better than what that provides, then that’s when you would move on and that’s the natural evolution of [websites] — even for hobbyists with sites and stuff, you got to understand how you can keep moving the needle for your projects and that’s your website.

So with regards to that, you mentioned, the episode that we did, that was episode two, Website Speed and Why it Matters. We went over a few — we’re not going to go over them again at the moment. But that is always a topic that comes into what impacts on speed. So go and listen to that if you need any like home remedies with regards to, website performance and making sure that your website works at the speed that you need to retain users, because that’s the major impact isn’t. If you have these really heavy websites that utilise the CMS, and you’ve got all these plugins and all these widgets and all this- even the content, it’s lik, you can have a site that is literally just content and you don’t have these add ons, but the amount of images you use, the amount of pages they can all over time, like in the back end, take a toll.

Chris: They all add up, yeah. Nothing’s free is it.

Neil: Yeah, exactly.

Chris: There’s a cost to pay at the end if you’re integrating all of these features and services to your website, there’s a cost somewhere to pay and that might be on your performance.

I would probably like to touch up on the CMS to choose when you know that SEO is part of your strategy as well.

Neil: Great point.

Chris: Wix, in my personal opinion, cannot be SEO’d very well because you can put your meta titles in, put your descriptions in and that’s about it. Squarespace will actively lock you out of different sections that help you monitor your SEO and your strategy. So you can’t necessarily add all of the Google services in, if you’re not on a certain package. So that can be annoying and it can be detrimental to SEO what you need to do.

Interesting one we came up against not long ago was, we did a web audit for somebody and their website was built in like, a no-code builder. So that would be a CMS. You go into the backend, you would put all the information in and then it would spit out a website.

But this was very strange because it wasn’t spitting out a website in HTML. It was basically iframing some JavaScript, which is okay, the website looks like a website, but nothing on that website was SEO’able because there was no code there. There was nothing for Google to read. So really take that into consideration. If you are wanting to do some SEO and you’re on Wix and Squarespace, you probably need to have an understanding of the fact that you’re not going to get very far.

You can do some things. You can implement some strategy. You can by all means create content and whatnot. But when it comes to the foundational SEO like schema data and all of the technical things that we look at, WordPress is the best option. In conclusion, if you are looking to do SEO and implement a strategy, CMS is really key because, as I mentioned, Wix and Squarespace will only allow you to do so much, will only allow you to get so far.

You can by all means create content. You can do metadata and descriptions and whatnot. You can do all that. But when it comes to the foundational stuff, the things that we look at schema data and making sure that the pages are set up and structured in a way that is beneficial for SEO in general WordPress is the best platform and I think if you’re looking at the no code options, SEO isn’t — it isn’t for you. You’re not going to get anywhere with them.

Neil: So that’s SEO specifically. I mean, with regards to the idea of — Wix and Squarespace, they allow you to have stores, right?

Chris: I’m not sure, actually. It’s a good question. I’ve never worked on a work — Oh, Squarespace does. Yes definitely.

Neil: So they allow you to have stores a nd I suppose there’s going to be, people and businesses that have those websites and they may be evolving and, you know, they need to scale to accommodate growth. So, what should they consider? When’s the right time to jump ship if they need to? You know what I mean?

Chris: Yeah, so I think if you’re in a scenario where you’ve created your own website, you’ve chose your own CMS and it’s Wix or Squarespace, and you know that your business or your store’s outgrown that point, or you know that you need to start…

Neil: There’s something that — there’s more functionality that you might need to utilise.

Chris: Missing functionality, you’re not getting the SEO where you need it to go, now would be a good time to start considering WordPress.

Neil: Okay. Great. I think that more or less rounds out, the pros and the cons [are] because obviously it’s not all roses when it comes to using these systems, but there are ways and means around, especially when it comes to maintenance and security and whatnot. I think the main thing here is that people that are in a position where they are using the cheaper membership website creators, those are great, especially at entry level- we can’t — I’m not going to put them down. We understand the pros and the cons of those.

Chris: They’ve got a reason for being there.

Neil: They suit a need don’t they, because obviously depending on what you’re trying to get built in and what your website needs to do, you come to somebody like us, immediately you got to have that conversation [budget] -

Chris: …when you are looking to build a website that is feature-rich, SEO optimised, conversion optimised — is, as we say on the website, transforms your business and creates leads and drive sales. Those platforms aren’t really going to do it.

Neil: No, you have to — and that comes with evolution. That’s what you want. You want to be able to put yourself in a position where you can pay for these things that may cost more, but they also deliver more. The ROI is bigger for you. So, yeah just to reiterate the above and to round out the episode more or less, can you give the listeners some practical takeaways and best practices for managing a CMS effectively?

I mean, you’ve touched on the majority anyway, but like, let’s say like the previous episodes, what would be the top 3 to 5 either to look out for or to implement?

Chris: I would say, have a look at — a cost is always going to be a contributing factor for people when they’re looking for a CMS, especially if you’re doing it yourself but don’t always look at the cost. I would say have a look at the features that it’s offering.

Neil: Great point.

Chris: Maybe get a demo on these things and have a look at, is this — are the controls easy to use for you. I mean, not everybody is a web developer. I mean, even in this room, we’ve got differing levels of Web Developer Experience.

Just make sure you’re comfortable with it. If you’re using WordPress, as your CMS, and you need to use a page builder, look up the page builder. What’s quicker? What’s easier for you? I know a lot of people that ‘Divi’. Divi’s a fine platform. We don’t use it, we use Elementor.

Neil: You definitely want to say something else there don’t ya — you stopped yourself, but that was great control, Chris, I appreciate it.

Chris: It’s a fine platform, it works.

Neil: It’s just some of these are indifferent to each other and the workflow -

Chris: It’s personal preference and we personally prefer to work with Elementor because we want more control.

Neil: Yes. That’s perfectly put actually. That’s the — some people will benefit from the constraints of what that can bring. I mean there is options to edit, but they might be tucked away or they’re just different in the way that they work.

Chris: Unfortunately, you’re not going to get a single CMS that will allow you to… have a no-code experience but also, if you wanted to develop everything from scratch. There’s nothing really out there that will fit both of those at the same time.

Neil: No, not unless you develop it yourself.

Chris: The closest would be WordPress and you’d have to heavily remove plugins or add plugins. When it comes to CMS like GoDaddy or Wix or Squarespace, they’re at different levels of what they want you to do, what they allow you to do. Pricing points all that stuff.

Neil: Okay. Great. I think that’s a good primer on CMS and basically what, you can expect from them, what they do and why you would use one. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add to that other than we do — even though we primarily work in WordPress, we have experience in others, right? Or [like] I say [said], you guys do.

Chris: Do one thing like, I touched upon a little bit. You can build your own CMS. We’ve built web applications that are basically, CMS aren’t they?

So we will build word- we will build web applications for any sort of projects at the end of the day, what we’re building is a front-end website, and we’ll build a portal in the back end that restricts people adding certain types of data or doing certain types of things. That’s a CMS, you can build them yourself. But again, you need…

Neil: And that’s a that’s a bespoke -

Chris: And that’s also not for everybody. If you were to come off the street, “I need a website for my business” and I’m selling cakes or I’m a plumber. You don’t need a custom CMS. But when for example, we worked on a project that weighs cows, for example, that needed a custom build. When we worked on the planning application, web application, the PreApp. That needed to be from scratch.

That’s all the same kind of things, but what I would do is ask Nath because Nath has got more experience with the actual programming than all of us here. So is there any things that you would add or questions you would like me to ask?

Okay, so I’m not sure whether you’ll be picked up on it. So what I’ll do is I’ll summarise that now. So, Nath has brought up a good point here. Think about where you want to go with your website, not necessarily where you are with it right now. So if a website is roughly going to last you 4 to 6 years, by that time…

Neil: What do you mean by that sorry? When you say 4 to 6 years because obviously websites last a long time. So do you mean refreshment?

Chris: Yeah, a website is probably going to be refreshed every 4 to 6 years. It will last you if it’s built correctly as long as you want it to, but by that time, you know, styles have changed, people, contents change, your business is probably changed. I mean, look at our business. Full six years ago.

Neil: “Look at us.”

Chris: Completely different. It’s about thinking, where do you need to be? So if you know that in a couple of years’ time you want to be selling products, you probably need to be looking at a CMS now that can facilitate that in the future. If you want to be selling and doing events or something like that, and posting events onto your website, you probably want to be looking at CMS that can facilitate that further down the line.

You don’t necessarily need to [it] be right now, or at least if you’re going to pick something that is quick and easy and cheap right now, know full well that in 18 to 24 months you’re probably going to be changing that, but yeah, I think that rounds it off nice.

Neil: Great input from Nathan. Thank you to Chris for reiterating that. With all that being said, because it’s still a website at the end of the day, right? So even if — every time that we do the podcast and when you see our socials, we are on about the Web Audit. Can the web audit that we do, or wherever they decide to get the web audit from, it can still be carried out on these platforms, right.

Because at the end of the day, it’s still just another website. It’s just that the CMS system, operates differently in the back end for you to output the stuff. So even if you’re working with, Wix, Squarespace or anything, that’s like a product, we can still do the web audit for that right? So that brings me to the point of if you do have one of these sites and you’re interested in what the performance is like or where you’re lacking, because as Chris said, there is ways and means that, restrictions are applied depending on the tier that you’re going for, you can find these out and you can do that with, our free website audit.

I sounded robotic when I said that because I was reading it. You can do that with our free web audit, which is, as I said, free. No obligation. No obligation means that you can come and do the web audit with us, find out what you need to and then you’re not forced to work with us, but obviously we do these web audits because we know we can act on the stuff that comes up. Right. So there’s that. So if you.

Chris: Spoilers. It’s very rare that I’ll look at a website that doesn’t need work, because the people that have websites that don’t need work don’t usually need free web audits.

