Guest Speaker, Daniel Fisher-7 Reasons Your Website is Failing and How to Fix It

Transcript

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Vision2Success digital marketing workshop. 

This morning is on seven reasons why your website is failing and how to fix it, presented by the founder and director of Pagio, Website Builder Daniel Fisher, whom I’ve known for quite some time. It’s been brilliant to watch him develop this system, which we’ll talk about later on, and give you some hot tips on what we should do with our websites. 

These workshops are designed to help you realise your vision for a successful business. 

The overall structure of the next hour will be a short introduction to who we are and what Vision2Success is all about. 

And then we’ve got the educational presentation. 

Today, as I said, it will be about Daniel, Daniel Fisher. And some reasons why your website is failing and how to fix it. 

There will be a chance to answer questions at the end. But feel free to drop questions into the chat. 

We’ll make sure we address them; then, we’ll have an open floor if anybody wants to talk about any other marketing issues they’re facing at the moment.

That’s what’s going on with the show. So for those who don’t know me, quite a few do and have been around for quite some time. 

So we’ve got KUB, a digital marketing agency, and then we’ve got Vision2Success, a brand of KUB, which is the coaching, support, training, and collaboration element to it. 

I’ve worked with over 500 companies across a wide range of sectors for over 20 years. And I’ve been working with technology since 1984. So I’ve been around for a while. 

And we’ve got quite a wide spread of collections across LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. 

So just a few housekeeping rules, please run ‘speak view’ during the presentation and ‘gallery view’ during the interactive sessions. 

Use mute when not talking, raise your hand to contribute, and ask questions through chat. 

And if you’re on LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook, please put them into those prospective platforms. 

And we’ll pick those up through the tool we’re using for streaming called ReStream. 

And Rachel will put them into the chat. 

We are recording, and we are live streaming. So if you don’t want to be videoed, please keep your video off. 

But otherwise, keep it on. 

So why did we do this? Competing in the digital world is getting more complex and complicated and requires many more people involved in the process. 

So these workshops, and we’re going to be launching the Hub this week as well. 

It’s about building on your knowledge, helping you solve those marketing problems, and building a community supporting marketing. 

We believe the future is through collaboration. 

And we’ll expand on that. 

So Vision2Success, we’ve got free Wednesday morning workshops that’s 11 until 12 every month. 

And then, if you’re into reading, we’ve got a 60,000-word book we published on driving sales with digital marketing, and I suspect we’ll have part two coming out next year because things are changing so much. 

Today, I’m pleased to launch that we’ve launched our free marketing community, which is our free online marketing courses and forums. 

And then we’ve also got paid membership support programmes. 

So for those who need and want to grow their businesses faster and like some help doing that. 

And then the app I had been talking about, we’re currently validating its financial models, which is taking a little bit longer, so we’re now expecting that to be a January launch. 

And we do marketing strategy development and implementation planning consultancy. Still, we’d like to feel that we can help no matter your budget, your ambitions, or your stage of growth. So we’re hopeful we’ve got something for you. 

So these are the details of the book; if you go to Amazon and type in Drive Sales with Digital Marketing, that’ll pop up as an ebook. 

At some point, we will be publishing it. But there have been many changes, so we’ll revise next year. 

This is the community, and it’s free to join. 

Just a quick breeze through it. 

There are more details when you click on it; if you type in Hub.vision2success.co, you’ll see here in the top right to sign up. 

And, it gives you what you can get available to you. 

So you can ask him marketing questions, we’ve got the free workshops, which is what we’re running here, there are some forums for you to ask relevant questions through his strategy, and so on. 

And then we’ve got members who can post insights into their marketing. 

And then we’ve got a networking one. 

So if you want to network and share what you do with others, that’s there. 

And then these are the three courses they would have paid for courses that are free if you access this platform. 

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Daniel Fisher, founder and director of Pagio, a Website Builder. 

We had a presentation to a group about a year ago, 18 months ago, and it looks like a great system now. 

And Daniel says he’s been hard at work developing it, so I’m sure it will be awesome. 

And he will give us some excellent tips on why your website might need to be fixed and how to fix it. So I’ll stop sharing. And then Daniel, if you want to take over?

Of course. So, morning everyone. I’m going to ask that typical question of presenting. And can everyone see the screen?

Yes.

Perfect. Right, we’re off to a good start. 

So again, thank you, Peter, for letting me talk today.

And for those who don’t know me, I’m Daniel Fisher. I’ve been in the industry for 13 years. I started as a commercial analyst at Blackburn Rovers Football Club, went and sold my soul to the gas industry, and then decided to start and run my web agency. 

So I’ve been going for ten years doing web app development. 

So anything from simple WordPress websites to complicated systems and mobile app builds. 

But during the last couple of years, we found that some of the smaller companies struggled, primarily UK-based companies, because there needed to be an online platform that did that handholding for you. 

You got Wix, GoDaddy, and Squarespace, and we just found a massive space in the market for someone that was customer-focused and not just one that relied on support tickets from the end user when they have a problem.

So that’s why we created Pagio, an online website-building platform. 

So why am I here today? So, I’m here to talk you through the most common mistakes people make for their websites or small businesses. 

And this is all my 13 years of doing this. And we see these mistakes every single day. 

And just by implementing a few of these, that extra 1 % will get you more results from your website, little stat on the screen.

This stuff was done last year, where 67% of people referred to your business will check out your website before making contact. 

So just put that into comparison, that means that more than half of the people that refer to you could lose before you even manage to speak to them. 

With that said, reason number one, this may come as something that should be standard now if your website needs to be mobile-friendly. 

So as you can see on there with the stats, just over 57% of all web traffic came through mobile phones in February 2022. 

So again, that’s a massive market. It still surprises me now that websites need to be mobile-friendly. 

You could be missing out again on half of your leads from that. 

