Leaving your audience satisfied with every click
So you have your beautiful new website.
You’ve carefully written the copy and paid an arm and a leg for a fancy pants design, you’ve even done a little SEO, optimising your images, writing titles and metas and making an effort to speed up your site.
But you’ve noticed something odd when you look at Google Analytics.
Your time on site is low.
People are only viewing one or two pages.
And your conversions are lower than worm doing a limbo.
‘What went wrong?’ you cry, gnashing your teeth.
Well it could be your user experience.
How people enjoy and consume the content on your site, and travel from point a to point b.
Perhaps there are 15 steps before I can check out.
Perhaps the font is so small it needs a microscope to read.
Or the buttons have grey copy on a grey background.
User experience is crucial not just for … the users, but also to please the Google beast, so lets dig into this topic today.
Tune in to learn
- User experience: what it is, and how it differs from accessibility
- How to measure user satisfaction
- Why engagement is so important to SEO
- Which good engagement metrics to focus on
- The pros and cons of heat mapping tools
- Kevin’s best heat mapping tool recommendations
- Which GA4 reports you should focus on
- How marketers should approach SEO content in 2023, compared to 2013
- Kevin’s number one tip to improve user experience
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And big thanks to Catootz from Australia for their lovely review:
“On the pulse.
This is the podcast for SEO copywriters who want to stay up to date on the latest SEO trends and info.
Kate’s access to industry and Google heavyweights, and her ability to break down concepts and make them understandable, is second to none.”
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Connect with Kevin Indig
Useful Resources
About Kevin Indig
In the past, he led SEO and Growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian and is an angel investor. Kevin is on a quest to accelerate technology that solves impactful problems.
Fun fact: Kevin used to be a club DJ during and before college.
Transcript
Kate Toon:
So you have your beautiful website, you’ve carefully written the copy paid an arm and a leg for a fancy pants design. You’ve even done a little SEO, optimizing your images, writing titles matters, and making an effort to speed up your site. But you’ve noticed something odd when you look at Google Analytics. Your time on site is low, people are only viewing one or two pages, and your conversions are lower than a worm doing a limbo. What went wrong, you cry gnashing your teeth. Well, it could be user experience, how people enjoy and consume the content on your site, and travel from point A to point B. Perhaps there are 15 steps before I can check out perhaps the font is so small, it needs a microscope to read, or the buttons have gray copy on a gray background. User Experience is crucial not just for the users, but also to please the Google gods. So let’s dig into this topic today. Hello, my name is Kate toon. And I’m the head chef at the recipe for SEO success and online learning hub for all things related to search engine optimization, and Digital Marketing. And today I’m talking with Kevin Indig. Hello, Kevin.
Kevin Indig:
Okay, good to be with you.
Kate Toon:
It’s good to have you here. Now, I just let Kevin know that I’m a huge German phile, Germanophile. Is that a phrase? I don’t even know. Um, so we, you know, I’m just gonna say, Guten Tag ve gates.
Kevin Indig:
(Replies in German)
Kate Toon:
(Replies in German)
Kevin Indig:
It’s perfect. It’s perfect. I’m impressed with you, Kate. I’m just gonna say that for the audience here as well, I told you earlier, but it’s pretty impressive. We don’t have a lot of germanophiles, you know, like Japanophile is pretty kind of trendy. But so by that many fans, medium, hypercritical German traits,
01:52
Kate Toon:
It’s so German. I’ll tell you what’s something Kevin, I went on a this passenger retreat, a silent 10 day retreat. And there were loads of Germans on it. And the meditation retreat, people said that, yeah, Germans have this sort of deep kind of feeling that no one likes them. When we do so. I’m a huge fan of Germany. And I’m really hoping to get out there and visit Berlin and travel around. But anyway, let’s not talk about Germany, let’s talk about user experience. But for everyone who doesn’t know who you are, let me first introduce you. So Kevin is a growth advisor who helps the world market leaders define and evolve their organic growth strategy. He hosts the tech bomb podcast where listeners get inspired by growth growth ideas from the best experts in the field. In the past, he led SEO and growth at Shopify. Wow, G2. I’d never say this Atlassian is that right? And is an angel investor. Kevin is on a quest to accelerate technology that solves impactful problems. Fun fact, Kevin used to be a club DJ during and before college. Okay, Kevin, when he was spinning the discs, was it discs? Or maybe showing my age?