But yeah, we can work on — I’ve done web audits on, WordPress, custom builds, Wix, Squarespace, that no-code platform that I talked about.

Neil: Anything that you need to deliver data to a user and somebody has to come and use your URL as an access point to get to it. You can do an audit on. So it’s worth to bear that in mind, especially if you want to know the performance of some of these, smaller page builders, or if you’ve got a massive site that uses one of the technologies that we spoke about, so you can find that at voidapplications.co.uk/free-website-audit/ that’s free hyphen website hyphen audit and yeah I think that’s going to bring this episode to a close.

So we’ve done a range of topics right now and it’s good. As I said the next one we are going to hopefully do it with a guest, not going to give any inkling into who that guest is or what the content is about, because obviously we want to be able to surprise ya’ll.

Chris: Maybe a little spoiler on, it’s about content.

Neil: Yeah. That’s true. Yeah it is about content and obviously going forward we want to do more of these, with other design agencies and with other people of different — different disciplines that, you know… they use digital marketing as their tool to get their message across. So if you have any questions or you’re in that line of work and want to get involved, then please reach out to us over on our socials.

You can find the link to those, along with everything else in the description of the YouTube version of this or wherever you get your podcast from. So yeah, I think that’s, going to wrap this episode. So that is episode five. Thank you for listening. I’ve been Neil Cooper, this is Chris Carter, and we’ll catch you next time.

Chris: Thanks.

Neil: Peace.

Web development changes at an incredible pace, with studies showing that over 58% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices alone. In such a rapidly changing environment, businesses that fail to keep up risk losing visibility, customers, and valuable opportunities for growth. Modern web development is no longer just about having an online presence; it’s about delivering fast, secure, and engaging experiences that meet customer expectations and drive real results.

Staying ahead of the latest web development trends in 2025 can help businesses boost their digital visibility, improve customer journeys, and remain competitive in a crowded market. From building mobile-first experiences to embracing AI-powered tools, modern web strategies are helping organisations transform how they connect with their audiences.

At VOiD Applications, we work closely with businesses across the West Midlands to develop smart, forward-thinking digital solutions. Although this article focuses on trends impacting businesses in the West Midlands, these insights are relevant to any organisation looking to thrive in today’s fast-moving digital world.

The smartest approach blends AI efficiency with human insight, creating digital experiences that feel both innovative and authentic, while still keeping the human connection at the heart of every interaction.

1. AI Integration and Automation in Web Development

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way businesses build and manage their websites. AI is streamlining customer service through intelligent live chat systems, personalised content recommendations, and automated email responses that create smoother, faster user experiences.

Tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and AI-powered analytics dashboards allow businesses to gather insights, automate routine tasks, and deliver highly targeted content without heavy manual input. This can save time, reduce operational costs, and help brands stay connected with their audiences in more meaningful ways. AI can also help analyse customer behaviour patterns, predict future trends, and offer personalised solutions that better meet user needs, helping businesses stay one step ahead of competitors.

However, while AI offers exciting possibilities, businesses should be cautious about relying solely on automation to drive their digital strategies. AI can miss the emotional nuance and human understanding that customers value in their interactions. Human creativity, critical thinking, and personalised attention still play a vital role in building trust and delivering genuine value online.

The smartest approach blends AI efficiency with human insight, creating digital experiences that feel both innovative and authentic, while still keeping the human connection at the heart of every interaction.

2. Responsive Design as a Non-Negotiable Standard

With mobile devices accounting for nearly 60% of global web traffic1, having a responsive website is no longer an optional upgrade–it’s a fundamental requirement. Users today expect seamless, fast experiences whether they are browsing on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop, and businesses that fail to deliver risk losing visitors within seconds.

Google’s move to mobile-first indexing reinforces the importance of responsive web design. This means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site for ranking and indexing purposes. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, it may not only frustrate users but also perform poorly in search engine rankings, which can impact visibility, traffic, and lead generation.

Modern responsive design is about more than just shrinking content to fit smaller screens. It involves thoughtful layouts, flexible images, touch-friendly navigation, and fast-loading pages that offer the same quality experience across all devices. Investing in responsive design helps businesses stay competitive, improve engagement rates, and meet the growing expectations of today’s mobile-first audiences. Companies that prioritise responsive web experiences are better positioned to attract and retain their customers in an increasingly mobile-driven world.

3. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for Enhanced Performance

Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs, are quickly becoming a popular choice for businesses that want to deliver faster, more reliable digital experiences without the cost of developing native mobile apps. PWAs combine the best features of websites and mobile apps, offering users a smooth, app-like experience directly through their browser.

But one major advantage of PWAs is offline access. They allow users to continue browsing certain parts of a website even without an internet connection, making them perfect for customers on the go. PWAs also load faster, respond more smoothly to user interactions, and often take up less storage space on a device compared to traditional apps. For a more detailed look at how PWAs work, you can explore our previous article on this topic here.

Businesses such as local retailers, manufacturers, and service providers can greatly benefit from implementing PWAs. They offer a convenient way to engage customers, speed up the shopping or booking process, and improve user satisfaction without requiring users to download anything from an app store. In today’s competitive digital landscape, offering a quick and flexible online experience can set businesses apart and help them build stronger connections with their audience.

4. Website Speed & Core Web Vitals

Website speed is one of the most important factors influencing user satisfaction, search rankings, and bounce rates. Studies show that if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, more than half of users will likely leave before it finishes4, as you can see reports were covering this as early as 2016 and before. A slow website not only frustrates visitors but also damages a business’s visibility on search engines like Google.

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific metrics that Google uses to measure user experience on a website. They focus on three key areas: loading performance (Largest Contentful Paint), interactivity (First Input Delay), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). These measurements help determine how fast and smooth a site feels to users, which directly affects how well it performs in search results.

Optimising for Core Web Vitals involves improving server response times, compressing images, using faster hosting, and minimising unnecessary code. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights4 and Lighthouse5 can provide clear reports showing where improvements are needed. In short, businesses that focus on website speed and Core Web Vitals are better positioned to attract and retain customers while also boosting their SEO performance.

Maintaining GDPR compliance for websites isn’t just a legal requirement; it’s a way to build loyalty and confidence among customers.

5. Privacy-First Development and Cookie Management

As digital privacy becomes more important than ever, businesses must take clear steps to protect user data and comply with regulations like GDPR. Customers today expect transparency about how their information is collected, stored, and used, and failing to meet these expectations can harm both trust and reputation.

The rise in GDPR compliance for websites has led to an increased use of cookie consent tools, privacy policies, and user-friendly data management systems. Simple practices like giving users clear choices, limiting unnecessary data collection, and offering easy access to privacy settings are now considered basic standards for any serious online business.

Maintaining GDPR compliance for websites isn’t just a legal requirement; it’s a way to build loyalty and confidence among customers. Easy-to-implement tools and native consent banners can help businesses stay compliant without disrupting the user experience. Clear, accessible privacy notices and regular updates to cookie management systems are also important steps in keeping websites safe and trustworthy.

Being open about privacy practices and putting users in control of their data sends a powerful message that the business values trust, honesty, and long-term relationships built on transparency.

Bonus Trend: Local SEO-Driven Web Architecture

For businesses that want to dominate local search results, building a strong, SEO-focused website structure is more important than ever. Thoughtful site architecture, the use of schema markup, and accurate local citations all play a vital role in helping companies appear in relevant regional searches.

By structuring a website with clear navigation, well-organised content, and detailed service area pages, businesses make it easier for both users and search engines to understand what they offer and where they operate. Implementing schema markup, as explained in our guide to schema SEO, helps highlight key information like business addresses, reviews, and opening hours, improving visibility in local search results and on Google Maps.

For West Midlands-based businesses, investing in local SEO strategies is a smart way to compete more effectively within the region. Local customers are often searching for nearby solutions, and businesses that prioritise strong web architecture and trusted citations will naturally stand out. Whether you run a retail shop, a manufacturing firm, or a service-based company, focusing on local SEO can drive more targeted traffic, boost brand awareness, and support long-term regional growth.

Conclusion: Adapting to Thrive in a Digital Economy

Businesses these days cannot afford to stand still. Keeping pace with modern web development trends in 2025 is not just about having the latest technology; it’s about delivering better customer experiences, improving online visibility, and building long-term success. As new tools, standards, and expectations continue to evolve, businesses that adapt and innovate will be the ones that thrive.

Now is the perfect time to audit your current website, identify areas for improvement, and start making changes that will keep you competitive both locally and beyond. From faster load times and better mobile experiences to stronger privacy practices and smarter SEO strategies, every improvement helps move your business forward.

Need help implementing these trends? Talk to VOiD Applications today. Our team is ready to help you transform your digital presence and set your business up for future success.

Sources

1. Indectron — Mobile Phone Traffic Statistics and Trends
2. ChatGPT
3. Microsoft Copilot
4. PageSpeed Insights
5. Google Lighthouse

Key topics in this episode:

• What makes a high-quality lead for your business
• How to design your website to appeal to your ideal customer
• The role of content, case studies, and social proof in lead quality
• What lead magnets are and how to use them effectively
• How to track website performance and conversions with tools like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity

Watch Now

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Improving Lead Quality: Designing for Your Ideal Customer | Into the VOiD Podcast: Episode 4

Episode Transcript

Neil: Hello and welcome to episode four of ‘Into the VOiD; a friendly guide to Digital Marketing’. I’m your host, Neil Cooper, Director here at VOiD Applications and with me is the MD of the same business and co-host of the Pod once again, Chris Carter. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris: I’m good, thanks. You?

Neil: All good, I think so… yeah.

There’s been a little bit of a change up again, like we mentioned in the third episode, we’ve been going through the routine of figuring out how we want this shot, and, we’ve settled on some different cameras this time. So for the visual listeners who are on YouTube, you’ll probably see some differences again.

We’re just trying to improve, you guys, to be able to take in this stuff in a more leisurely fashion and for the audio listeners, if you haven’t, please go over to the YouTube and check us out.