And it could be many reasons why it’s not mobile-friendly. 

And it also could be based on like how your website is set up, the web developers or the platform. 

So how to fix it? 

This is one of the simplest ones to come if they fix yourself; visit your website on your mobile phone, click every button, and click through every page. 

Every time you see something that doesn’t look right, take a screenshot, and you’ve got one or two things. Then, if you manage the website yourself, you can go on and edit that and work through those fixes. 

Or if you have a web designer, you can send that to them and say these are all the things that need fixing. 

And that’s one thing that people don’t do. 

And we see it time and time again where some other website they’ll sit on a desk article yet great. 

And then they have yet to look at their mobile phone. 

They still need to look at the menus, timing and all the buttons. They haven’t looked at stuff touching each other when it goes down to the menu because the padding needs to be done correctly. 

That’s one of the simplest things to go through and do. 

So give you an example. 

So this is how, on our website building platform, you can view how it looks on mobile phones. 

So again, you can go onto the platform, edit, and check and see how it works. 

So again, most of them have this view if you’re managing your websites. If you don’t, and you’re working with an external kind of party or web development agency, as I said, go through, look on your phone, and send them all of the photos. 

We are moving on to number two: slow-loading pages. 

So Neil Patel is one of the masters of SEO; he said that 40% of website visitors would abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. 

I’m a very impatient person. So I’ve gone at one and a half seconds. 

We are an impatient species, and we want everything directly now. That’s why we love Amazon’s next-day delivery because we are impatient. 

So sodom web pages, how to fix it. So the best thing to do is run a test on websites like Pingdom. 

Or even if you search your ‘website speed test’ on Google, it has a lot of free ones at the top. 

And when you run your website through them, it’ll give you lots of different options on the stuff you can fix. 

Some of those will be web development, which I’m not going to go through today because my thing today is looking at how people can quickly fix their stuff. 

Whereas there’s a lot of stuff like compressing CSS and all that techie side, I don’t want to go into that technical details. 

So the most common reason we come across is that the images need to be optimised.

You’re hosted on a slower shared server, or you’ve got a website platform, or you’ve got multiple plug-ins like on WordPress, or people pile on plug-ins on their website because they think it adds value but then slows the website down massively. 

And again, Google will penalise you for that. 

I will go through each of these and tell you how to fix them.

Such optimising images. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, size does matter. The image size, so the two ways to optimise your pictures are dimensioned and the file size. Many people need to get that right.

So, first of all, the image file size. 

You want to try and get your image file size as small as possible without reducing the quality of that image. You don’t want pixelated images on your website.

But the example of that on the screen is if you have any images that your photographer has taken or you’ve taken on your phone. The eight megabytes each, that’s 80 meg that your browser has to load. If someone’s out on a mobile phone and just got a 3G connection, or they’ve got slow internet, that will take a while, and you will lose customers. 

So it’s looking at reducing the fat image file size, firstly, so there are lots of tools online that you got online tools, which I’ll show you and then obviously Photoshop, which a lot of people do have.

So first 1: online tools to reduce the file size. 

So again, I’ve put some on the screen, compressedJPEG.com and tinypng.com.

What you do with these websites is you’ll load your images in there, and they’ll reduce them for you. 

It’s going to keep the massive like, for example, you could take something down for four megabytes to 500 kilobytes. And what you want to be doing is reducing them as much as possible, as I said with that. 

So that’s step one to doing it on there. 

And that’s these free online tools that are helpful. 

If you have online tools, if you have Photoshop, then you can export for the web inside there. 

So if you put your images inside Photoshop, as you can see on the screen, you go on File, Export, and then there’s a Save for Web option. 

And that reduces your file size massively. So again, if you’re big into Photoshop, do that. 

But if you still need those tools, go and do it online on these platforms that I have just said, then compressedJPEG.com and tinyPNG let you do different file types as well. 

As you’ll see on the right hand of the screen, you can see jpg, png, and PDF. There are lots of different things you can do in that. 

Next, we go on to image dimensions. 

Apologies for all the text on the screen. I wanted to ensure you can read bits while I’m talking. 

Already we talk about dimensions on like websites and digital stuff off pixels. 

And as I mentioned, you’ll never upload high-resolution images from photographers because all the photos look amazing when photographers take on massive cameras. 

You’re looking at the very least five to 20 megabytes per image, which you don’t want, and when we work on websites, we work on a rule of thumb that the full-width images should be 2560 pixels wide. 

Now generally, that matches up with bigger screens. 

So that’s the image size that we recommend. 

And that’s the one we always go off. 

The height of the image is based on the proportion of your images. So, for example, a short image will be 2560 by 400. And then a large one will be a lot, a lot longer, which I do have some examples, like here. 

So again, it’s all about keeping the width correct and then at whatever height the image you want. 

That is how you do the dimensions, and based throughout your site based on the way you put in the images, and we work on that as a rule of thumb. 

So if you are on the screen, like, for example, if you want an image that’s half the webpage with some text next to it, you’re then going to have divided by two, so your work for that full image should be 1280 pixels. 

So again, you can go through that theory; the rest of your websites are half is 2800. 

A third, I said, they round it to the closest whole number, 850. And then 640, and 512 and round down.

So it depends on how you want to do it. That’s how you should do the dimensions of the images. You do get the picture with that.

So then, how to edit the dimensions? 

So again, there are lots of tools. You’ve got Canva, which a lot of people know about. 

So you can go online and set the image dimensions in Canva. 

You’ve got Photoshop, again, where you can do that. 

But Adobe also has a free online tool called Adobe Express, which is good, which I’ll show you now. 

This is the Adobe Express tool; you can upload the image into Adobe Express, select the Custom Size, and then put your width and height. 

But the good thing about this is that if you’ve got an image you want to use, the image and height are locked. 