Kevin Indig:
Plates? Vinyl, you know, is like real? Real vinyl? Yeah. I still have about 1000 records in my mom’s basement. That’s perfect. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
You know, okay, we’re gonna ask you that if you could only listen to one record, ever again. What would it be? Come on, You’ve gotten this is an important life question.
Kevin Indig:
That is an important question. Not an easy one. Yeah, I was a club DJ. I was I was spinning for people.
Kate Toon:
Was it, was it fist pumping kind of music. Yeah.
Kevin Indig:
You got the country, maybe in Germany, maybe just sort of finger pointing.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Well, I want you to think about that. I’m going to ask you that question again at the end of the episode, so let it just marinate in the background. But I was a DJ briefly for university. But I played like 50s crooners, I had a 50s and 60s show. And it was called Kevin it was called Kate Toon in the afternoon. How good is that?
Kevin Indig:
to get a quick answer. So if I had to pick one song Can I can I swear on this podcast? Yeah, it sounds sexy bitch. But wait, wait, there was this amazing remix by a DJ called Afrojack might still be around. And there’s this other remix by by Chucky DJ called Chucky. And both of them are great. I’d probably probably pick the Chucky remix of sexy bitch I can 10 out of 10 recommended that song gets everybody to dance at the club and I-
Kate Toon:
I wish I had the rights, the music rights to add this to the podcast I won’t be able to but you know what I’m gonna do I’m gonna find the YouTube video of that Kevin and put it in the show notes. So if you’ve ever had a reason need to visit the show notes before this is it. We all want to go and listen to the sexy bitch. I love that. I hope Kevin that when you go on stage at SEO events, you have that as your intro music.
Kevin Indig:
No, I’m not I’m not that full of myself.
Kate Toon:
Just coming on like, hey, yeah, it’d be nice sexy bitch. Okay?
Kevin Indig:
That’s sort of the corner from here.
Kate Toon:
Well, we’re gonna, I can’t think of any decent segue from sexy bitch to user experience, but I’ll try. Okay, I know what to say, how do we turn our website into a sexy bitch in the eyes of Google and customers? I mean, we’re talking user experience here. Can you give us a definition of what we mean when we say user experience?
Kevin Indig:
Absolutely. So a lot of people when they hear the term user experience, think about how a website looks. And that’s such a bad start. But there, I want to take this two clicks further down. So first of all, in the SEO sense, right, we talk about basically user experience in the in the context of corporate battles, right? That’s, that’s the first attempt that Google ever made to quantify what the actual experience for users is. It’s more than just speed. It’s basically when elements loaded if the experience syrup is disruptive, yes or no. I want to take this a little bit further, my, my definition of user experience has basically five elements. The first one is speed, right? Speed is critical to almost everything that we do in life. Two is the look and feel, which is very justified in my mind, very underrated in SEO as well. And we can dive deeper into that. Three is the ease of orientation. When I land on the website, how quickly do I find the main content and navigation where I am? And if I find if actually having fun of me, what I’m looking for and forth is the simplicity of consuming the main content. So am I getting interrupted? Is the font too small? Is it hard to read, you know, is some other stuff happening on the website. And the last step is the ease of navigation and all these things together, form an amazing, outstanding user experience. And the goal is, is ultimately to get people what they want when they come to a website.
