¶ 00:45 | Introduction
Hello and welcome. It's episode 29 of the 90 Day Website Mastery podcast, the perfect companion to our 90 Day Website Mastery program. We're excited to bring you even more valuable insights and practical advice to help you enhance your website's performance. Join us as we explore strategies to make your website work harder for you, reigniting your pride in your online presence. I'm here with my co-host Pascal Fintoni. You all right, Pascal? And very well, thank you very much. I've
had a quick look at the show notes. This is once again packed full with advice, practical kind of applications, but also, and we have to, we're gonna introduce more and more AI advice.
¶ 01:27 | Segment Overview
Absolutely. We've got 4 segments as always. We've got the you ask, we answer. We have website stories where we take an article and we dissect it and give you our reactions. We then move on to the website engine room where myself and Pascal bring an app or a piece of kit that's gonna make your life easier as a website manager or website content creator. And of course, the website call to action to finish off, which is 1 small change or adjustment that you could be
making to your website right now. And of course, Pascal, we have the Action Randomizer that we've added to our website. And that is all of our call to actions that we've suggested so far. Yes, this is our kind of second free gift. You know, we didn't wait long. You know, this is only episode 29, as you mentioned. So you've got the ebook to begin with, a selection of 50 top apps and tech that can really help you feel proud of your website again. And as you mentioned a moment ago, the action
randomizer. So the 2 activities you can do right now for your business.
¶ 06:58
Yeah, you'll find those in the show notes or just head over to 90-day website, Mastery.com. For now, let's start on our first segment, which is You Ask, We Answer. Now, this is interesting. So I was having a bit of a kind of discovery call with a prospective client a few days ago. And we were talking, of course, that I've more formally introduced AI training consultancy as part of my delivery. And question actually was really interesting. I thought I would ask you again to get
unique perspective, Johnny. So here it is. Can AI help me with my SEO campaign? Do you have any tips for me to use chat GPT or Google demo night to optimize my website content. And if you're only listening to the audio version, you won't be able to see Johnny literally jumping up and down at the prospect of sharing his advice about AI plus SEO. We could talk about this for a while. So I've decided that we're gonna give ourselves a brief and we're only going to focus for
this episode on on-page optimization. And then next time, you know, I can explore off-page optimization, the other facet of SEO. But here it is on-page optimization, with everything that comes with it, can AI help with that element of your SEO campaign? What say you, Johnny Ross? I think AI has changed SEO. I really do. I mean, I was joking with you in the green room just then. ChatGPT has been down for 2 and a half hours this morning across some worldwide users. And it's
felt like my right arm has disappeared. I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't use it for absolutely everything. But I certainly use it as a colleague. I use it as someone I can brainstorm with. I use it as someone that I can go off and perform research, analyze, and enhance my thinking. So it's being able to tap into a team of different people, different
experts. So I think the way it's changed SEO is from an on-page point of view is being able to analyze current content, to analyze data in terms of traffic across the website, in terms of what pages are engaging and what aren't. So you can use a lot of the GA4 data and input that into AI tools. Not only that, you can use it for keyword research, for finding out FAQs, people that are particularly asking questions. So thinking about your target
audience. In fact, even just thinking about your target audience, you can use AI to define who your target audience is, be really targeted, really tap into some of their pain points and then start using AI to find out what questions they're using to Google. And then thinking about how you can structure some of that content on your page. And I've not even got into some of the technical side yet. I mean, there's just so much that AI can do to enhance your SEO.
I love the way you've kind of described it as a team. And that's tough because listen, all of us, you and I included, we spent a part of 3 decades using a search engine where we punch in A3456 words maybe if you get a bit fancy, and then you have to wrestle with the search results. And here we're having conversations and it's not as it sounds.