If you want to reduce the width, say, like I have done there, so 180, it’ll scale it down for you properly. 

And then, you can move the image around if you want to cut it off, etc. 

What that will do is the dimensions. 

You want to look at the image file size and the dimensions, and doing both of those together and doing them right, will reduce the file size even more because the measurements are suitable for the page. 

So that’s those on the images. 

So the following reason was hosted on a slower shared server. You can’t host anywhere else if you’re on a website builder like Wix or Pagio. 

But WordPress is different. So if you’re on a slower shared server, I’d move your website to a VPS, a virtual private server.

And this will speed up your website massively. 

And as I put on here, IONUS, which used to be called 1on1, offer great deals that you can get your own VPS from a couple of pounds a month, going up to 20/30/40/50. 

But to get that performance you need on your website, you should be looking at that. 

So obviously, I said you couldn’t do it on website building platforms, but on WordPress and over custom builds, you can do that and move them along. 

And multiple plug-ins. So obviously, this is a big issue regarding WordPress sites because everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, great. There’s a plug-in for that, and there’s a plug-in for that.’

We went on a client’s website last year, and they had a plug-in to change the colour of a button. 

And it’s just frustrating because there are many things you don’t need. 

So the rule of thumb for plug-ins, the first question is it needed? Do you actually need that plug-in? People buy a lot of plug-ins because they tell them they need them, and then they download the plug-in and try to put lots of stuff in there.

Well, when, in fact, they aren’t needed. 

And if there are plug-ins you don’t use, delete them. 

Second question, Can I do this function without a plug-in? So like, for example, changing the colour of a button. 

There are ways of going around that and learning how to do it without needing the plug-in. 

And there are many things like that, where someone’s installed the plug-in when it’s not needed. 

And then the final one is, and the main one, does it add value to the customers? Is me having this plug-in actually adding value to the customers? 

And the customer wants to get on your website, they want to see what you do, they want to know that what you do solves their problem, and then they want to see how they get in touch. 

So as long as the plug-in adds that value to that customer, that’s fine. 

So reason number three, your website is failing is that it’s not SEO optimised. 

That said that 67% of the buying journey starts via a search engine such as Google. 

So I’m going to miss the whole SEO journey today because that would be an hour to start. 

And that’s just the non-techie side. 

But I’m going to go through the main ones that we get and the main ones that give you that extra 1 % and make it easy. 

As I said, get an SEO strategy in place if you’re doing it yourself, a DIY platform, so there are quite a few DIY platforms. 

There’s one called hikeSEO, a UK-based one that’s decent, nice and easy, or use an SEO agency. 

But today, I’m going to go through the quick wins you can do yourself, which are the h1, which is the titles on the pages, and then look at a page per service that you offer to target the keywords. 

So firstly, h1 tags and the h1 tags are the main title on that page, which you’ll see on the screen is the coding version on the left. 

And then on the right is the pretty version everyone sees on the front end, which essentially the h1 tag is used to say: This is what the page is about. 

And that’s what Google reads. And there’s a hierarchy. And many people need to correct this, especially graphic designers. We love graphics designers and work with them all the time, but they need to fix this because when they design in their design software, they use a tag system for headings based on styling. 

And they always get it wrong.

And we see many web designers still need to correct this. 

Like, we’ll go on to websites now, and even there’s no h1 tag. 

So the way it works is exactly how this hierarchy here is: you’ve got one h1 tag on the page, and then it breaks down into the subsections of h2, h3, h4, and it goes all the way down to h6. 

But this is how you should structure your website. 

It’s just a heading system. 

So the main critical point for the h1 tag is only to have one on your page and have one. As said, we have seen lots with h2 tags on them. There’s no h1 or multiple h1, and it’s duplicated.

And sometimes that happens as well as people have a web and mobile version. So you have two h1s on the page, and we are just making sure you have one h1 title and include relevant keywords. 

So if you’ve just got a standard ‘our services page,’ and you were an HR company, like my example here, you could just put ‘outsourced HR services’ instead of ‘our services because you get an outsourced HR keyword in there, if that’s what you want to rank for. 

Suppose that company is based in Preston, for example. In that case, you want to have ‘outsourced HR services in Preston’ or ‘outsourced HR services in Lancashire,’ wherever you are location-based, and that’s all you focus on. 

That works well. So, for example, people who work hyperlocal, like tradesmen, don’t want to travel, making sure your location is a big win for the h1 tags. 

And my final point is that they’re not for design purposes; like h1 and h2 tags can be the same design on your website, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a hierarchy. 

It’s basically when Google looks at that website and says, ‘What is this page about? Right? I’m reading the h1 tag. Okay, great. I know what this page is about now.’ 

And as I said, that’s where some designers need to correct it. And web developers, too, as well.

So this is just an example so a personal trainer. On the left, you’ve got the ultimate fitness experience, which is excellent. But who will type in the ‘ultimate fitness experience’ when Google looks at that? I wouldn’t. 

And if you do keyword research, I don’t think many people will be typing that in. 

So a simple, quick change to personal training and Preston, which is more likely the thing that people are going to type in. And even without doing the keyword research, I will bet you on that one. 

That quick little change of that one sentence and h1 tag can make a massive difference. 

It goes off the content and everything else. But those are the quick little wins that will help your site. 

I’ve been doing a project for years, it must have been about nine years ago, with the Daily Mail Online, and they still need to get those. 

They just changed all the h1 tags and got it sorted, and it massively increased in traffic over the next few weeks, and it continued. 

It’s just a simple little 1%. 

Next, page per service. So again, many people have had multiple services. So we’ll have our services and then put them all on a page, which is excellent. 

It’s just because it gives everything that you do. 

But I would also do that for each service link to its page. So, for example, on a digital page, as we have, you’ve got app development, branding services, and website design. 

We don’t do branding, but I used it as an example. 