Kate Toon:
Ah, that’s such a great way of defining it. I love those different metrics and different ways of thinking about it. I think I always start with the architecture, the navigation, what you know, because I think that’s something that you plan, right from the get go, or you should most people do that afterwards, you know, and they’re like, oh, maybe I should change my nav. And he’s like, Oh, no, that should be the very foundation, how are people going to get from A to B in the most simplistic way, way back years ago, when I was working at Ogilvy, and we were doing the user experience for ING Bank, which is a bank over here, you know, trying to get somebody to make a payment in a banking system, the level of architecture and usability, you have to think about to do that, because there’s so many opportunities for mistakes. And just even simple things like putting the buttons the wrong way round, you know, the clear button and the submit button, if you put them the wrong way, round, and 90% of people will clear the form by accident. And people just don’t think about this. You taught there a little bit about, you know, some of the elements about accessibility of content and use of content. How do we differentiate user user experience from accessibility? Because they are quite different disciplines? Really?
Kevin Indig:
Yes, they are. I love that you bring that up, because they’re often often kind of thrown in the same bucket. And a lot of people think they’re the same thing. But they’re not. If I had to define accessibility, it’s really to make the user experience accessible for people who have a handicap or people with a handicap. So are they able to see or listen to the main content? And are they able to navigate the site to a similar degree that a person without a handicap would have? And that has an element of user experience, but it’s not the same. And at the same time, Google really pushes accessibility, which I think is a great thing. But it can be, you know, it can land as if Oh, that’s also important for SEO while to be completely transparent. I don’t think that accessibility has anything to do with organic ranking. But some things you do for accessibility are also important for SEO. So who was able to detangle? That a little bit?
Kate Toon:
It’s always it’s a bit hard, isn’t it? I spoke to John Mueller about this, because I have a deep rooted feeling that accessibility might be a future update, like they may start to bake some of these requirements into, you know, rank ability, you know, that the content is legible. Yeah, it’s resizeable. But, you know, we talked about handicap, but I think accessibility is just making the content accessible, which sounds really crazy. Like, you know, you may not have any kind of disability, but say you’re trying to use the site with the sun sign shining on your screen on a mobile while you’re at the supermarket checkout, and you’ve got one minute, those grace, grace on a gray background is going to put anybody you know, able bodied, whatever, into trauma. So I do think it’s important. And at the end of the day, anything that improves someone’s use of the site gets them staying on the site and the longer they stay on the site, the more likely they are to convert. So this is it’s kind of mixed and kind of separate. So thank you for that definition. So let’s talk about user satisfaction. Obviously, we had Google’s helpful content updates. And you know, we talked about, we were going to come back and talk more about kind of individual user experience things. But how does that play into accessibility? How do we gauge if our content is satisfying?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, yeah, it’s great question. And it’s one that’s often overlooked by SEOs as well, right? We love our technical things, our tactics, right, our conduct simulation or link building and stuff, but we often forget that a successful experience ultimately ends in a conversion. And then the question is what you know, conversion can mean many things, and what is the conversion, and I distinguish between a hard and a soft conversion. So most people, when I think about conversion, they actually talk about hard conversions, which mean, which means sign up for a product or fill out a lead form or buy something. But they’re also soft conversions. And a soft conversion could just simply be click through to another article, right? So you land on a product page on an e commerce Store. And at the bottom, you find a couple of blog articles linked. In my mind, that is a good thing. If you click on that, right, it’s better than you bouncing and going somewhere else. But a lot of people forget about that. Another soft conversion could be to sign up for an email newsletter, which I’m also a huge proponent of email marketing in general, I think it’s very underrated. And so we can distinguish between these these two types of conversations or conversions. But at the end of the day, a, you know, a helpful piece of content or a good user experience ends in a conversion, it’s unlikely that every visit or click ends in a conversion. But that’s one of the best gauges or metrics, if you will, to understand if you’re on the right track or not.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, and I think this ties into my next question about engagement. You talked about soft and hard conversions. I love that distinction. But you know, even in this day and age, even some are making it to the bottom of your pay, which is pretty impressive. Someone not bouncing poll going back to the search results after 30 seconds. If someone My goodness reads more than one blog post a small round of applause, please. So why is engagement so important to SEO?