With that being said, onto the subject, today we’re diving into something that affects every business with an online presence, how your web design can dramatically influence the quality of your leads.

But before we get into the nuts and bolts of designing for your ideal customer, change it up a little bit. I’m going to spring a quiz on you, Chris. How does that feel?

Chris: Yeah, let’s do it.

Neil: Right. So, I’m going to throw some stats your way. No cheating.

Chris: Uww, okay. No cheating, how am I going to cheat.

Neil: By looking at the iPod.

Chris: Can I use Google.

Neil: Absolutely not actually, put that on aeroplane mode.

Right so I’m going to throw some stats your away and you have to guess if the real number is higher or lower than what I actually say. The answer that will be marked is the higher or lower, but if you want to throw an estimated percent in, feel free.

So like if you just want to take a random guess of what the actual stat is, but we will be looking at the higher or lower right. Listeners feel free to play along.

So first question, 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Is the percentage higher or lower?

Chris: Higher.

Neil: It is indeed. So do you want to take a guess at the precise amount?

Chris: I think between 65 and 75%.

Neil: Not not as quite as high. It’s reported that 53% of mobile users –

Chris: Oh okay, lower than I thought then.

Neil: Yeah, exactly. They’ll leave if a page takes more than three seconds to load. It’s something that we tell all our clients. It’s definitely one of those things. If you can’t get to the information quickly, it’s a turn-off, right? So optimisation — it goes back to what we said on previous episodes.

Question two. 55% of users have reportedly said they prefer a site with a clean, minimalistic design over something complex.

Higher or lower?

Chris: Higher.

Neil: What did I say? I said- I said 55.

Our survey says, approximately 48%.

Chris: — Really –

Neil: Of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.

How does that make you feel?

Chris: Yeah, it makes sense but…

Neil: The cogs are turning I can see –

Chris: — but, it’s a matter of taste, isn’t it? And whether or not you like complex or more clean (design).

Neil: It’s down to preference. And it depends on –

Chris: But 48% I mean… Yeah, you dropped me in it there then. ‘It was 54%’…

Neil: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it depends on the pool that they took from as well right.

Chris: I feel quite sad I haven’t got 100% but okay!

Neil: It’s fine, don’t worry, there’ll be times in the future to gain retribution.

Right question three.

33% of businesses, so an estimated third of this survey is satisfied with their online conversion rates. Higher or lower?

Chris: Let me get this straight first. The question is….

Neil: They’re ‘satisfied’, 33% — only 33%.

Chris: I would say that’s lower. Less than 33% are satisfied with the leads that they’re getting.

Neil: You sure.

Chris: I’m pretty confident.

Neil: Wanna phone a friend?

Chris: No.

Neil: Good because I wouldn’t know the answer.

Right, around 22% of businesses are satisfied so you was correct. That’s lower.

Which definitely isn’t a lot at all in the grand scheme of things, but it shows there’s massive opportunity for improvement through design and functionality for lead quality.

Right. So we’ve got two more questions, it’s just five (in total).

Question four; 25% of small businesses do not have a website at all. Higher or lower?

Chris: Oh that’s a good one… I’m getting — getting a little feedback from Nathan over there. He’s going higher, so I’m going to go higher.

Neil: It is indeed higher. 28% of the businesses, according to this survey, or at least 28% of small businesses still don’t have a website. So they’re missing out on a huge potential market.

And like we’ve raised in discussion before, if you aren’t in a position to have a website, but you have premises, then you should be looking at Google Business profile.

Chris: Yeah, some sort of presence on the internet.

Neil: Exactly, yeah. So fifth and final question. 40% of small businesses have optimised their website for mobile use, higher or lower?

Chris: Lower. The amount of websites that we see that still don’t work.

Neil: *Fails attempt at Who Wants to be a Millionaire Heart Beat Sound*

What’s the thing — is it — ‘Who Wants to be…’.

Nathan: Countdown!

Neil: Yea- No! I was on about ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’.

Chris: That’s definitely not countdown.

Neil: Yeah — right! It is lower.

From a neutral standpoint, it may seem surprising, but 30% of small businesses have optimised their websites for mobile. So for us being in the position, we wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually and factually lower than this value if we was to take an actual value from everywhere.

So with the majority of web traffic coming from mobile devices, that’s a huge area for improvement and a critical factor for improving lead quality. It’s something we’ve touched on every single episode, like every time we talk about optimisation speeds and whatnot, that is the one thing it leads back to as well, because there’s so many users on mobile.

So yeah, there’s no revelations there really is there?

Chris: No. Pretty good, four out of five.

Neil: Yeah that one was a doozy. I did — I set you up on the second i’m not going to lie.

So that was basically a nice way to lead into what we’re going to be discussing. [I’m going to move this over here. So I’m still in front of the, microphone.]

All right, so setting the stage for identifying what a high-quality lead actually is, and to do that, I want to ask you, in the context of us, ‘VOiD’, or a digital marketing, slash, agency perspective, what does a high-quality lead look like?

Chris: Yeah, so you really should be having a persona of what your ideal client is, really. So a high quality lead is anybody that fits into that persona, into that ideal customer of yours. So for us manufacturing, engineering companies or companies of a certain size in a certain area who have needs for our services, really. Web design, SEO; ideally for us, we want to be looking at talking to marketing managers, marketing directors, business owners, people with an understanding of what we do and why we do it, and somebody who can make the decisions as well — Ideally.

So that for us, most people will have, a quality lead persona. A perfect, customer.

Neil: So we’ve got an idea of an ideal customer, somebody who’s in the role of decision maker that knows what they want, and the way that that they need to move the business in order to do this. So how do you — how do we to begin with, how do we start designing to attract them?

For example, if we’re just starting out and we’re trying to bag our first ideal client, what would the steps be to take?

So you talked about personas. How do you go through and even like begin to understand that persona?

Chris: A lot of it’s going to come down to the content that you’re using, the words that you’re using.

The getting across the fact that you understand what their pains are. We touched upon this before — but yeah — your ideal customer will have a set of common pains that they find in their website — in their business sorry, that you, as a web designer or whatever you do, services you do, products you sell will alleviate, so your content will be the main key.

And then it’s about how do we start telling the story from top of the page to the bottom of the page? Because one of your quiz questions could have been, ‘what was the percentage of people that actually get to the bottom of the a web page?’

Neil: Even below the fold.

Chris: On our website we know it’s less than 30%. So all of the really important catching, hooks that we want to use, to get people to really engage with what we’re trying say on our web pages is going to be at the top.

So you need to engage them as they come into the page, make them realise that you can actually do what they — what you say you can do, social proof, showing what services that you offer along with getting them to understand that you can actually understand their pain points. Without them going into…

Neil: They don’t have to spill, they don’t have to give you everything, you are already you’re showing your authority by understanding where they’re coming from in order to alleviate their stresses with the work you do right.

So with that then, the ideal customer has been identified and fleshed out to a degree. And because you’ve done the research to understand their pain points and what you’re trying to alleviate as a service delivery, what are the key elements then that are most effective in attracting those high quality leads?

What are the vehicles, if you will, so like we use or we’ve gave people to use.

Chris: So again it really is content, but putting your content into sections such as your opening hook, if you can get people to understand exactly what you do and who you do it for, that’s an opener really.

Then you want to start showing people that you understand their pains. You want to show the user that you can actually do what you say you can do.

So that would be with your social proof — so your reviews, links out to case studies, testimonials, then start answering some questions that they may already have.

What you really want to do is make their decision making process as easy as possible. So when they land on the page, they need to know everything about why you can do what you say you’re going to do for them and get them confident in the fact that you can do it for them as well.

Neil: So some of the proof of concepts, case studies and whatnot, you use these to attract people, get them in, and then you want to turn that into interest into your service and one of the ways that we do it are ‘Lead Magnets’, and when you go to other people’s sites, especially if you’re scouting out your competitors, you’ll always see some sort of lead magnet from the more established businesses.

First of all, what is a lead magnet? What does the term mean? And when we are designing these lead magnets what what is the end result we’re looking for?

Chris: So our lead magnet is, I believe a very old and tried, tested way of getting leads through and doesn’t necessarily have to be through your website, but, it could be in person, people do it when they’re at, expos and different things. You go to an expo and they’ll say, put your business card in this big old fishbowl and you might win something.

That’s a lead magnet.

When you come on a website, it might be a pop up that says, “Hey, get your free web audit”, exactly what we do. You’re giving away something for free in exchange for that person’s information. You want that person’s information because you want to either direct market to them or keep them on a drip fed marketing campaign.

There’s loads of things you can do in every industry. Free web audit is probably the most on the nose one that web agencies can do. There’s 50 tips on best web design. There’s, here’s your 101 tips for SEO on your website or getting started with SEO Beginner’s Guide. Different things like that, you’re giving away content in exchange for usually an email address or a phone number or something like that.

They work with every industry, no matter what. It just depends on what content can you give away. It’s got to be compelling. For us, it’s pretty easy because we know, a lot of people are going to have pains in SEO. Why don’t we teach them about SEO? Most people will learn a little bit more about SEO and then realise I ain’t got the time or the patience to do it. I’ll get somebody else in, and then they come to us.

Or you give away the free web audit. It gives them an idea of what they actually need to do with their website, because they might not know. But yeah, just giving away something for free.

Neil: Yeah, so it’s cluing them in without them having to invest as well. So it’s, it’s saving them money in… It’s saving them money before they approach you for any sort of service.

Chris: I think it touches on the point of that social proof as well. Because if you’re willing to give your expertise away for free, you’re showing well actually, these guys are pretty cool. I don’t have to pay them anything for them to teach me something.

Yeah, it works.