And though those are different things, if you’ve got other related services, people will be searching for that and search engines creating those pages. 

So and again, an example of what we’ve got as we create our landing pages because we’re an alternative to other website-building platforms. 

So we’ve got pages that are Wix alternatives, a Squarespace alternative and a WordPress alternative. 

So it’s creating pages like that, that people will be searching for. 

And that will make a big difference in traffic. So, yeah, it’s breaking it down. And if you’re a product-based business, obviously, usually with products, you always have a page per product. 

The similar thing you want to be doing is just breaking it down and adding the services there. 

Reason number four is poor web design.

And this is a big reason why websites do fail. 

Design is subjective. 

I’ve got a do’s and don’ts list that I know of stuff that works. 

But again, the main thing to think about when you’re designing your website is it doesn’t matter if you think it looks good, or you think it’s cool, or you think it looks great. 

What are your customers going to think when they look there? And that’s the main difference. 

So most common design mistake, number one fonts select fonts that are easy to read; many people make this mistake. 

They like the curly font because it looks cool or like it’s handwritten. 

And we all know, when you go to a doctor’s, you come back with a note, and you haven’t got a clue what they’ve written on the note, or you get teachers report, you don’t know because they look like this.

And that’s the thing that when you go on to the site, and you need help to read, and you’ve got a perfect vision, think of people who don’t have perfect vision on that site.

And this is why a lot of people need to correct it. Like there’s a lot of people with vision impairments, and I’ll get through it, I’ll go through that later on. 

But that’s what people don’t accommodate. 

So when you’re getting squiggly text like this or something that you think looks cool, someone will not read it. 

So it needs to be clear, exactly like this. Make it nice and straightforward. Use an easily readable font where no letters overlap or anything like that. 

Just nice and simple. 

Yeah, it might make the site look simpler. But that’s what people want. 

They want something simple; they can read and get through to where they want to.

The following reason there is, it’s too much text. 

So what people do is I’ll load the text on a website site, ‘yeah, people need to know as much as possible!’ And this is what the website ends up being like.

And you’ve got to read through loads of different content. 

And that’s not how we read websites or what people do; you’ll find the same even when you’re reading books or anything else. And you do it when you’re looking for a food menu, you’ll skim, and you do this, you look for the titles. 

And you look through looking at what’s of interest. And if you see that, and say, for example, on the screen, that ten years of work. 

So you see that, and you go, ‘right, I am interested now. I’ll read what’s underneath it.’

And that’s all about breaking down your website into readable paragraphs of titles that people can skim and see the information they need to go through. 

Like we do it well on our website building platforms, or when you look at features, we list the features down in headers and certain things that people want to read. 

And then, if they want to read more, they can go into it. 

And that’s what the websites need to be like. 

If you follow the text that people say, for example, bullet points and 12 bullet points are all two sentences long, people aren’t going to read it. 

And one of those bullet points is likely the thing that that person’s looking for, the thing that makes them want to buy, and they’re going to miss out because it needs to be laid out correctly. 

The following reason for using bright colours is that many people need help to read bright colours on a page. 

So this is a horrendous example. So if you’re looking at that, that’s not something you want to look at; that is an eyesore. 

But believe it or not, we had a client that did one of these recently because they’re all colourful and bright. 

And they want to do it that way. 

And it just doesn’t make sense. I get it; it’s their brand colours. 

But what you want to be doing is playing on the accent. So I can use a bit of the colour, images, and other stuff. 

So, for example, make that one better. But then, you clean it up and make it nice and simple. 

I use blue on numbers and keep it nice and neat. 

Because, again, people can easily read that. 

And then next one is stock images.

So, for example, put two examples on the screen to show the difference, and stock images can ruin a website. 

We suggest getting your photos done. 

But we know that’s only sometimes capable because someone might be unable to afford to get the photos done. Or you need to get photographs done for specific reasons. 

And so what we say on that one is to avoid using generic stock photos. 

So you’ll see the one on the top. 

That’s a generic photo that you can tell the one on the bottom right is a bit better. 

In the example I was coming up with, there is using images to show happy customers or what you solve. 

So, for example, if this was an HR company like I mentioned before, you’re looking at that top one going, ‘oh, we create happy customers or whatever else happy workforce,’ you can tell that the American stock image is terrible. In contrast, the one on the bottom right looks a bit warmer and a bit more realistic. 

And there are lots of free websites for that. Unfortunately, many of them are American, but you can find some good stock images if you try. 

I always recommend getting your own and having a bit of your personality, but budget or circumstances may not work. 

So yeah, look for some decent stock photos. 

Even if you know a graphic designer, they can do that for you. 

But yeah, there are lots of websites called Pixabay and Pexels and stuff like that. 

There’s a lot online.

Another design is cluttered menus. 

So people have too many menus when they enter the top, and what it does confuses people.

So when people have more than seven items at the top, like the rule of thumb, people become frustrated and close because there’s too much information, then they can only take it some in as their people like to skim. 

So, for example, you’ll see this website here. You’ve got the company at the top, the menu, the phone number, all the social media links, and then the call to action button. 

A lot is going on at the top there. 

I always tell people to avoid social media links near their website’s top. 

And this is personal for me, just because when they’ve landed on your websites, you’ve done something well to get them onto your website. And we all know what it’s like. So we can click one of those links and now connect on Facebook or LinkedIn to go and check out the company. 

The next minute whilst you’re on that social media platform, someone messages you, you get stuck in that message, and you forget, you keep talking, you talk to that person. And the next minute, you know, I need to move on to the next thing and close the tab down with your websites gone. 

So what we do on this one is you neaten up that top layer. So there’s a little, and you’re limited to those seven items. You can use drop-down menus if you’ve got a lot of services. It’s just not unlimited. 

So a simple fix for this one would be to keep it nice and straightforward. 