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, I think engagement might be one of the most important. Yeah, I don’t want to use the F word, which is not what do you thought? What are the most important signals or buckets of signals, probably better way to say it to Google period. And the reason I’m saying that is, you know, McConnell, McConnell elaborate on this for too long, right. But there are obviously lots of different important things like the content, technical optimization, user experience, as we thought about but ultimately, the strongest signal to Google whether the click was helpful to users or not, is if it completed the user journey. And that is what I understand under engagement is to measure the progress towards completing your user journey. And Google can measure that very reliably. And with a high rate of confidence simply by how many people go back to the search results when they have visited this site, or how many people look specifically for specific domains when they when they have a certain intent, right? If you if you enter, you know, a book, your book, title of a book you want to buy, and you add pen, you append Amazon at the end, that obviously is a strong signal to Google that says, hey, I want to buy this on Amazon. So Amazon has to have a certain quality property, good user experience for people to buy books there. So it’s all these kinds of things together. There are many different ways to measure engagement, but they all kind of show progress towards a completed user journey.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I like that. Let’s talk about those many different ways, you know, the easy ones to spotter in Google Analytics, where you can look at time on page and, you know, there’s a little bit of a rule of thumb, you know, this is why people have time to read content, you know, that if someone spends two to three minutes reading a blog post, that’s pretty good, you know, probably takes two to three minutes to read about 400 ish words, maybe depending on what you’re reading it on, and how fast you are. So time on page is obviously important. For me pages viewed is quite important. Not always, because as you said, sometimes that one interaction people worry a lot about bounce rate, you know, but sometimes coming in getting what you need from that piece of content. And leaving, again, is the end of the user journey. Right? But I think people get confused. So can you talk us through time on page pages? Feud? And also bounce? Let’s revisit bounce rate, because people get very confused about that one, don’t they?
Kevin Indig:
They absolutely do. Kate, I love that you bring that up because I’m passionate about this. So here’s here’s my answer is only valuable when you segment it, right? So when you when you slice it by another engagement metric, because again, the likelihood that that no visitor to your website, bounces is completely insane. That’s not going to happen. So you want to pre qualify bounce rate with another metric. For example, what’s the bounce rate of users who have been on your website for at least 30 seconds, that is much more telling Right? Or what is the bounce rate of users who have had two clicks in the past or maybe who have had been on the website the day before. All these things you can measure in Google Analytics without too much fuss this without too much customization or any code simply by creating custom dimensions. So a big fan of that. I’m also a huge fan of just understanding what is the average time people spend on my site before they convert, which is another way to segment metrics. So So you kind of get my drift here to you to really make the use of any metric, we need to contextualize it. But if people take away one thing from from anything I’ve said today, it’s really that there’s no metric is valuable without context, context can be time horizon, like year over year, or, you know, yesterday, compared to today, it can also be across different gos across different pages on your site, or it can be segmented and put into context, through other engagement metrics, they kind of can play off of each other. And so we don’t make use of that, if you just look at the bear time on site and bounce rate, we basically look at all people, you know, through the same filter or through the same lens, but you want to you want to you want up, you want to be specific about who you look at, and then draw conclusions from that. And when you do that, all of a sudden patterns emerge, and all of a sudden, you see oh, okay, when I when I only look at people who spend, you know, say 30 seconds, such as arbitrary, but 30 seconds on my blog, and then they take an action that gives that’s obviously much, much more about the user experience than looking at everybody, you know, independent of how long they have spent on the blog.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s why Google Analytics Insights is quite helpful, because it kind of gives you those pivots and says, you know, your engagement is up over the last few months. And then you can go, oh, well, that’s good. Because I’ve been putting so much more effort into making my content interesting. And it’s working. You know, I think a lot of people look at data, or you have to go out and look at data with a question in mind, not just looking at data, you know, like, if I do x, will this happen? I have been working so hard on my Instagram, has my direct traffic increased from Instagram, but also, what does that traffic do on my site is the quality of traffic from Instagram, spending as much time on my site as the people coming from organic search? Okay, it’s not, so I’m going to not waste you know, you need to have that angle. Before you go in. I think that’s so important. And, you know, there’s other ways of looking at user experience and weather, I think where thing people are jarring, people are struggling, right, you talked about time on site there. And I know, for example, on the recipe for SEO success, I you know, at the time on page on my testimonial page, the average is something like 17 minutes, which is so high. And I think because it’s it’s not a cheap course, or a cheaper courses on Udemy. But that people want to find a testimonial that matches them. And then when they start reading them, they read one after another after another because they really want that affirmation that they’re about to make a good purchase decision. Right. So that is very illustrative to me. But also, I’ve used heat mapping tools on the site to see where people are struggling. So what are your thoughts on heat mapping tools? And how can people use them effectively?