Neil: Yeah. So obviously this still needs to be implemented and you can onl — especially if you haven’t got the expertise, it comes to a point that you’re going to run into maybe some sort of blockage where your expertise doesn’t go over that hurdle and that’s when you’ve got the information, you know, what you’re asking for. There’s less chance of you getting conned into something that you wasn’t meant to be doing.

So, for example, we do the web audit, we tell you these things you can then go out and find yourself — with our web audit it’s, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Chris: No obligation.

Neil: No obligation at the end of it. So if it means you’ve got your own developers, at least then you can go to them — and then it raises the point that if you have this, and you approach them and they don’t know what you’re talking about or aren’t ready to action it, then at least you can question it, the whys and hows, and you’re in a better place to do that. You’re more clued up.

So, obviously we can make all these efforts and we can put out content and in the hopes that it brings people in. However, how do we track this?

So going through the process, we know what a high quality lead is. We’ve identified them. We’re now at this point designed for them, this is what the lead magnet is for. This is the, authority building that we do on the site to keep people engaged. Give them information. But how do we track our performance so that we can continuously improve upon the formula going forward so that there’s this consistency and it’s not just seasonal upticks.

Chris: Yeah, so you have to track because you don’t know what you don’t know.

You don’t know if you’re getting the leads in. It could be that one thing is working and then you think actually none of this is working, because we’re not not getting enough leads, and then you actually change the thing that was working for you and you get less leads.

So tracking it is really important.

Google analytics number one tool. Find out where your traffic is coming from, how much traffic you’ve got, what the demographics are, where they’re coming from in regards to source. So if you’re running adverts you can see if they’re coming in on ads or is it organic? You can see how well your SEO is doing, if it’s referrals or social media, you can see all of that stuff. You can see exactly where it’s coming from.

Put tag trackers on your call to actions. So you know what buttons are being pressed, where people are coming from. Track, ‘Thank You’ pages at the end of contact forms to make it easier to know — if you’ve got multiple contact forms, make sure you know which contact form is being used when you’re getting an enquiry.

Neil: So just to put that into context for people that may not be aware, if — sometimes you’ve got a form and you press submit and then the loading circle will come up and then you’ve got ‘Thank You for Submitting’ — and that’s still, it’s on the page, it’s submitted it, but there’s no result of action where that person has been tracked to go to another page.

So it may get lost in numbers that they’ve actually submitted the form and that they’ve gone to another page successfully. So that’s what what Chris is referring to with regards to, redirecting them to a page on successful submission.

Chris: You can then see how many people have actually been to that page and you know that if you’ve set up no follows on those pages, that the only way to get to that page is to have clicked and submitted the forms. But yeah, if you’ve got multiple forms, make sure you know which forms are being sent to make sure the form is telling you this form was filled out on this page. All of that good stuff.

And Clarity, ‘Microsoft Clarity’. There’s lots of other ones around for Microsoft Clarity, like we’ve used ‘Hotjar’ in the past. We’ve used ‘Lucky Orange’. They’re great, but they’re paid for — Microsoft Clarity came along and basically does what Hotjar does and what Lucky Orange does pretty much. I mean, it’s not really up there with them in terms of the way that — it’s not as user friendly, I would say is a bit of a learning curve with Clarity, but it does exactly what the other two do.

And that is record sessions. So when a user lands on your website, it’ll record a session, it will then give you heat maps and scroll percentages. That’s how we know that only less than 30% of people actually get to our footer.

It takes a lot of sessions and combines them over a period of time to give you those percentages, so you can see if there’s a really good piece of information on your homepage, for example, but only 40% of people are getting there it might not be the greatest idea to keep it there. You might want to push it up and vice versa.

You can also tell where the hotspots are. So if there’s a button there and there’s a big hot spot on the button, you know, that button’s been used. That with tracking will tell you.

It’s pretty good, and especially if you can get an idea of when you do get a lead for your website, go to clarity. Try and find that recording and see what that journey was, see what that successful conversion journey was. You can get some ideas.

Neil: That’s going to basically outline the steps for the improvement of your plan with regards to designing for your ideal customer, because it is a bumpy road and it’s not something that you can fix overnight,a nd everybody uses these websites or just — that everybody has a different use case scenario, especially when it comes to tracking, as if we’re talking website specific because with tracking you can you can do it in your applications. You can do it on, an array of other things, but for website tracking, especially if they’re using a different browser; If they run into any hiccups, you can you can see that

Machines, it will identify whether it’s a mobile, a tablet, your Mac or your PC. So all of these things come into play. So I think that, ties up neatly into the rest of what we were saying.

Chris: It’s like — and this analogy might not work, but I’m going to give it a go so you can cut that bit out. But, it’s like you’re driving down the motorway, you don’t need to make massive adjustments to the steering wheel.

You make small corrections as you’re going along as the road needs is and as you are in your lanes, that’s what you need to do with your website. When it comes to conversions you’d need to make small adjustments to it. Because if you’re wildly changing from left to right, you’re going to be missing something. You’re not going to really land on something that works.

You need to make small adjustments to the things that already work.

Neil: Of course, that lends itself to a point. ‘A/B Testing’, if you really want to make that massive jump, especially if it’s a case of using Google to see the results and you want to see how your keywords are reflected. Once that page is indexed and it’s comparing the two, it will pick one. So if you do want to, I don’t know, swerve into the other lane for whatever reason that you try to avoid an accident.

Let’s say that’s the only time you should be swerving on the motorway, by the way. If you try to avoid it –

Chris: I think this analogy is going downhill.

Neil: But basically if you do want to try the other lane, there’s A/B Testing, and what we mean by that is just setting up another page for example with a similar link structure. Not the same because obviously they can’t both (exist) — you can’t do that for websites like.

Chris: Just put A or B on the end.

Neil: …and then see how that performs,and then that’s your way of doing a big change for example. Unless of course, you’re going for a complete redesign.

Chris: Well, there’s two ways to do A/B testing in my view.

There’s running ads and literally using A/B Testing. So the ads will present A or B, and then you can see how well it does over a certain amount of time. Or if you want to do organically if you’ve got enough traffic to your website, you can run page A for two weeks. You can run page B for two weeks. You can see that way. Either way.

Neil: Great. So I think that we’re coming to a close with this. So if you kept up with what’s been said, there’s a concise plan of action that can be carried out. It is over a longer period of time obviously you can’t just do this overnight. But all of these things intertwine themselves with what we spoke about on the previous episodes.

The nature of this beast means that there’s always a facet of digital marketing that lends itself to another action, so you can’t necessarily jump over anything. You go through the process and you can’t expect overnight success unless you’re a viral sensation for any reason. Let’s get things into context.

Chris: Yeah, you can’t plan for virality either so.

Neil: Exactly. So talking about our previous episodes, after we’ve understood what our ideal lead is and we’ve designed for them, we need to take into account user friendly design as a whole. Right? So our ideal lead isn’t everybody and that’s something that we’ve encompassed into our site so that we know who we’re designing for. But we we still want to talk to as many people as possible.

So you’ve got to take that into account with your content, and your framing, which has a direct impact on website speed, which is intrinsically linked to analytics which we just spoke about because.

Chris: We’re cutting that bit.

Neil: No we’re not.

Yeah so all of this has a direct impact on, website speed, which is linked to analytics because this has a major impact on SEO.

Chris: Yeah, I think we’re four episodes in now. They all kind of work together. If you want to get high quality leads, your SEO needs to be where it is. Your design needs to be, high quality, friendly, usable, and obviously it needs to be quick or people are going to bounce. As we found out in the quiz.

Neil: So yeah, processing this episode in a too long don’t read, you need to identify what a high-quality lead means to you and what these desired outcomes of working with them are. Understand what their needs, wants and pains are and how you solve them. How do you fit into this equation?

Take this information in design to attract them via social proof and trustworthy direction. Utilise testimonials, lead magnets and just everything that will make them think that you are an authority in that space.

Chris: Case studies, FAQs, as much, ‘I know what I’m doing and I can prove it’ content basically.

Neil: And then from that you can monitor the outcome so you can see where there’s an uptake or drop off. So you can further refine your approach and create more opportunities for outreach, and you’ll do that through the analytics — and that will feed into whether or not you’ve got issues or not, and you can solve them. So you’re always coming back to the start to sort out your roadmap to success basically.

So yeah, that’s to wrap it in a bow. Obviously we’ve spoken about lead magnets. We ourselves have one which we’ve discussed and is a free web audit. So if you’d like to take that, you can go to voidapplicattions.co.uk/free-website-audit/ — that’s free hyphen, website, hyphen audit and the link will be in the description of anywhere this podcast appears.

So there you have it Chris. Any final thoughts, words of wisdom for listeners? Other than do your research.

Chris: No. Not do your research — but if you don’t currently have a ideal customer persona, start working on that. It will drive all of your marketing.

Neil: Yeah. Just not to go back into it, but we were stuck for a while. Not understanding how to increase our outreach and bring in the ideal clients and everything began to change when we understood who it was that we wanted. here, we’ve working with us.

Chris: I think one of the things that helped us was let’s look back at who we were already working with. Who do we like, who’ve we really enjoyed working with and that will actually answer some of the questions probably.

Neil: So depending on where you are in your business, your life cycle, looking back on who you’ve attracted before, that’s a massive one. Obviously, if you’re newly starting out, then put some thought into who you want to work with, because a lot of the times you are working with them as much as you work are working for them.

So yeah, with that being said, thank you for listening. We’ll be back with another episode. Please subscribe where possible and follow us on all the channels available. Links will be in description. Once again, I’m Neil Cooper, this is Chris Carter. Peace.

Resources

1. Google Analytics
2. Microsoft Clarity

It’s nothing new to be told that if your website doesn’t adapt to the range of screen sizes available, it’s destined for a bad time. But it doesn’t stop the topic from being any less important anytime it’s discussed; having a website that adapts seamlessly to any device isn’t optional — it’s essential to attain any success. Responsive website design ensures that your website provides an optimal viewing experience across all devices, from desktops to smartphones.