You got your menu, contact, and call to action in the top right. 

And then you’ve got enough information to get where you need to go. 

So that person who wants to land within two or three clicks needs to be where they want to be. 

So next up, text over images. 

And again, people have eyesight issues; it’s hard to read the text over images sometimes. 

And people also get it wrong when they put text over images and Google can’t actually read that either. 

So sometimes, it damages your SEO. 

But what we generally do is you have an image background and then text over it like a text element. 

And what we suggest to people is using an overlay on the image. 

So, for example this is one example. 

So again, the one on the left, you can’t read that great because of the background image. There’s no overlay, whereas the one on the right does deteriorate from the image slightly, but you still get the same effect, and you’re able to read the message. We always tell people to try and avoid putting an image over a textbook, but sometimes that does work. 

Here’s another example where it’s slightly hard to read. You can’t see the company or anything like that. 

Adding a little overlay over the image and a bit of colour is ten times easier to read. 

And it’s just little things like that. 

The next one, one of our main pet peeves, is hidden content. 

So a lot of people do it where they use sliders or like the typewriter effect. 

And they are like that, but it looks fantastic. 

It doesn’t matter if it looks cool if your customers get frustrated reading it. 

So, for example, the animated typewriter effect when you start reading a sentence, and suddenly it deletes, and another sentence comes in or deletes again. 

And you’re there just trying to read the sentence. It could be a better user experience. 

And you see it so many times on different websites. 

And I did a small business presentation recently, and one of the people in the room said, yeah, I’ve got that. 

And I was like, Yeah, I know I saw it. You’re one of the main reasons I put it in because people want to be able to read what’s there. And yet it might look cool. Or people say it ‘looks good because I work at a computer. I’m a virtual assistant; I attached a form.’

But it only matters if people can’t read it or it doesn’t bring value to the customer. 

Stop doing it. 

The following reason is on sliders. 

So this is where a lot of people need to correct it. 

So with sliders, sliders are fantastic for, say, portfolios or images and galleries and stuff like that. But many people that slide like the services and sliders and demo reel forms have to go through two or three towns and different sliders. 

But you remember many of you when you went into, like, the old game shops and used to sell the posters on the wall, and you flick through trying to find a sign, you probably get halfway through and get bored, and you won’t get to the end. 

And that’s really when you stop.

That is precisely what it is with a slider if you’ve got five services. As I mentioned before, if we said we add web design, branding, app development, marketing services and printing, for example, if I had those in the slider, I bet any money those last two, hardly anyone would inquire about because they’ll flick through. They won’t get to the one, and that might be the one I’m looking for. 

You are hiding content from the people who want to read it. 

Try and avoid sliders based on your appropriate content. 

Yeah, portfolios or images. And the carousels are significant. 

But put it into something other than your primary services where you land on a website and have a slider at the top with three or four messages. 

And that’s not necessary that you are just hiding content for that user because, again, that third and fourth message would probably be missed. 

And especially if it doesn’t automatically go, and as I said before with the typewriter effect, if you’ve automatically got your slide sliding through someone reading your content and the next minute it’s gliding through to the next one, it’s just a frustrating user experience. 

So again, keep it simple.

The next up is no call to action. I refer to them as CTA because that’s what they do internally. 

But a common mistake is that they don’t tell your visitors what to do next. 

So you’re on a website page, you get to the bottom, and there’s nothing, and your footers are just there. So you’re not telling them what to do next. 

So a couple of examples ‘buy now and save 40 pounds.’ So obviously, this is purchasing, buy now and get 50% off. So they create a bit of urgency to say, buy now, and you’ll save some money, or great I’m on the page, so I’m looking for it to buy now, and I’ll save money.

And another example there is how much money you can save on X Y Z service and get a free quote today. 

And then the last one, subscribe to enjoy free marketing tips sent directly to your inbox each week. 

That’s an example of something that, obviously, Peter could use. 

It’s that thing of saying look, we send free marketing tips to your inbox weekly. 

So I’ve got a couple of examples. 

So this is a fleet services group, and their call to action is nice and simple. 

And it’s saying, ready to make the management of your fleet more efficient, because it’s saying, ‘My pain is that my fleet is inefficient, I want to manage it better,’ that straightaway ready to make that call us or schedule a callback. 

So we’ve given them multiple options. 

Something as simple as that at the bottom of their content page will get them more callbacks than not having anything at all. 

Because when they get to the bottom, they don’t know what to do. 

Another example of these is utility brokers, obviously a massive thing at the minute. Make significant savings or businesses Delta brokers. That’s what people want right now. 

They said it only takes a couple of minutes to cut the cost of their utility bill. A great example of how much you can save the number of businesses right now that are looking at saving money that tells them precisely what they need to do next and why. 

Look at ‘see if you can save on your energy bills,’ great. I don’t know one business that pays energy bills now that doesn’t want to save on it. So tell them exactly what to do. 

If that just said we make energy bills comparison, you got to the bottom, and there was nothing there. So, yeah, they might get in touch and call you. 

But this tells them you will save money and get in touch with us now. 

So it’s ensuring our call to action tells you precisely what to do and why. 

And then contact details on the call to action. 

Let the customer contact you how you want them to.

I was on a call on the way here to a partner of our studio design agency, and they said to be speaking with PR contacts, etc. And they said they got referred to a website the other day and the only thing you could do on that website was to book a call with the person. 

I just want to send them an email ‘I’m busy.’ Give people the contact information. Let them contact you how they want; give them the phone number, provide them with an email, give them your contact form, get the email address, if it’s applicable, if you’ve got a physical address. Many people need the physical address. You don’t need to put it on there. 

We don’t put our physical address on the website or the platform because by doing that, we’re website building platform. So we don’t want people just saying they want a website, but it’s given them the information where they can feel comfortable contacting you. 