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, huge fan, right. The first thought that came to mind when you said, you know, people are spending 17 minutes on your on your page, which, which is very impressive, is Oh, awesome. Now, my marketer or analytical brain immediately jumps to what about the people who don’t spend that much time? What action do they take? Or where do they fail? And that’s exactly where heat mapping tools can give us an answer. When we’re looking at only visitors who maybe spend five minutes or three minutes or maybe 30 seconds on that page. Can we can we see what what action to take or what action they don’t take, they scroll at all to they immediately leave to they click on something that doesn’t open or that maybe opens and disappoints them. Those are things we can do with heat mapping and session recording often talk about them in the same breath. There’s a great free tool from Microsoft called clarity that does all of that for you with a huge advocate huge fan. And there are others as well. There’s, you know, it’s crazy, there’s Hotjar but any of these tools can give us valuable information. Once we have a hypothesis, as you said, once we have a hint or you know, a thought that something might be wrong, or that something might be going really well. It’s not always, you know, have to
Kate Toon:
be negative doing Yeah.
Kevin Indig:
Exactly, exactly. Doesn’t have to be a problem that needs to be solved sometimes just understanding what good looks like.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, and you know, I’ve I’ve done a lot of heat mapping work when I was working in UX and little things that people don’t realize that eyes, for example, are very often drawn to faces on pages. So having eyeballs looking at you, ideally your eyeballs not just a random pair of eyeballs, you know, breaking content up from left to write giving them the eye, you know, space to move around the page and white space. You know, I have very long sales pages and people are really like, you know, long sales pages are terrible, but They work. But then I worked on solutions to give the people who don’t like the scroll the option to just jump down to where they need to go. So you know, I noticed in my heat mapping software on the recipe page, I have a little mini micro now that has FAQs and pricing, the number of people who just jumped to pricing, because that’s just what they want to know. And sometimes price is the defining factor in a purchase, you know, you know that it’s good, you know, you want to do it. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have two grand right now you don’t have two grand, and that’s the end of it. So you know, I didn’t have that nav for a long time. But when I added it in conversions went up. Because it was easier for the people who knew what they wanted, they had the money to just buy the goddamn thing, rather than scrolling through everything. So yes, you’re right. It’s not just about finding flaws, but finding what’s, what’s working as well. And I will add links to all those tools into the show notes for this episode. Now, you know, we talked about metrics, obviously, these, these heat mapping software is amazing. One of the things that we use a lot is Google Analytics, but GA for God, I don’t like it very much, Kevin, I’m gonna say it’s made it tricky. I feel for some people to understand the metrics myself included, what reports should we be looking at to review experience and satisfaction and engagement? You know, where should we be looking?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, I share your pain about year four, by the way. I think I’ve been pretty vocal about my disappointment. It’s not going to I’m not going to, you know, be the dead horse. But yeah, doesn’t. It’s challenging in some ways. And other ways. There’s some interesting thoughts out there. And some of those are about out of the box engagement metrics, which I very much appreciate. So Google, for example, provides a definition of good traffic in GA for which they define as sessions longer than 30 seconds. And it’s not perfect, but it’s at least better than just sessions or entrances or pageviews, which comes come with their own challenges. So that’s, you know, that’s a good start. And so I would say, when it comes to the three factors, you mentioned, experience, satisfaction, engagement, different numbers, we should different reports, you should probably look at. But before we jump into some of these examples, one of the defining things about GA form is that it makes contextualized metrics much much easier, which is what I talked about before, right, so you have much more of a business intelligence dashboard, then rather than what we will use to happen in Universal Analytics. And that makes segmentation a lot easier. So one good kind of thing, one silver lining about GFR is that you know, you can you can slice and dice metrics much, much easier. So we talked about experienced a couple of things that were dimensioned a time on site, quite pre qualified, right, but by people who either have taken a certain action or have spent a certain amount of time already for satisfaction, it’s the completion of the user user journey. And none of the reports in GA four are valuable with before you define what that means. Right. So as I mentioned before, self conversion, high conversion newsletter, signups, you know, buying products, etc, etc. And then in terms of engagement, it kind of depends on what your main content is, as well. So are we talking about engagement for a blog article where something like scroll depth is, in my mind, a good precursor, even though people skim content, but we can solve the problem by segmented again, right. So how many people have scrolled all the way to the bottom and spend it as a minimum amount of time on the page? And then for engagement with any if, for example, ecommerce context? The question is, for example, are people scrolling through a picture of carousel? And how can we track such events and then measure them? So engagement? There is a bit more specific, based on what what the page is that people visit?