You know, people, you know, train individuals to put together the prompts or the briefs, as I prefer to call them, but decided to kind of almost split the different aspect of on-page optimization to a number of virtual assistant. I think it's very, very helpful because otherwise it could be quite overwhelming. And I've seen the situation where people ask actually quite a broad question or many questions at the same time. And then within seconds, there's a daily use of
information. Of course you've got to fact check and so on. But the point is, sometimes people put too much pressure on themselves because they don't break it down into meaningful tasks. And I think the idea of a team is very helpful. And think of it as they're gonna report back to you, not all at the same time. It's not like 5 or 6 people or barging in through the door of the office saying, boss, boss, boss, I want you to listen to
my bit about SEO. But I want to, because I will ask you to get into the technical side is, if, you know, as in when you listen to the series, when you come across information that you don't know that is new to you, then don't let that stop you. Literally use AR first as a form of self-study and to be educated. So I will ask you, Johnny, about schema markups because they are very, very important. They were part of the culture
action in the last episode. So if you don't know about schema markups or what they mean or even how they are kind of crafted, you can begin by being educated first and then bring, as I mentioned a moment ago, your audience profiling, bring your sales strategy and then ask for advice on can you give me some draft suggestions on how you would actually ride the schema markups for my business with that audience in mind and that
service? But what other ways would you say the technical side of SEO could be supported by AI? Well, Interestingly, take Schema as an example and take the plugin Rank Math, which is a highly optimized WordPress plugin for applying SEO onto your website and Schema markup, et cetera. What's really interesting, and I was having a bit of an experiment with ChatGPT. We were looking at how to implement some schema on a particular website, and we were looking at doing this through
RankMath. We're going back a tiny bit here, but we were looking at some of the user guides and the help guides and the knowledge base on RankMath. And whilst there was lots of step-by-step guides, I decided to just see what ChatGPT had to say. And what was really interesting was ChatGPT's output was a far simpler bite-sized step-by-step guide than
RankMath's own knowledge basis. So ChatGPT had sort of read everything that RankMath's outputs in terms of help guides and turned it into something that's actually even easier to understand. So there's so many ways that you can use it and it's really about understanding that. From a technical point of view, 1 of the things that's interesting currently is really analyzing and understanding the top 10 pages that rank for a particular phrase or a
particular keyword in Google. And I don't mean just by the content itself, but the structure of the content, the way the content is written. Is it written in first person, second person, third person? How's it structured? How's it answering that question? And trying to find patterns across those different pieces of content so that you can then produce something that clearly Google is
liking. So What are the commonalities between those 10 pages that rank on page 1 that then you can introduce into your content? What's interesting is some of the findings are remarkable in terms of structures that you just hadn't considered. I think that's 1 example of how you could use it. Now this section, so no, there's 2 questions. Can I help my SEO campaign? It's resounding yes. Tips on optimization, we've looked at on page today, we'll look at off page next time.
But if everyone, you know, just rethink about the experience of a visitor from the title you've chosen to the images you've chosen and whether they are optimized and obviously tagged correctly, the way you've structured and broken down the content, have you added media interest, all those things, you can be reflecting on it with a conversation style type support as opposed to, as you mentioned a moment ago, punching a search term, download a 20 page PDF and still be
no further forward in terms of taking action. So for me, AI can help with clarity, with understanding. It can help with critiquing what's there already, but also make you think about things that either you knew, but you've forgotten about. And that can happen because of knowledge, but also new ways of doing things. But for me, if I would begin with actually get that sales strategy reviewed and critiqued by AI to begin with. Have
you got that really, really perfect? And then by extension, do you have the right audience profiling and the naming and labeling of the product and services. Have you got that right? Begin with that strong foundation and everything else you
can apply. And if you find on-page optimization interesting, I would encourage you to seek out 1 of the webinars that we recorded, the 1 we launched, obviously, the 90-day website mastery program, where you and I go into quite a bit of deep dive on page and off page optimization. But time is against us sadly, and we have to move on to our next segment, the website stories.