Some people will hide behind an email; they don’t want to jump on a video call with you and go through the problem or what they need. 

I sometimes like you are busy and want to send an email saying, can you do this? Yes or no, that’s sometimes just what you want. 

You don’t want to speak to someone for half an hour while they tell you about the company or try to sell you everything. They want the simple question. 

So please give them the contact details they want as much as possible. 

And also, at the bottom is that 44% of potential customers prefer to call you on a landline. Sometimes that is if you’ve just a mobile phone on your site and many people do this. They can also pop off because they think, ‘oh, there’s just a one-man band’ even a one-person band is great, obviously, like most businesses and micro businesses in this country. 

Some people just get put off by that. 

I recommend that someone get an online invoice number on their website if they have just a mobile number on their website. There are websites such as circle loop, you go on there, and you pay £5 or £15 a month, and you get a number. It would help if you did everything online, on your desktop or mobile. It can send all your numbers through etc. gives you an online number.

For example, for me, Preston 01772, so something like that gives them that professional number. 

And number six, the reasons why your website is failing broken links. 

So when people land on your website and get broken like you’ve seen this, it’s like a 404 error on a website, which makes it look unprofessional and poorly maintained so that someone can get put off by this. and they click a link that goes right ‘this page is no longer here.’ So they go ‘alright’ and click back instead of going elsewhere on that website, potentially buying. 

You’ve lost that customer.

And also, it’s terrible for SEO. 

If Google sees the broken links, they look at them and say they’re not maintaining the website. It’s not a good thing. It generally happens when, for example, you’ve changed the URL of the page or the page has been removed or deleted. 

And that does happen a lot. So I can fix it. This is a simple way of me going over it so that you can track broken links in Google Search Console. 

So if you have any web tabs in Google Search Console, you can set up a redirect and that URL to point to the new one. 

Some people may need a web developer for that. 

On our website builder we all have that to manage in the website builder itself. 

So as soon as there’s a broken link on the website, you get an email to say someone’s clicked on a broken link. 

And then, you can easily click to redirect that. I think that’s one of the good things we added on there because some people aren’t technical enough to go into Google Search Console and redirect. Still, we’re just doing one for a client at the moment where the complete URLs change because of being bought by a different company. 

So we redirect it all, but that’s more on the technical side. 

Whereas some people want to be able to change one thing from the kind of like a bit of the URL changed or a page being deleted, but instead of sending people towards broken pages, you want to send them through to the new page for that. 

Or if there’s no new page, send them to the homepage because that is where someone might buy from you. 

Reason number seven is that most people check out your website and will be introduced to you, but you also need to promote your website. 

Many people think, put the quote at the bottom, build it, and they will come. 

That doesn’t work. Building a website doesn’t give you the right to get new customers. 

And that’s where many people get it wrong, you just got to build a website, or build a website, and it needs to be fixed. And you go, ‘when was the last time you had done anything to it?’ Well, I don’t. It’s just there. 

It’s all great, and many people are using websites for reference. 

But that reference still needs to be correct because when people visit it, they’re going to visit it and then decide and get that perception of you before they come in. 

So when you walk past the shop, you will ask the shop, and the sounds fall off. It looks scary and probably not where I want to be. If you’re looking into a restaurant, and it’s dirty, you’re not going to go in there and eat. Some people may depend on what food is bought. Still, you’re going to put people off. It’s all about appearance and perception. 

So you need to work on your site and then promote it. So how to enable it? as I mentioned earlier, improving your SEO strategy to get more visitors. 

So again, we’re going to h1 tags, working on your content, page per service, limiting your images and doing them correctly. 

There’s a lot more to that. So I said, get an SEO strategy to speak to an SEO company or use one of the ROI tools. 

Social media is a great tool, as we all know, that will get your website up, it’s even if you’re on LinkedIn and you’re connecting with people. I always do this if I’ve associated with someone on LinkedIn and look at the company’s profile. 

And then it goes straight to the website, and I look at them. That is potential if you’re connecting with people you want to communicate with, a referral partner, or someone you want to sell to. 

They’re going to be coming to check your website out. 

So the social media side is significant. 

You have paid social advertising. You now have Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and stuff. So you can look at those and look at whether you think that’s worthwhile for you. 

And then pay-per-click advertising, Google ads, and Bing Ads because SEO is great for a long-term strategy. But if you want visitors now and want conversions now, one of the things to look at is probably pay-per-click advertising because that brings in the leads. 

As I said, that’s not the stuff; we don’t touch anything. So we do it for ourselves, but we have other partners, but we know how much that can then help drive in traffic, driving inquiries and driving sales. 

And then, last but not least, email campaigns.  

Once you have attracted people, when people have downloaded anything, download the PDFs, etc. It’s interacting with them, sending them content, and sending them the news, because most of the time, people will read through your content. 

We have people that buy from us now that started reading our content three or four years ago, and they come to say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been reading the emails that you send out, your tips, I’ve been reading your blog. And now I’m in a position to buy.’ 

And all of these work together. Like they’ve been checking our social media, email campaigns, and blogs, they’re in a position to buy. So people linger. People spy on you and stalk you until they’re ready to buy.

To finish, where to find me and how you can work with me. As I said before, we’re Paige, a website builder. 

Our key features were easy to use website building platform. You can drag and drop all the items. You can see the example on the screen. 

You drag and drop the items into the place where you want them to go. 

You have a UK-based support team, so you can jump on a video chat, a normal standard phone call, email, or any way you want it interactive like I said before, you can jump on and show you how to edit and train you as well. 

To make sure that you get the best out of that, no other platform does that. 

There’s only one online shop that I know that cares. No one else does that. There’s no added cost. So every feature we ever implement for life is included in the monthly fees. 

We don’t believe in charging extra for plug-ins or any additional features, etc.