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I think and I think, you know, you may need to, if you’re listening to this going, Oh, my God, what the f, you may need to engage, you know, a GA for person to set up some of these goals and targets for you to, you know, explain some of these kinds of pivots that you want to measure this versus this, you know, you might need to get those set up, you know, talk to somebody who understands this, explain what’s important to you. And then they can set up J for to give you the data that you need. And as I said, you do get some interesting stuff out of just the plain insights. Now, this isn’t a question that I had pre prepared, Kevin, but I think it would be useful for the Layperson. Someone you know, who’s listening to this today and going oh, my God, I’ve never really thought about user experience before. What are some quick wins are some easy things. Yeah, we can either frame it as common mistakes sites usually make, or quick wins that sites can do today to just move their user experience along what do you think
Kevin Indig:
100% There’s so many things that I’ve come across my work. The number one thing that you know, maybe I’m personally invested in this little bit, but the one the number one thing that irks me ever time is when the fonts the font size is either way too big or way too small, or it’s kind of dark gray on light gray back off these kind of things just, it’s so bad and honestly that it could be the best content in the world I wouldn’t read it could be the, you know, I don’t know what like the the winning formula to becoming rich or whatever, I wouldn’t read it. So anyway, one size, massive offender, second, popups. Huge. I’m very sales averse in general. But I think even for the layperson, Nobody enjoys a pop up right when they get to a website. So whatever incentive you have discount newsletter, whatever it is, give people some time to digest and read through your content or triggered after people scroll, I don’t know, 75% with a page 50% with the page, or when they read when the repeat visitor right when they had at least one interaction with your site before, but don’t ask people to sign up for something. Right? When they come to your website, the first
Kate Toon:
thing, and that’s actually, you know, into Google calls them intrusive interstitials. You know, it’s actually a core part of, you know, the algorithm. And it’s like, I always, you know, refer refer to it, like, you know, you’re at a networking do. And Kevin marches up to you and shoves his business card in your hand, before he’s even introduced himself. You know, it’s like, Can you can you give me a minute, Kevin, can you calm your farm, let’s at least eat a mini sausage roll and chat for a bit before you try and shove something in my face. So, you know, I’m trying to think of the human human idea. I love the font one. The other thing for me, which I think is often forgotten is padding on text. So you know, the human eye, that why a books, I’m just gonna, you know, I’m doing what I’m doing this but for the video, human human books, because of course, there are animal books are only a certain width, because the I cannot connect with the next line. If it goes on over a certain width, we lose ourselves in the copy. And on websites, of course, we have to think about responsiveness. And hopefully we you know, we’re really considering mobile responsiveness because most people are viewing your site on a mobile these days. But often it all goes hula Lala, when we get on to the desktop version, and I’m on my giant mag, and the font just goes on and on and on and on. And then I try and find the next line. And my I just can’t connect. So making sure that your padding is working really well is important as well. Come on, let’s give it up. Give people a few more tips. What’s that we’ve done font, we’ve done pop ups, we’ve done padding, what else can we what can we tell them?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, you know, there’s a saying in Germany, which is, you know, don’t leave people standing in the rain. And what it basically means,
Kate Toon:
How do you say that in German, I want to know that you say,
Kevin Indig:
(Repeats in German)
Kate Toon:
Oh so good, carry on.