It’s not just for the sake of your user’s experience, although this is a massive factor, but your site’s viewports are also scored by search engines — so by forgetting about what your website looks like across the spectrum, you are essentially hindering your website’s search ranking performance.

Here, with this post, we’d like to explore the evolution, principles, benefits, challenges, and best practices of responsive design while emphasising its importance for SEO and user experience.

The Evolution of Web Design

From Fixed-Width to Flexible Layouts

In the early days of the internet, websites were designed with fixed-width layouts tailored for desktop screens. These designs often used fixed pixel values for layout elements, which provided a consistent appearance on desktop monitors but resulted in a non-optimal or poor viewing experience across smaller screens and devices. As mobile internet and handheld device usage began to rise, these rigid designs failed to deliver a satisfactory experience on smartphones and tablets. Content would often overflow, making it difficult for users to read and navigate the site.

Fast forward to 2010, and a new term is coined by Ethan Marcotte pertaining to the idea of fluidity in web design, where all components work together to create a flexible viewing approach regardless of device or screen. This is ‘Responsive Web Design’.

The Rise of Mobile Internet

In the here and now, mobile devices are responsible for a significant amount of global web traffic; in 2024, approximately 61.35% of all website traffic worldwide, was mobile. This means it’s imperative for businesses to prioritise mobile-friendly websites, something you’ve heard us say again and again… and again.

More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the web and this trend isn’t going away anytime soon. As a result, it’s essential for websites to adapt to different screen sizes, ensuring a smooth experience for users no matter what device they’re using.

Google’s introduction of mobile-first indexing further reinforces the importance of responsive design, as search rankings are directly affected by how well a site performs on mobile devices. Mobile-first indexing means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Therefore, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it may suffer in search rankings

Key Principles of Responsive Website Design

Responsive web design is built on three foundational principles:

1. Fluid Grids

Fluid grids use relative units like percentages usually, instead of fixed pixels to define layout dimensions. This approach allows elements to resize proportionally as the screen size changes, making it easier for the layout to adapt smoothly across different devices. Unlike fixed grids, which maintain a constant width regardless of the device, fluid grids adapt to the viewport. For example, if you have a three-column layout on a desktop, each column might take up 33.33% of the width. On a mobile device, these columns can stack vertically, taking up the width of the screen, utilising the space in a more constructive fashion.

2. Flexible Images and Media

Images and media need to scale without losing quality or breaking a websites layout. Techniques like CSS’s max-width property ensure that visuals adapt to different screen sizes.

By setting ‘max-width: 100%;’ and ‘height: auto;’ on image elements, you ensure that they never exceed the width of their container, preventing overflow issues. This is an example and won’t work for every situation, but as a rule of thumb where you would begin when implementing this type of technique for the situation at hand.

Additionally, modern image formats like WebP can provide better compression and quality, helping to improve load times on mobile devices (another major factor in assessing the performance of a website amongst Search Engine Results).

3. CSS Media Queries

Media queries allow developers to apply styles based on device characteristics such as screen width or orientation. It allows the developer to shape the user’s experience based on their specific device, e.g. a navigation menu might appear as a horizontal bar on desktops but collapse into a hamburger menu that has to be tapped to open up the options available on mobile devices.

With media queries, you can target specific screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations to provide the best possible experience.

Benefits of Responsive Website Design

To overcome these challenges, follow these best practices:

1. Enhanced User Experience

A responsive website enhances the user experience by making it easy and enjoyable for visitors, regardless of the device they are using. Ensuring features like touch-friendly buttons and readable text improve usability and encourage users to stay longer, these are staple fundamental design decisions that should be considered from the get go.

In fact, 74% of users are more likely to return to mobile-friendly websites. A seamless user experience will always lead to higher engagement rates, lower bounce rates, and increased conversions.

2. SEO Advantages

As mentioned previously, Google prioritises mobile-friendly websites in its search rankings through mobile-first indexing.

Responsive design is a great way to simplify your online presence by integrating both desktop and mobile formats into a single URL. This approach not only simplifies management but also enhances your SEO efforts. By having just one responsive page, you can avoid the complications that arise from managing separate mobile and desktop versions. This means you won’t need to stress about duplicate content issues that could negatively impact your search engine rankings. In essence, a responsive design makes your process more efficient and helps keep your SEO strategy on point.

3. Cost Efficiency

Maintaining one responsive website is far more cost-effective than managing separate desktop and mobile sites. This unified approach cuts down on both development and maintenance costs while keeping branding uniform. Building and managing separate websites for each device demands substantial resources. A responsive website eliminates this duplication of effort, saving time and money. It also means you aren’t competing against yourself when trying to rank.

4. Increased Reach and Engagement

With responsive design, your website becomes accessible to users across all devices, broadening your audience and increasing engagement rates. By providing a consistent experience across all devices, you can capture and retain a larger audience; this also goes hand in hand with building your authority and ensuring your online presence is consistent across the board.

5. Faster Page Load Times

Responsive websites are optimised for speed through techniques like image compression and prioritising above-the-fold content. Faster load times improve user satisfaction and boost SEO rankings.

Optimising images, leveraging browser caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN) can further improve page load times.

Common Challenges in Responsive Design

While responsive design offers several advantages, it does come with a few challenges.

• Performance issues: Large images or complicated layouts might slow down loading times, particularly on mobile devices where bandwidth can be limited.
• Testing Across Devices: To ensure everything runs smoothly, you’ll need to verify that your site performs consistently on various operating systems, browsers, and screen sizes.
• Navigation Complexity: Crafting intuitive menus for both small and large screens requires careful planning and execution to make sure users can easily find what they need, no matter what device they’re using

Best Practices for Implementing Responsive Design

To overcome these challenges, follow these best practices:

1. Prioritise Mobile First

Starting with a design for smaller screens lays a strong groundwork that can be expanded on for larger devices/screens. This approach aligns with the fact that mobile optimisation dominates among 62% of top-ranking websites. Starting with mobile design forces you to focus on essential content and functionality, resulting in a cleaner and more efficient design.

2. Optimise Loading Speed

If you’re clued up on the matter, then you can use techniques like lazy loading, image compression, and minification of CSS/JavaScript files to enhance performance.

If you outsource your web design and development needs, these are techniques that your developers should use. This is crucial in the success of a site, as it’s reported that 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds. Lazy loading defers the loading of non-critical resources until they are needed, reducing initial page load time.

3. Test Across Multiple Devices

Regularly test your site using tools like BrowserStack, Responsinator or Responsively App to ensure compatibility across various devices and browsers. This is essential and not negotiable.

Cross-browser and cross-device testing helps identify and fix any layout or functionality issues that may arise on different platforms.

Browsers can have different outputs as devices. They are designed differently. Operating Systems also have their own set of rules that can effect the output of a website, even seperate to that of the intention of the device.

Test, test, then test again.

Why Responsive Design Matters for SEO

Responsive web design plays a pivotal role in improving your site’s SEO performance:

• Reduced Bounce Rates: A mobile-friendly site keeps users engaged longer, signalling relevance to search engines. High bounce rates can negatively impact your search rankings.
• Consolidated Backlinks: With a single URL for all devices, your backlinks strengthen overall site authority. Having multiple URLs for different versions of your site dilutes the link equity.
• Improved Local SEO: Mobile accessibility is crucial for local searches, making it easier for users to find your business on the go. Local SEO is essential for businesses targeting customers in specific geographic areas.

By aligning with Google’s mobile-first indexing standards, responsive design enhances both visibility and user satisfaction. In fact, as of July 2024, Google has stopped indexing sites that are not accessible on mobile.

Conclusion

Responsive website design is no longer optional — it’s essential for businesses aiming to thrive in today’s digital landscape. With an estimated 90% of websites now implementing responsive design, it’s clear that this approach has become the industry standard. By adopting responsive practices, you can improve user experience, boost SEO performance, reduce costs, and future-proof your website against technological advancements.

Start optimising your site today! Explore our podcasts or blog posts for more tips on web design and development.

Sources

1. Business Dasher — 25+ Web Design Statistics For Business in 2024
2. Google — Mobile Site and Mobile-First Indexing Best Practices
3. W3Schools — CSS Max-Width Property
4. W3Schools — Responsive Web Design — Media Queries
5. Business Dasher — 25+ Web Design Statistics For Business in 2024
6. Hostinger Tutorials — 21 Essential Web Design Statistics for 2025

Key topics in this episode:

• Why website speed impacts SEO and conversions
• Practical tips to test your website’s speed
• Common culprits slowing down your site (from plugins to hosting)
• Essential tools to identify and improve performance (Google Lighthouse, GTmetrix, and more)
• Whether you’re a small business owner or a web designer, you’ll gain actionable insights to improve your website’s user experience and performance.

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SEO Made Easy: Building a Strong Foundation | Into the VOiD Podcast: Episode 3

Episode Transcript

Neil: Hello, and welcome to episode three of Into the Void, a friendly guide to digital marketing. I’m your host, Neil Cooper, director here at Void Applications.

And with me is the MD of the same business and co host of the pod, Chris, how are you doing?

Chris: Very well, thanks. How are you?

Neil: Yeah, all good. Episode three.

Chris: Episode three. Yeah, we’re getting through it. We’re not professional podcasters, so learning the setups, learning the ropes, it’s really interesting.

Neil: Adding a Few different cameras today to try and aid the cuts, because obviously in the first episode there was a lot of urms.

We learned from that, applied it in the second episode. This time we’re rocking three cameras and just seeing how that goes.Which is always nice. Yeah, the multiple.

Chris: Yeah, multiple angles. Every angle you can think of.

Neil: What else? What have you been up to?

Chris: Yeah, playing quite a lot of Zelda games at the moment on Switch. Back into that. 25 years after Majora’s Mask released, I’m finally gonna finish it, I think. Multiple attempts.

Neil: It’s a complicated game.