It’s just not what we’re about. We’re tried and trusted, and we are rated excellent on Trustpilot. 

We’re ethical, so everyone who signs up to our platform, we plant trees and support climate projects worldwide. 

So we’re just done with 6000 odd trees, but by 2027, I will plant a million trees. So people do call me a tree hugger, but I don’t mind. 

So yeah, 1 million trees by 2027. And then, finally, we’ll transfer your website for you. So we transfer people for free if you’re on a different platform, such as Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, or any of those. 

And it’s just to get them on a platform and show them how to update the website because, again, there needs to be more customer support, especially with smaller businesses. But, again, WordPress is a fantastic platform. 

You don’t need to be updating plug-ins every month or messing around with that. 

Sometimes you need to learn how to edit the website, and there can be a lot of issues, and we’ve seen it all over the years. I’ve got people on WordPress constantly. No matter how often you tell them you need updates, they don’t do it. 

They don’t know what to do and get frustrated with it all, so they look at the dashboard. It just needs to be more precise. So they’re out of it. So yeah, Pagio.co.uk, as you can see at the bottom of the screen. And then this is the final bit of any questions for me. And if you want to connect on LinkedIn, that is the link to the QR code to scan. 

So yeah. Any questions? I’ll open up to everyone.

Yeah, so we’ve got a couple of questions. 

Thanks very much, Daniel, that’s absolutely brilliant and some fantastic tips there. 

And if your site’s not performing, that’s undoubtedly a great place to go. 

But if you put your hands up in the air, and you go, ‘Whoa, I can’t do this,’ then, as I say, you can transfer your site accessible to Daniel’s platform. 

That may be an answer as well. 

We’ve got a couple of questions. First, one of Teressa Jones’s questions regarding h1 tags is, ‘if you have multiple products that are similar and would have similar keywords, is that okay?’

Give me an example.

So I imagine they might have a car cleaning service, and you might have a car detailing service. Because it’s –

Yes, those are different things that also dare to defy. You said car cleaning car detail, and they’re also different. So that’s fine because you have another product. They’re good to have if they’re so close that you could have car cleaning and detailing as your h1 tag because the contents are very similar on that page. 

Yeah, Theresa, do you want to jump in there?

So Teresa says products could have several different two-bedroom logs and log homes. Do you want to give us an example to please either speak or?

Yeah, so we have several different products, which are similar, but they’re somewhat different designs. So we’ve got pages with you. We’ve got a WordPress website that lets you filter, searches and find things. 

So they have a product name. I’m curious about the ideal content for the h1 tags because I’m conscious that you don’t necessarily want to have several pages with the exact keywords.

You don’t want the same h1 tag on those pages because then it’s just duplicated across. So what is your product? Sorry, can you give me an example of the products?

Well, they are log buildings, basically log cabins, shall we call them.

I have a client who does that, so we’re good. 

So what you want to do, for example, is talk about seven products, two-person log cabins. So you want to focus on the category page, a category that is two-person log cabins or whatever one bit of content on and then linking through to those products. So the thing you’re optimising for itself is the page of two-person log cabins, which is like a category page that can link through to the products.

So you’re going back, adding a layer of saying there’s a page here about two-person cabins, and you can have a page with three people. Sometimes these are category pages, or you can create them as custom pages and link through them. And that’s generally how to do it the way you do it. You have different names. For the cabins, I assume each one has a name, a brand name if you like of that particular one.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then, what differentiates the log cabins? So from one brand name to another or one log cabin style.

The style, yeah, so you might have three things that are fairly similar in terms of, okay, they might be a slightly different size, but still have two bedrooms. That is one option.

Exactly. Go on the size. So you’re looking at size-old features. So, for example, you can do it based on 20 foot, two-person log cabin. And that’s your differentiator. But I’d always have that extra page of the two-person log cabins just before, so you’ve got the multiple layers through and built a hierarchy to get to the product pages.

Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you. 

Okay, so thanks so much, Teresa. Giles is asking what recommendations you have for font type.

Right, okay, font type, good question. I’m writing a blog on this. 

There’s a lot of use. It’s just its standard fonts. I recommend using Google Fonts because they’ll load wherever you go. 

And then your simple fonts, such as your Helvetica, kind of Sans Serif fonts that are all simple to read. Finally, there’s one called Enter, which is a Google font, which is good. 

Poppins, that’s the official social media font for Liverpool Football Club. 

I’m a Liverpool fan. So I know I got friends in the PR department there. 

So yeah, loads of those simple ones like that. But I wrote in a blog on it at the moment about fonts, what simple Sans Serif fonts like that are, and you get to be honest, even if you Google the most popular Google Fonts, you’ll find a list of them. And they are usually the same ones. 

Brilliant, thank you.

All right. Okay, so Williams asking, is direct search the best strategy rather than organic? When considering selling fine wine? I asked. William, what he meant. And he says direct search means via social media, paid ads, and blogs. 

So is it better to do SEO and spend your time doing SEO? Or is it better to pay the man and pay Google Pay social? Put up social links? What would you say in your view?

Excellent question. 

And if I gave you an answer, I’d be lying. 

Because I haven’t tried them. Because, say, for example, you’ve got to try them and see what works. And that’s what it’s all about. 

It’s about experimenting. So if you look now, say, did you say fine wines? 

Yeah. 

Yeah. So when you look at it, it’s looking at what works for you. So, if going direct to the customer, whether working with partners is more beneficial to you, I’d always look at that angle, the fine lines and how the people who can consistently bring you to work. 

But if you’re going direct to the customer, you’ve got to test it, test social media, test your SEO strategy. And then, looking at a bit of paid work, you’ve got to try them all because you can’t compare unless you’ve done it. And every business is different. 

Once you find what’s working, you double down on it. Then, you’ve got to try it. 