Kevin Indig:
Never heard that before, thank you. Anyway, it’s a party trick, So the beauty of this sense, is, you’re basically don’t want to leave people hanging. And what I see often is that there’s a poor user experience, because there’s no clear next step of what you want users to do. But you’ve created all this amazing content, you’ve put all this time in creating an amazing experience. And then what’s the what’s the next step? You scroll to that and there’s nothing there’s maybe some related articles on the blog, or maybe you know, I don’t know what but give people something to click on something to do, especially when they’re when they’re at this ready state. So have a call to action. Tell them explicitly what what do you want them to do? Or even you know, sometimes for for this is another pet peeve of pet peeve of mine. I see this in ecommerce all the time where there is a product that’s currently not available or currently out of stock. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Instead of you know, the store saying hey, leave your email here. We’ll let you know right away when when new inventory is coming in or leave your email. I’ll let you know right now when the next inventory is coming in. But it’s such a missed opportunity. So don’t miss your opportunity. So miss your shots to make people take the next step on your website.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that, don’t leave people standing in the rain at a dead end pages. It’s people like to be told what to do you know, that I often say if someone needs to scroll back up to the nav, you’ve lost it, you know, like, but I want to just give a quick tip on navs before I come to the final question, because again, I think people get with navigation. So they start off well. And then they add and they add and they add and they add and they add. And I think you have to understand that, you know, the idea of a navigation is to reduce overwhelm and reduced choice. So you know, I often say you know, maybe up to about 10 elements in an E commerce or maybe about eight on a service based business. It’s a rough rule of thumb, but people like rules of thumb, and then drop downs. If you’re dropping down and dropping down again and dropping down again, the navigation has ceased to be effective. You know, if I’ve, if I’ve got 72 categories to choose from, you have not done a job of curating your content into usable lumps for the for the reader. So think about the number of elements in your nav, think about dropdowns if your dropdowns becoming excessive, think about a mega menu instead, is that a better way of you displaying it? So there’s lots of things here. I’m just going to do a little plug for myself here. If this is all sounding overwhelming on the recipe for success, we have a super affordable mini template. It’s called the speedy website checklist. It’s not technical, it’s simply about 50 cents. Seven different usability UX checks you can do on your site. Some of the things that Kevin I’ve just discussed are on there. So really great way to just take a step back and look at your site objectively. And what I often recommend is you get someone else to fill in that little checklist for you, and then show you the terrifying results because it gets hard to see the problems with your own site after a while, don’t you kind of you get you get site blindness. And then you’re like, Oh, my God, like no one can actually click on that button. I never noticed that. So
Kevin Indig:
you bet you better have it all done.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, you need a fresh pair of eyes to look at it. So. So let’s wrap up with it with a general question. You know, obviously, you you know, you’re a bit of a thought leader in the SEO space. What do you think about SEO content in 2023? What should marketers be concentrating on?
Kevin Indig:
The number one thing is to realize what a high bar content takes these type these days, this is something that I realized once again, over the last couple of weeks, when I thought about my own content, to be completely honest with you, okay, you know, I have this, this newsletter, it’s called the growth memo. And I was very proud and excited about how fast it grew. And then a couple of weeks ago, it’s slowed down significantly. And, you know, I was looking, of course, first look into technical complications and issues, and all sorts of other stuff. And I came to the realization that content probably wasn’t that great the last couple of weeks, or months, you know, and, and then I published one piece that took a lot of work. And that resonated greatly. And then, you know, growth, Kim came back up. And so it just goes to show that the bar for content is incredibly high, because there’s tons of great people out there who create good content, and lots of companies who are willing to put down the money. So I don’t think it’s, you know, I don’t think it’s enough to ask yourself what best looks like, I think you have to ask yourself, What does best plus 10? Or maybe times 10 look like these days? How can I create something that is that makes other people say I don’t even want to spend the time trying to beat that because it’s it’s probably futile.