¶ 17:02
Now this is an interesting selection. We normally go for an article, a podcast, a video, maybe an infographics that we can review you and I and kind of reflect what it means to be in charge of a website in today's economy. I chose this article almost by error. I had something else in mind altogether, but I thought, now I'll stick with it because actually on reflection, this will work. So the title is as follows, an article for
entrepreneur.com. This is the winning formula for starting a successful podcast. A matter of intention. I'm actually just sharing with you privately and go, well, let's review and let's make sure that we're doing everything we can for our audience in terms of being useful and helpful. So this obviously was written as part of a research exercise. The author is Sharon Shibu and she was helped by her colleague Melissa Malamut
as the editor. And listen people don't skip this section just because you have no plans of starting a podcast. I do believe Johnny this would be relevant for any form of content series, whether it's a blog article, whether you're gonna do video Q&As, even social media campaign with a particular focused theme. I think this will work well as a way of
reflecting. I keep saying that those website story selection, they feel like you should pass that around the office and then have a catch up with your colleagues. So this is a study that looked at the top 50 podcasts in the US. We need to be careful about cultural
differences and preferences. And they're looking for what do they have in common that may suggest that this could be a formula for success and we need to go with it with a more pragmatic, correlation and causation are very different things, but it's important to have a look at this. So In no particular order, and please everybody do follow the link in the show notes and read the article in full, the study found, Johnny, that the average length of the top podcast in the US was around 65 minutes.
Interesting. So of course some were shorter, some were longer. More than half, 60% of them had more than 1 host, so a bit of a duo or trio kind of experience. And in these 3 and 4 of those top podcasts had at least 1 guest on the show on a regular basis, providing a different way. So there's more about it, but I wanted to kind of focus on audience
profiling and audience preferences. So the vast majority of podcast listeners will use Spotify at 64% and then it's followed by Apple Podcast and a teeny teeny percentage of 6% for YouTube music. So I don't know, there's a lot of marketing about YouTube music, but beware the marketing when marketing doesn't mean to say that, you know, they're gonna take over the world. But to me, it's very important, but again, you're gonna go for a blog series, a video series to
understand about distribution. And this is where podcasts, I think, have a lot to teach everybody because when you do, when you write for the web, Johnny, and you publish on your website, or if you do a video, it's on YouTube, you still haven't solved the issue of distribution of that content, whereas podcasting does a much better job. But this is something that could be interesting. 70% of listeners go back to a show because their host offer
new information on new perspectives. And I have to say, I was almost like giving myself for a round of applause because that's what we do with this particular show. But bear in mind, all of you, with a new blog series or a new video series, it's about new information and new perspective. Very, very important. But I thought that was interesting. 36% actually would come back due to the host
expertise. So if you reverse it, Johnny, that means that you don't have to be an expert in what you want to be referring to or investigating, so long as you know your offer this in a way that is engaging. So that also kind of kills that demon for all my clients about, I'm not an expert, I can't possibly write about this. It's not a requirement. And then what reason would people actually tune
out of a podcast? There's a number of items listed in the article, but I wanted to kind of mention this 3 to you at the very end. If the podcast is overly scripted or rehearsed, then people tune out. If the host speaks in monotone voice, they tune out. And if they share lengthy or irrelevant anecdotes, they tune out. And that would be true for the written form. If you're writing a word that is very monotone, or back to your
point earlier, it's fully structured. It feels a bit too over-engineered, whether it's a video as well. And more importantly, you've got to share your stories and case studies that are relevant, or people will switch off. There's a lot more in the article. So we've got to thank again, the hard work from the team there, altamirror.com. But I thought for what it was, I thought, no, I've made a mistake. You shouldn't be part of the show. I think that this is actually very informative.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, that stat on 64% of podcast listeners are using Spotify. I mean, I think if you were to ask the majority of people, they'd have said the answer was Apple. But I think we need to bear in mind that Spotify is a huge player in the market. And for me, business podcasts, if we certainly focus on business podcasts, I think a lot of people are wanting to learn. And so that backs up that 70% of wanting new information or perspectives. Interestingly, I liked how you flipped
the host's expertise. So 64% you could say don't actually have to be an expert in that topic. I think it's about how they engage, how they understand and how they interview the guest. Certainly if they're not the expert, I'm assuming they're going to have a guest who is the expert. So, so that would be about the, the interview skills and the sort of
engagement skills. And, but yeah, I think, I think ultimately podcast listeners are after learning, they want to better themselves, they want to better their business, So it's about how can you add value, which, like you've rightly said, you could take this into any form of content, whether it be audio, video, or blog series content. So how can you add value is really important. How can you teach people and give those sort of how-to, that helpful resourceful content.