Chris: I actually might finish it, yeah. It really is complicated.

Neil: What’s it been like to play now? How aged is it?

Chris: So I’m playing the N64 version on the Switch. It is quite jank, but, compared to the 3DS version, the graphics aren’t as good, different things like that, but it still holds up.

Still a fun game, still a great game. Music’s great. It’s just really complicated.

Neil: Oh, you’re sticking to the guides this time, aren’t you?

Chris: I got to have a walkthrough guide for this. I don’t have the time to repeat the same three days over and over again more than I need to, so no thanks.

What about you?

Neil: Me? Oh, to be fair, just because I’ve been trying to make more use of Game Pass. I’ve been on a PGA Tour golf kick, which is a bit… it’s not odd I like golf games.

Chris: This explains the driving range, then.

Neil:Yeah, I really want to go. There’s a driving range not too far from the office and Nathan goes to golf with his friend. So we’ve got somebody who’s a bit experienced in it.

Chris: Shout out to Kieran.

Neil:Yeah shout to Kieran… and It’d be nice to see if I could actually hit the ball first and foremost…

Chris: You got to hit it with the bat.

Nathan (off-camera): It’s called a club guys.

Chris: It’s a golf bat.

Neil:Golf bat — all right, cool, Nathan’s advising us that it’s not a bat indeed.

But yeah, going forward with this episode, in the last episode we talked about website speed and its effects not only on your business’s digital performance but the impact it can have on users’ perception and with regards to your business and why they should use you for what they’re looking for, right?

So we tried to cover the basis in the first episode with website design and accessibility. So now switching up gears, basically bringing this all around and how it affects SEO. It’d be a great time to start understanding how you actually get users onto your website to start using it and that begins with SEO.

Chris: So we’re going to talk about what is SEO fundamentally. We’ll split it up into three different sections, start talking about each one, and give you some, as usual, nice tips and tricks on how to start and do things for yourself really.

Neil: Yeah, so today’s episode all about building a strong foundation for carrying SEO out.

So, the first question, which I think this time is probably a bit more easier than the other questions that we’ve started with, is can you tell us what SEO stands for, the acronym, and why it’s important?

Chris: Yeah. So, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s basically getting your website, or any website, to rank organically for the keywords that are relevant to your content.

So for us it would be Web Design, App Development, help with my SEO, different things like that, if you’re a manufacturer it might be ‘Welding’ or ‘Laser Cutting Services’, different things like that, that you know you need to be ranking for what people are going to search for and you would expect to appear for as well…

And why does it matter?

Well, Every business lives and dies on leads, and if you don’t have a — if you have a website and it’s not working for you, you probably wasted your money on the development of that website, but you’re also missing out on the fact that you’ve got a website, which is basically a 24/7 marketing asset, it’s a marketing employee.

Think about it as an employee that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, doesn’t need time off and works 24/7, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Imagine if that was working for you, to the top potential, and it was bringing in new leads constantly, leads and sales, if you’ve got an E-commerce website. That’s why it’s important.

If you’ve got a website, okay, unless you’re a massive brand, maybe like ‘Coca-Cola or –

Neil: Something that’s established and has been for years…

Chris:Chris: household name, where, they’re not really — Coca Cola aren’t really bothered about their Search Engine Optimisation, really. They don’t need the leads from it.

It’s just brand recognition — most small to medium businesses, do need that because the first place that people are going to look for your services and products is ‘Google’, they’re going to search for you, especially locally. If you’re a small business that just serves the local community or a smaller wider area.

You need to be ranking in that small search box on the map.

Neil: Which links back to the first episode with regards to local presence.

Chris: So that’s why it matters — it matters for every business and the amount of websites we see that just don’t work for the businesses. You don’t need to do that much to really start moving the needle. You do need a strategy implementation if you want to start ranking the higher ones. Honestly, it’s all about your website working for you and making you leads.

Because if you get more leads, you’re going to get more sales. You’re going to get more revenue. Your business is going to grow. That’s what every business owner wants.

Neil: Knowing what that is, basic understanding of what SEO is and why it’s needed. How do we now apply that to websites in deliverable exercises?

So if you approach anybody and ask, usually it’s split up into three core components of SEO. Those being ‘On-Page’, ‘Off-Page’ and ‘Technical’. So what we’re going to do in this episode is briefly break down each. So starting with ‘On-Page’, Chris, can you begin to explain what that is? Before going into the others.

Chris: Yeah. So you would break down SEO into these three pillars, ‘On-Page’ being all of the work that you would do on your pages, funny enough. It would be your keywords that are in your content — in your page content, your ‘Meta-Titles’ and ‘Descriptions’, your ‘Meta-Tags’, how you’ve structured your ‘Headers’ and the ‘Keywords’ that are in your headers — so your ‘H1s, 2s and 3s’ and ‘content optimisation’, so not overstuffing your content with the same keyword.

So let’s talk about Web Design for example, you want Web Design to appear quite regularly, but we don’t want it to appear too many times, depending on the size of the content.

Neil: ..and what you’re trying to say. You don’t want to be talking about –

Chris: It has to feel natural. Really?

Neil:Yeah, it’s like a conversation really.

You don’t repeat the same word over and over just to reinforce what you’re saying, especially if you want good conversation. But with regards to meta tags, for people that aren’t aware, where do they appear or, like, how would you best explain that to somebody?

Chris: So, your metatitles and titles and descriptions are basically when you search for something on Google and you get the search engine result.

So the SERP, the title will be your first part of the, of the result and then the paragraph underneath, that is your description. So you’re really telling Google and especially the users that this page is ‘Web Design’ and it’s ‘VOiD Applications’ and it’s ‘best web design in wolverhampton’ that you can find. That kind of stuff.

Neil: Yeah, it’s the same for when you’re sharing stuff on socials like once you share a link — like I don’t know — on ‘Facebook’ or ‘X’ formerly known as ‘Twitter’, they take some of that information and they display the link in a fashion that it’s not just a link they’re grabbing an excerpt and that excerpt is usually whatever you set in that title and description, which is why it’s so important to actually name those, correctly and actually describe what you’re trying to display to the user.

So it works tenfold for SEO because obviously Google reads that and knows to qualify that page.

Chris: Yeah, it’s one of the most important parts. I mean, we don’t necessarily fully know which parts of these three pillars are weighted the most. So it’s best to just make sure you’ve got the fundamentals done. So, the meta titles and descriptions, if you’re using a WordPress website, you can install things like ‘Yoast’.

We use Yoast a lot, it’s a plugin — that will give you boxes on your page that allow you to update this information. Yoast now has AI tools that allow you to just create them. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend just using AI. You do need a strategy based around the research you’ve done for the keywords that needs to really fill –

Neil: That connects the dots.

We’ll go on to keyword research in a bit but like whatever your keywords are you gear around that content, to push that in the search engine. So when somebody searches it you’re hitting those criteria.

Chris: So really, research what the keywords are, make sure it’s in your content, make sure it’s your Meta-Titles, make sure you got your Headers sorted. Make sure your focus keywords in your header as well. That’s really important.

Neil: Just a point as well because obviously, Yoast is a plugin for wordpress and then there’s a lot of — What’s the word? — drag and drop type website builders that make use of these things that are built in, you just have to go and find the option, but what about, like, if somebody has a website that’s built from scratch, is HTML based, what do you recommend for trying to find the correct places to input that data, or?

Chris: Yeah, so if you don’t use WordPress or a similar CMS builder, you will add these into your header of each page, um, and yeah, if you’ve got a, a website that’s built from scratch or it’s a PHP website, for example, using Laravel, the different things like that, you just need to make sure that you understand how to add them into your header.

It’s exactly the same way that Yoast would do it. It’s just Yoast adds it into the headers for you.

Neil: They put everything within the editing area so that you can automatically see it, can’t you? So there’s no complication of going into a file or having to go to your root, FTP access, depending on where you’re hosted, stuff like that.

It just takes away the complications for WordPress users, which is why plugins are so good with that platform, right?

So moving on to ‘Off-Page’ now, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not the front of your website, but ‘Off-Page. ‘Back links’, ‘PR (Press Release)’ and ‘Social Signals’. Can you tell us some more about that and how they…

What does ‘Off-Page’ entail and how does that connection happen?

Chris: So, ‘Off-Page’ is slightly different to ‘On-Page’. So, think about On-Page as everything that you can do on your pages, on your web pages, ‘Off-Pages’ are the things that you need externally.

So ‘Backlinks’ are a big one. So if you can get backlinks from high domain authority web pages, like .org.uk, .ac.uk, different places like that, or, your local newspapers or just generally high domain authority sites… if they can link back to you. That will give you more ‘Domain Authority’ as well. That’s creating a backlink — be careful though because if you get bad backlinks, you also get the other direction.

So if low or toxic domain authority websites give you backlinks you’re going to be in a sticky situation. You’ll need to disavow them, but that’s something that is a little bit more advanced but basically, get backlinks from trusted people and you do that through PR really.

So send out press releases about your business about what you’re doing and try and get them picked up. So we we’ve done that with a partner, we’ve sent out press releases to different news agencies They’ve got picked up here there and different places and basically they’ll link back to us and we’ll start drip feeding off there. Another way to get good backlinks is to guest post onto other websites.

You will need to do this manually and try and get Partnerships with them but it’s really good. Over time you will gain some more domain authority, but it is a slow burn, It’s better to to create those backlinks…

And then social signals every time you put a blog post or something out on your website, put it on your socials and then link back to your website and that’ll start to again, give you a nice little kind of feedback loop.

Neil: So with regards to places that you want to get listed, obviously there’s you going out and doing it, yourself. So, for example, Freeindex, Yell, not to say brand names, but basically there’s different reputable places that you can go and actually actively set up your business on those directories so that you’re on there.

Otherwise, you might find that your business is already on there. And you have to go and claim the listing in order to — in order to take control of it and also make it official. So even though you may be listed on Freeindex, for example, but you may not be in control of that listing. So if they’ve taken information that is old, you could have incorrect information on that page.