We’re in the process at the moment. So we’ve been doing most of our stuff until recently. It’s just been organic for networking or online or working on SEO strategies, but we’re just starting on paid advertising now. Then we’re going to do a bit of social media. I’ve been forced to start Tik Tok, which I feel like a granddad because I’m going on it. I got Instagram, and I don’t know, TikTok. I’m not dancing, but I’ll be there. 

But it’s just about trying what works. You have to try them and then look at them and go, ‘Oh, actually, this works. Well, let me try and do this. Like we’ve ever done. We’ve done everything from going to lead generation websites where you buy leads and stuff. There are lots of different things. 

You’ve just got to try it. Because you could ask anyone, and they’ll give you an answer, which in honesty if they haven’t tried it, ‘s a lie. I’m a data guy. So I needed help to give you the answer there. So you just got to try.

What we do see is that SEO is very much a long-term thing. 

And you have to do everything Daniel has talked about, and there is a workshop we ran just on SEO, which is in the pre-recorded workshop section. 

But we’re finding that if you’re selling products and things, it might be worth doing little blogs on wine on YouTube, pushing those out on social media, you know, and being where you are. 

You’re a wine expert, and you’ve got some exciting wines, which is to embrace video. 

And to get that out to social media, talking about a bottle of wine a week, and then you can drive people to Insight, is probably now because I know you and I have an ongoing conversation because you have a bit of a challenge. But recently, we’ve noticed that the video will be massive. And it’s getting those video blogs going. So In your case, it’s because people buy from people and want to see you as an expert.

And everyone knows Gary Vee, I assume, here. So Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk. American guy.

I do, yeah.

What did he do? He started doing online videos of wine. 

That’s when he started doing videos of wine. His dad ran a wine company. 

He started creating videos because he took all the help from his dad and started doing live videos. 

Even he said, who wants to listen to me talk about, I don’t drink wine, but I’m just going to say like Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or whatever. And he goes, people were, and people will listen to me looking at it interacting. And then, all of a sudden, they start getting orders of cases of wine. So it’s that type of thing. 

Whereas if you know the subject, and you’re passionate about it, and even if you go on YouTube or Tik Tok, wherever those platforms are talking about it, people will see that because when people interact in our rooms or social media, we’ll put them more towards you. 

And as Peter said, that video size is huge at the minute. So that’s why our guys are forcing me to do it. But yeah, just looking at stuff like that. It won’t be new media or overnight success but consistency. And you’ll probably enjoy doing it, it comes down to people to see, and if they know you know what you’re talking about, they’ll ask questions. 

And when they start asking questions, that’s when they’re likely to buy.

I mean, the thing is tasting sessions. We’ve been doing a lot of tasting sessions. But it might be a good idea to video them. But you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to ask the customer, you know, whether they agreed to that. And we have spent going back to the SEO; we spent a lot of time trying to fix our SEO, using miles. And equally, we suggest as well, and it just has yet to work. And we were on Google Analytics. And that gives us most people landing on our site from organic. So that’s why we put the SEO work in, but a large percentage is actually direct. So, if we go for the direct, that might be an excellent way to see if the sales are affected.

So are you looking at targeting people who want to do a wine tasting? Or do you want to target people who are buying direct? Because I know wine tasting will turn into people buying directly usually?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we want to have people buying direct. We don’t offer that service at the moment; we sell wine, that’s all.

If you’re doing the wine tasting, I will go on to these coupon companies or anything like that; they’ve got a massive market. 

Yeah, you’re not going to make much money on a wine tasting. But think of the customers you’ll get on the back of it. It’s like going to a networking event, you know, don’t get paid to go to networking events. But if you cover the costs from the fees and what you give to the platform like Wowcher. 

And all these are even the other ones like Virgin Experiences, that type of stuff; you can get a list of those that will drive the traffic and people doing the wine tasting, maybe a tiny bit of a loss or breaking even. And then it’s the upsell of the one that you’ll get. So that’s what I would do.

And with the videoing, I wouldn’t video your clients. I would do a virtual one. So, you know, I pretend this is your bottle of wine. 

It will be later, but not that, and show the bottle and talk about it. 

And then you know and say if you want to try a bottle then, you know, so you’ve got it controlled, you know, get a microphone, get some lights, and you could do that as a piece to camera. 

And so you could do that easily once a week. I suggest that and get that on Tik Tok because I’d imagine that would go down quite well as everybody’s on TikTok. 

Do you want to see rolling videos? You go to Tiktok. Prime Ministers are on TikTok. 

Right. Okay. It’d be great. 

Great.

I could try. Yeah, we’ll try anything.

Yeah, well, you can load the video on YouTube. And put it onto social and LinkedIn because that’s where the dudes are with the money. 

You know, the changes we see, our video work, we do video work, and it’s just gone up and taken off recently. 

Let’s quickly check and ensure there are no more questions but some great ones. 

Thank you very much. Okay. 

So bring it towards the end now. 

So Daniel, thank you very much for it was a beneficial webinar this morning.

It was a good summary of what people can do themselves. 

And so thank you very much to everybody else attending, whether you’re on LinkedIn, in the Zoom Room, on YouTube, or Facebook. I hope you found it helpful. 

The recordings and transcript will be on the website the next day. 

And a link will be sent out to everyone who’s registered today. 

On the 17th of December, I’m pleased to announce we’ve got Gary Bramwell from Great Minds. And he will be doing a presentation on how to create a PR strategy and tactics that will help your business shine. 

So there’s a big move now for digital PR. So the traditional PR, what they used to do, has changed dramatically over the last few years. And we’re indeed working with Gary on PR strategies to digital PR strategies to help customers get even more exposure, but it’s not your sort of traditional sort. 

So if you want to find out more, please book on to the event. It’ll be on the website in the next day or so. And we’ll be sending out an email anyway. And so I look forward to seeing you all.

Thanks very much.