That's what a successful podcast is all about. No, absolutely. And I think for me, it's back to the side there of on behalf of your audience, you've launched an investigation and you share your findings, you share your surprises, your disappointments and so on, which is why I see this thing about expertise is not always true. Now, for sure, when you want to do podcasts and to raise your brand and awareness and of course, your expertise, there will be some elements of
that. But when you talk about inviting a guest that will have expertise that would supplement yours, I think that's what we were talking about. Because the risk, of course, if you're too anxious to showcase your expertise, you will almost fall into this idea of being over-promotionally in terms of the delivery, the structure and the content. And That's 1 of the top reasons people will turn out of a blog series and the email newsletter, a podcast or a video Q&A.
Yeah, you don't want to be too salesy at all. Very important, avoid that self-promotion. It's about having a balance. I think it's important if you are giving your time away for free, I think it is important to have some promotion, but it's about having a real good balance and really considering why are these people giving time up to listen and what do they want to get out of this? So, you know, it has to be focused on the audience. Absolutely has to be focused on the audience.
¶ 21:22
Super, so everyone, let us know what you think of this very quick overview of the article. Please, please click on the link in the show notes and read everything for yourself. And yeah, what are your plans for the future in terms of your content series and what will you do a bit differently for the coming months? We would love to know about it, but for now, let's move on to our next segment, the
website engine room. Now, each time we share 2 apps, 2 software solutions or a piece of kit that can make life easier as a website content creator or manager. So Johnny, what is your selection? Well, my latest find in terms of AI powered transcription services, because there's a lot out there, but my latest find, I think is phenomenal in terms of the quality, but also the price is so low as well. So it's called Transcript LOL,
Transcript. LOL. It's an advanced AI powered transcription service that converts content from videos and podcasts into written text. And it's equipped to handle a wide range of media types, including videos, podcasts, interviews, webinars, and much more. And you can literally record anything. So it could be a podcast that's already out there, a video that's already out there, or it could just be something that you've recorded on your phone and you can very
easily transcribe that. You could, you know, recording a meeting even very easily transcribe that. But the, the, the brilliant thing about it is that it's built for podcasters. It's built for bloggers and it outputs, not just the transcript, but all sorts of different things from social media posts to repurposes that content. So blog posts, LinkedIn articles, email campaigns. Of course, you need to bring some human content and thought into this, not just using what it produces and sending it
there and then. But the amount of weightlifting it can take off in terms of the time it can deliver is unbelievable. What's exciting is that there's obviously a lot of services out there that would be more human intensive. Those agencies, they shouldn't fear AR, they should actually embrace it because they're going to be able to provide value-add services saying, well, the transcription will be done, client, let's move on to something more meaningful in terms of our services.
Let's take over the advanced SEO technique, let's take over the online PR side, because that bit that was so resource intensive and time consuming is now being shrunk down to just minutes, not hours in terms of units. So I'm really excited about what's happening. And you're right, there are so many options out there. Just find the 1 that works for you and make sure that you squeeze value because I have to be clients Johnny that have moved on to AI solutions but they use them very
superficially. So they pay their monthly fee but they've not really delve into the belly of the beast or even ask for a video demo from the account manager to get more value from their investment. So what is your app for this week? So this 1 came about following a bit of a coaching session with the clients. So we were reviewing the half year that was at the time of recording this episode, and we found some top performing articles and
landing pages and so on. And we were looking at ways to get more traffic to those pages as you would do on a bit of a tactic. We went through a bit of a match checklist on what makes a perfect blog article, there's such a thing. And 1 thing they were missing was quotes and citations from authorities and experts, if you will. So they were making a point or giving an advice or, you know,
recapping on an important issue. And I said that I will be just a finishing touch for you to be seen and heard being helpful by having done the research on behalf of your audience. A quote, a citation, a stat even that would supplement, you know, your argument. So I
found something called consensus.app. And what is interesting about consensus.app, it's almost like Google Books and all the others you mentioned on the show, but on turbocharged because you can ask a question as you would a search engine or you could even ask it back a yes and no question and what this AI powered platform does it researches all the papers and all the kind of research and journaling that has been done by experts to give you both sides of the algorithm,
which I think is very, very clever. So it's not just a, you say, yes, I know, it's a yes for some of those individuals here, but it's a no from them. And it's a maybe from the other. So you get a rounded view of the particular challenge or question that you have. And then you can literally copy and paste quotes, citations, you have the named individuals, you have links to their kind of white papers. It's 1, it's very, very
clever. I will save you a mountain of time and transform the experience of going through your blog articles and more. I'm really excited about that app. I think what a great gap in the market for being able to find content that backs up what you're saying or even challenges what you're saying. And finds people have been cited many, many times for a quote that they've made. Wow, an app that just instantly delivers it within seconds, again, using AI.