That may cause confusion for search engines, but also cause confusion for people that are looking for your services or looking for you as a business. So claiming your listings as well as setting new ones up is massively important in order to get those backlinks to to your site as well, making sure your information’s up to date and then obviously the one with regards to disavowing backlinks is important because there are spammy directories that just they will try and claim everything and that’s why you have to disavow them. These are usually linked to, scam sites and things of that nature that they want the data and they’re trying to get more data or just trying to get into people’s directories and contact them.

So they use your data to be on there so you have to disavow them to get rid of them and then –

Chris: I think that going back to to your point about directories, directory profiles being probably your easiest and lowest hanging fruit when it comes to backlinks, so find a good list. You can probably Google Top top ten directories that I need my website to be on. or I need my business to be on, and just make sure you’ve got profiles and make sure they all match, that’s the most important, make sure that, that information is consistent across them all because that will help with Making sure that they’re linking and feeding in the right information.

Neil: Yeah, because even though you set up on Google like the majority of the time people set up on Google, right? –

Chris: But if you’re not, you should be. Google My Business is the first one that you should be.

Neil: And one of the things that Bing does is, if it knows you’re set up on Google, it will try to contact you to, claim your directory and also, you can use a button to basically take the information from Google to update your Bing directory immediately so that you don’t have to copy over and then you can link the two so that they’re always — if you make a change on Google you might need to confirm it on Bing but the option is there that- you have the notification to say this is outdated, it needs updating.

It doesn’t work like that for everything. So one of the best things you can do is have a spreadsheet or some sort of reference that you’ve signed up on all of these, these ones you haven’t, and just make sure that you have maybe a last updated or just a checklist so that you can go back and make sure the information is still up to date because it really does matter, especially if you want to reach out to as many people as possible.

So yeah, social signals as well, just to touch on that. In some cases, you may not need a net- when we say social signals, social media accounts, but sometimes you may not use that social media. It’s like, in the past, we was advised to sign up on certain things I looked at the list, and basically, if something pops up, like, Foursquare or Snapchat, That doesn’t necessarily apply to us. So –

Chris: We don’t need a Snapchat account. We don’t need a Pinterest account or a Tumblr account. It’s not really relevant to our business.

Neil: Yeah, but those things can come back in reports to say you need to sign up for this.

So just pick and choose based on what your business does and why. Like, because if you’re not going to upkeep them as well, it’s like we said in the last podcast. If you’re not going to upkeep them, it’s just another, another account that somebody can eventually hack if it gets out of date or just exist and somebody might see it and not be updated and it’s like, okay, are you lot active as well?

Chris: It’s it’s quite detrimental as well If you’ve got social accounts and you’re not posting anything even just once a month, it’s just a bad look because people could find you and go well, they look closed. So just make sure that whatever socials you’ve got either keep them and post even if it’s once a month, or close it down. So I think we’re going to move on to the third pillar now, which is ‘Technical’.

Neil: Which all of this these things that we’re going to mention in ‘Technical’ we’ve spoke about them in the first two episodes if you need an in-depth refresh of it but, ‘Site Speed’, ‘Mobile-Friendliness’ aka optimisation, and ‘Structured Data’, if you’d like to weave in between these points.

Chris: So, obviously, last episode we talked a lot about site speed, so if you need more in depth information about that, you can check that episode out. But, site speed is more important really, than anything on this list, mainly because if your site doesn’t load quick enough, people aren’t going to use it.

If it’s not mobile friendly, 60–70 percent of the internet now is used on mobile. So, you really need to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. It needs to respond to different screen sizes. It’s not just about your website working on a desktop and a phone. It needs to work on everything in between, and we’ve also got structured data.

So, this one’s a little bit more complicated and you could class it as ‘On-Page’. Structured Data is a little bit different to the other two. This is giving Google Exactly what’s on your page in a structured way — It’s structured data. Google have lots of different structured data Schemas out there if you can find the relevant ones and get them onto your pages.

It just helps Google really find out what information you’ve got on your page quicker and easier. It takes the guesswork out of it. So there’s different things like, organisation or job posting ones, really powerful pieces of information and it really does make a difference.

Neil: Yeah, for those wondering by the time this podcast is out, we will have the information — we’ve been working on a blog posts with regards to SEO recently. So depending on when these come out, you can kind of go back into the archive and find some, big articles on schemas and find out how to implement them yourself, basically. So we’re taking our blog posts and trying to expand on them here.

So if you need help with that, and to look at it specifically, you can always do that.

So that being said, it kind of brings us full circle with why designing for accessibility and with speed in mind from the start pays dividends going forward, because it means you don’t have to uproot your strategy, to then meet the needs of what search engines are looking for when it comes to the composition of your website, like the process that we went through, we had a new site last year, we looked at it, we was looking at the statistics and why people aren’t staying on the page and then we went through the process of changing up the content, which in turn changed up the design to then put us in a position now where what people see initially has helped page retention going forward.

So if we had that in the first place, it took learning to get there, but if you have these pieces of information from the start, it makes it easier.

Chris: Yeah, the old adage, you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you don’t know how people are using your page, or how people are searching for your services in particular, especially when we’re talking about SEO, how do you know what your content needs to talk about?

So, you need to do your research, you need to do your keyword research. Have a look at what your competitors are doing as well, because they might have some ideas, they might understand it a little bit more, better than you, or, fingers crossed, they’re not doing anything. So you can, you can jump on it really quick and and start moving the needle, but, Keyword Research, find out what keywords are related to, the services we’re offering. How easy is it to rank? Because if the difficulty for a keyword is 99, you’re probably not going to rank for it, unfortunately. But if it’s a 9 or a 20, you know that you can put some work in it, you can get that ranking. With the right keywords, with the right content, with the right blogs, you can get to the first page on that.

So, make sure you’re not wasting your time on keywords where you’re not going to be able to rank for, where the competition’s far too high and make sure that actually the keywords that you are ranking for have got traffic, because if the keywords that you think you need to rank for aren’t getting any traffic but a slight tweak to them means that there’s quite more traffic then actually what you had in your mind for that specific keyword isn’t what people are searching for.

So let the data tell you and inform you before you start making these decisions on content.

Neil: So with regards to how would you start your keyword research journey?

Chris: So there’s quite a lot of tools out there for you to be able to search your keywords. There’s ‘Keyword Planner’. A lot of that stuff is aimed at Ads, but it still will give you the information that you need but you can also jump on, Semrush or SE Ranking; the learning curve of those systems can be quite high and there is a cost involved but they do have lower end tiers and they are far better than most of the things out there so Use the tools that are provided, SE Rank, SEMrush, and just start to create some lists of keywords, put them in an Excel sheet if you need to, just work out, are people — how easy is it to rank for? And are people looking for it? And then off the back of those with the right tools, you can get ideas for content, question-answer-based content, and different other keywords that are related to them.

Neil: So, SEO-friendly content, as that’s what it’s leading into. How do we implement the keywords into our content without it looking forced, like, touching back on what we said initially.

We can’t just take a keyword and keep repeating it. Just to drum up the word count of that and also it matters how it’s phrased in Headings and what those Headings lead to as well as using that in your meta titles, descriptions, etc, as well as your images, your alt text, everything like that. So how do you go about taking those keywords and implementing it into the content?

Repeating that without you know, making the subject matter stagnant because you’ve kept repeating the same thing.

Chris: So It’s all about the quality of the content, really. And if you’re not a content creator, my biggest piece of advice is to go and find somebody that can write copy. Do your keyword research, make, make it clear to the content writer, the copywriter, what you want to be talking about on this page and these are the kinds of keywords and they’ll do the rest. As long as you then build the page correctly with the right Technical SEO boxes ticked, your headers are correct, your meta titles and descriptions are correct and yeah, alt tags on your images, don’t forget those. Put some schema data in, you’ve got every chance of ranking for the lower to medium, difficulty keywords and then start to create blogs that really enhance everything else around that topic.

Neil: So let’s play devil’s advocate and you can’t approach — you’re not in a position, you’ve used your budget to pay for your website, your branding, and you’re just starting out, and you’ve got to implement these things yourself, and you can’t go to a content copywriter, etc.

How would you approach it? Like, what would be the first thing you –

Chris: How would I approach it, I would be looking at pages that have 400 to 700 words as an average rule. I’d be looking at trying to get your keywords, your focus keyword in that content five to six times — max.

Neil: So when we say in the content, are you talking body content? Are you talking headings? Are you, are you saying that the headings are part of this body content as well in that regard?

Chris: Yes, they are. So your headings are part of your body content. So, get that in as much as you can make sure that the images are relevant and then put the alt tags- use your focus keyword in the alt tags, if possible, but remember alt tags are really there to describe what the image is about. So don’t make it just your focus keyword.

Make sure you’ve got some schema data on there as well. Your developer can help you with that, but, there’s a list of quite a few that are just standard ones that you need and really, the world we’re in right now as we’re recording this, ‘Question and Answer’ based content.

So, you need to be — we’ve started to use AI to try and find out what the AI would expect us to be — what questions would we be posing and answering and then we remix that into the content. If you do that through paragraph copy or you do that through literal question and answer based content. FAQs; that’s fine as well.

But start off with — try and write the best copy you can, try and write compelling copy as well because even though we want Google to read it. You also need humans to be compelled by it.

Neil: Yeah because At the moment, especially the growing pains that Google’s going through and the fact that, yes as much as AI is the — trending topic at the moment, it’s so new that getting control of it and understanding it, even Google’s having trouble. That’s why they’ve had to pull back updates and they set the trend, don’t they for the most part, so if anybody tells you it’s simple with what’s gonna happen with the updates going forward, that’s not the case just due to the fact that it’s so volatile at the minute that misinformation is a big thing.