Kate Toon:
That sounds exhausting. But I know exactly what you mean. And it’s hard for the smaller people like us to compete with the big, you know, I service the SEO market, and I can’t compete with the marketing team of Yoast or SEM rush or a H refs to put together these 20,000 word guides. So if that sounds overwhelming to you, and you feel like you can’t compete with the big brands, remember that one thing that big brands don’t have is your personality, and your voice, and your insight and your experience. And Google’s all about EA T these days, you know, that experience, I never gonna believe a big brand over an individual. You know, there’s just something about personal story. And a little aside, you know, knowing that Kevin’s a DJ, I felt like I was a DJ, I like him a bit more. Now, you know what I mean? It’s and I think that’s when you can add stuff that the big brands can’t. So it may feel impossible to compete with content, but it’s not because you know, people like people, people want to relate to individuals. So we still have a chance I feel.
Kevin Indig:
We do we do. And it’s still possible with, you know, a personal blog or a YouTube channel. So I would rank or out, click some of the big ones, especially, you know, exactly, because of the reason you said you share your own experience. It’s very personable, very relatable. And sometimes, it’s, you know, I know, from from fitness, I’m very passionate about working out. And I’ve worked with different coaches over the years. And sometimes a coach just has the right language for things to click for you. Right? It’s just like, it’s just speaks your language. Maybe it’s German. So anyway, I totally agree with you. Yeah,
Kate Toon:
it’s you know, it’s that idiom, it’s that that turn of phrase, that tone of voice? Why do we like some people and not others? Why do we like some brands and others, sometimes it’s really hard to put your finger on. So, you know, we’re talking about user experience. And I think building that trust in that relationship is part of the user experience, you know, not just mansplaining the facts in nice bullet points with some good infographics. But adding some personality, I think that can be part of the user experience. I could probably do a whole nother episode on that, Kevin. But we will finish up there. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re going to include links to all your various bits and bobs, but where can people connect with you? Where’s your what’s your favorite social media channel? Where can people find out more about Kevin?
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, thanks so much again, for having me, Kate. This was a pleasure. Very, very great conversation. My favorite social channel that probably recently switched from Twitter to no LinkedIn.
Kate Toon:
I see all over LinkedIn, everyone’s everyone’s moving on to the LinkedIn baby. Even John Mueller has gone on to LinkedIn.
Kevin Indig:
Yeah, Twitter is imploding. Unfortunately, it’s a shame. I love Twitter, and it’s kind of dying.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, so LinkedIn is the best place to connect. I’ll add a link to Kevin’s LinkedIn channel. I learned a lot from your posts, and I’m super glad to have had you on the show. So Danke, and er, tschüss, I guess
Kevin Indig:
(Responds in German) Kate, Mach’s gut.
So that’s the end of this weeks show. I just want to take a moment here and say, I’ve been recording this show for a very long time, and I’ve had so many guests on. And I’ll be honest, sometimes I get a little tired of SEO, like I’ve talked about it for so long, and then you get someone who comes on the show like Kevin, and I feel all excited again and perky, so, thanks Kevin, that was so great. Anyway, I’m getting all gooey, and we don’t like that. So if you have any questions about user experience, as I said, go and grab my Speedy Website Checklist. It’s not expensive, and it’s really gonna help you cover off maybe 50 or 60 of the major things you need to think about, I’ll include a link to it in the show notes. You can also head to my I LOVE SEO group on Facebook, and I want to share a little review.
From Catootz: “On the pulse. This is the podcast for SEO copywriters who want to stay up to date on the latest SEO trends and info.
Kate’s access to industry and Google heavyweights, and her ability to break down concepts and make them understandable, is second to none.” Aw thank you, gosh, I’m gonna cry.
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