So you triple checking your own copy and putting yourself in a different position to, pose the question, answer it, as long as the question and answer is coming from you as a representation of your business, you can’t really go wrong if you’re going to use AI in that sense, but if you’re going to strictly like, rely on an AI answer and think it’s going to solve all your problems and give you the high-level content that you would get from a copywriter, the fact is that copywriters at the moment, they are going to use, AI too, but they then know the queries to use, they then know how to alter the content and they know how to actually get emotional attention from the reader and actually understand the psyche behind the people that are using what you’re trying to sell or the information you’re trying to give. So there’s pitfalls to just latching onto the new trend and using AI for everything. But it can’t be understated that it’s also a powerful tool to get from A to Z.

Chris: Content is so important for your website. Your conversions, your SEO, we will be doing guests, but bits with guests on this podcast who solely focus around content, but I think go back to basic AI is a big talking point at the moment, but just write; write some content five to seven hundred words. Just go back to basics. Make sure that — do not just copy and paste it from ChatGPT even though ChatGPT can help you do not do that.

Neil: Right. So with regards to pitfalls of doing that, and things to avoid, what would be the common SEO mistakes that can happen? Like we know the do’s. What about the don’ts? What would be at the top of your list to avoid when committing to an SEO process?

Chris: So if we’re talking strictly content, Keyword Stuffing is an issue. Like we said, you don’t want to be using your focus keyword in every sentence. If you- the more copy you write, the more times you can use the keyword, it’s got to feel natural, but use common sense. So underwriting content is prolific. So we’ve built websites, we’ve seen websites where. You can’t make a page out of two sentences, two paragraphs. We need more content. We need high-quality content. If you’re going to write the content yourself, sit and write it.

Don’t leave it to the last minute. That is the most important part. Next is ignoring your mobile users. If you’re not thinking about your design and the way that your content is structured for mobile and you’re just thinking about desktop, yeah, personally I don’t think it’s going to work.

And also, just completely, omitting your Technical SEO practices. You can get somewhere by not having schemas, by not doing alt tags. You can get there by not submitting your sitemap to search engine — to Google Search Console. Google will find you, at some point. But if you don’t do those things and be proactive about it, you’re not going to get anywhere really.

Not focusing on where you are in terms of your journey as well. So creating pages, doing your keyword research, and then just leaving it. If you’re not looking at it on a weekly, two weekly, monthly basis to figure out are you growing, what’s changing, what needs to change, I was ranking for…

Neil: Well there’s — there’s a thing to take away there that none of this kicks in straight away.

Yeah. So, as much as you may have done it week one, by week four, you may have seen your site be picked up for a keyword, but it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be in the top five pages of results, so the process of looking at the results, you have to take into account that this has got to happen over a three to six month period.

Three months being the word or your content is actually being picked up and put out by search engines. But then what happens after that three months? Does it stay where it is? Does it continue to rise? Do you end up shooting up into the top ten and maintaining it? So that’s the only thing I would take away from the weekly to monthly checkup, because obviously it’s different for us in a sense that we can look at it monthly and see changes all the time because we’re ranking for so many keywords.

Chris: But we’ll also look at it on a weekly basis to see if our new blog posts have actually been indexed. There’s those things you can look at.

I think you’ve made a very good point there, which is patience. Don’t expect what you’ve done today to work tomorrow. You need patience, and no matter who you’re working with, SEO wise, if you’re trying to do this yourself, or you’re working with an agency, there’s gonna be- it’s gonna be a strategy implementation.

You have to take this as, this is a medium to long term goal. If you need short term gains, you need to look at Google Ads.

Neil: Okay, so, taking into account all of that we’ve covered today, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has listened to this episode, somewhat understands it and is ready to start their own SEO journey, like what are the — either the first or the top three to five things you would take away today and implement or research first, just based off of what’s going to give the most return if you do straight away?

Chris: I think, and this is going to be a plug here. But get a web audit, whether it’s from us, it’s another agency, or go to mywebaudit.com. Go and get a web audit, and find out what is wrong with your website right now. Because everybody’s website’s got something wrong with it in one way, shape, or form.

You might have ten things wrong, or you might have one thing wrong. But find out where you’re falling down, and you can start to work out where you need to go with it. If you want to start implementing SEO start looking at your content. Do you have good content? Look at your pages and genuinely ask the question.

Is this compelling content? Is it long enough? Are you telling a story? Do you have social proof? Do you have case studies? Are you telling the person exactly what they want to hear? Are you, if you’re selling a service or a product — especially with a service? Are you answering their pains? Do you understand them? Do they think you understand them?

That’s the most important one. So look at your content first and then look at your keyword research and I think those are the three. So try and find out what’s wrong with the website, if there is anything wrong with it. Look at your content and ask yourself some hard questions, be honest with yourself. You might need to change some content. We’ve done it multiple times. You just have to keep evolving and then look at your keyword research.

Once you’ve done that, you can start to look at creating blog posts on a weekly, monthly basis, whatever you’re comfortable with and you can start to then analyze where you are on a monthly basis to see if you’re gaining any rankings with those keywords that you found in your research.

Neil: Yeah. Agreed. We’ve recently — I think the biggest takeaway is that regardless of what you do, you have to be consistent with it. If you do- if January begins and you do blog posts between January and March, for example sake, and then you start to, by the middle of the year, see the results from those because they’re being picked up and they’re helping you be returned in search engines, just because that’s happened doesn’t mean that’s going to continue then for the rest of the year.

If you don’t continue to publish new content or update the content that’s on there you’ll eventually drop off.

The underlying factor is you can have your landing pages, but all of these things are supplemented with your activity levels across the website and if you’re interlinking these pages, so for example’s sake, our Web Design page, we release a lot of Web Design blogs.

We use our Web Design blogs on our page, so that whenever something goes live, it updates in that section.

Chris: Internal linking.

Neil: Yeah, internal linking. So, just that action alone will help the web design page, as well as using the keywords that are pulled up in the blog content to make the link that we are an authoritative source when it comes to web design.

Because we’re putting that content on there. So then that in turn helps boost and powers, the web design page, even though that’s not the main place that we may be doing current work, but the blog post keeps that level of activity so you can find ways of which internal linking helps-

Chris: It’s a nice little trick to keep most of your pages constantly updating.

One of the things I’ve got in my notes actually is ‘Google Analytics’ and ‘Search Console’. That should have been in the top three if you don’t have those on your website get them on your website now.

Neil: Because otherwise, nothing’s tracked, basically, right?

Chris: Yeah, exactly. Analytics will tell you all the demographic information about the users on your website.

The search console will help you push your website to Google. So, it’ll help them crawl it, they’ll find it using the sitemap. All of that stuff that you need to know, if you’re sitting waiting for a web page or a keyword to start ranking And you’re thinking, well, why is it not ranking? If you go and search console and Google actually haven’t indexed that page, it’s never going to rank.

So, it’s those pieces of information you really need to understand.

Neil: There’s a lot to it. At the base level, there’s a lot you can do.

So with all that being said, with regards to the web audit that we offer, it is a free website audit and you can sign up for it at voidapplications.co.uk/free-website-audit.

That’s free hyphen website hyphen audit. The link will be in the description of anywhere that you’re listening to or watching this podcast. If you enter your details, it’s a no-obligation report. You don’t have to work with us at the end of it, which is why it’s no obligation sign up and also if you want to take that information and go to your current developers or anybody else you can.

However, we do these reports because we’re in the position that we can actually grade your websites on this basis, and we can put into place the updates that it needs, right? So it looks at everything from your content, whether you’re hitting the meta criteria for Google, your website speed, your optimisation across the board, not just on desktop or mobile, your tablet, on your different devices and what that will give you is all the feedback that we’ve been talking about today, if you can’t find it yourself, right?

Do you want to add anything else on to that?

Chris: It’s a free web audit. We’re here to try and make sure that if you have a website that you get the best return on investment of it, whether or not we’ve built it or not.

We want to make sure that people understand what we’re doing and what’s important for Digital Marketing. Hence why we’ve started a podcast.

Neil: Yeah that’s one of the things as well that we can touch on just right now. If you can’t get clarity from your developers about — Developers, your advisories, your consultants, if you can’t actually get transparency, that’s a red flag because these are the things that in order for you to progress and actually have a website that’s competitive, you need immediate feedback on. The sooner you need like — these bugs or errors or just the fact that there’s no information that Google might be picking up at that point.

It can really stump your growth as a website as a business or however you trade, or if you’re just trying to get awareness for your website that isn’t even trading and you just need people to come to the site. These things if you can stamp them down early or if you’re far into the development get them sorted and you’ll be on your way.

So yeah, we offer that in the web audit and we can action all of those things there. So yeah, I think as a whole for SEO, a basic understanding, we’ve touched on everything as Chris said we will get into the nitty gritty of different things because these components are quite deep, keyword research being one of them, the amount of options and things that entail off of it, competitive research, it’s not SEO, but your SEO directly links to what you would look for with regards to PPC (pay per click campaigns), how much those cost, like the differences between organic and paid searches and why they work in tandem, like all of these things we’ll cover going forward, so yeah, apply these tips where you can, visit our website voidapplications.co.uk for more information on SEO, PPC and everything surrounding it. Follow us on the socials, all the links will be in the descriptions, you can listen to this podcast on all available platforms as long as they’re popular; and you can also see the video version if you’re not on YouTube already at the VOiD Applications Youtube just drop that in the search, and please subscribe.

Let us know that you enjoy the podcast and we’re answering your questions, we want to get to a point that the listeners can feedback to us queries so we can start answering questions which would be nice because then we know we are getting to the gusto of what people want information wise and how we can help them. So yeah it’s been episode three SEO and hopefully we’ll see you on the next one.

So thank you and goodbye from myself.

Chris: Thanks.

Neil: Peace out everybody.

Resources

1. Yoast for WordPress
2. Keyword Planner
3. My Web Audit
4. Google Analytics
5. Google Search Console