Absolutely. Yeah. So of course, do the fact checking, simple copy and paste on Google will suffice. But it will save you a lot of time. And I think what you do with AI solutions like yours, it inspires you to be more innovative, more ambitious. So I'm having that very different meetings with my clients where We actually are far more ambitious now about our content planning than a few months ago because of what's possible.
¶ 27:54
Totally. Let's move on to our last segment, which we always finish on. Of course, how can you have some content without the call to action? So it's the website, call to action. So now in addition to obviously trying out our call to action randomizer on the official website, we're gonna give you 1 more change or adjustment that you should be doing right now to make your website work harder for you. Johnny, what is your recommendation? So this episode, it's a content delivery
network, a CDN. If your website is not using a CDN, now is the time to implement it without fail. A CDN literally just speeds up your website from a global point of view. Even if you're not global don't be put off by what I've just said. This is local as well but also global. By implementing a CDN, it ensures faster user experience worldwide. Why? Because first of all, users expect things instantly. They're on a mobile device.
They want it there. And then if your website doesn't load, they will soon click that back button within a fraction of a second. But more importantly, Google could not have made it any clearer that websites have to be fast. This is no new news, but what is new news is that the number of websites out there that still don't use a CDN. And that is appalling. So if you want to be proud of your website, find out if you're using a CDN, and if not, speak to your web developer and get 1 implemented.
And back to our earlier comments, if you're not sure what that is at all, use AI to give you a bit of education, a bit of a breakdown, ask AI to give it to you in simple language as well, and then you can have a meaningful conversation with your developers, that's very exciting. Talking of conversation, My advice is around having a meeting with your colleagues working in sales and customer
service. It is very, very important to be sure that your website is truly supporting the business development activities and efforts of your organization. And there's nothing like organizing a meeting, have the drinks and the biscuits, whatever else works in your part of the world, and literally ask the simple question, what are we pushing actively and intentionally over the coming weeks and months? Products and services. I mean, organizations will have a lot on offer, but typically sales will
behave tactically. Maybe they're looking at time of the year, different seasons, different preferences, and maybe using data from historical kind of ordering. So there's always something that takes
precedence. So find out what is being pushed more over the coming weeks and months and make sure therefore that you've organized what I call spotlight content across the website, whether that's on a homepage, whether that's within reorganizing the FAQ section, whether it's reorganizing the blogs even by giving a kind of editors topics or choice of the month, whatever, but really make sure that this website is adjusting to the sales effort that would really
make a big difference. And I think in fact, make sure that you get more support for content ideas and beyond from people working sales and customer service. Internal comms, I mean, so important, but so many small businesses are so bad at it. So, you know, improve your internal comms. It's amazing what you can get out of it. We've focused a lot on AI. We're finding we're doing that a lot recently, but how can you not? You don't wanna be
left behind. AI absolutely has changed search engine optimization, changed it for the better, changed it to make it so much easier, so much quicker, but also so much deeper in terms of the analysis, in terms of the data, in terms of the implementation and the changes that you can make. AI is making it easier to get yourself higher on that Google ladder. We talked about successful podcasting. It's all about having engaging podcasts, podcast, none of this monotone, none of
this talking over each other. This is about helpful resourceful content because people are wanting to learn, they're wanting to be inspired, they're wanting to find out something new. And don't forget that the majority of people for some reason are on Spotify, which is very interesting. As always, we've given you a couple of apps and a couple of call to actions to start you feeling proud of your website again.
Thank you very much for this recap. And I must once again remind everybody about our free ebook about the 50 top apps and tech for your website. And of course, the call to action randomizer. It's quite fun. You get to pick an action for the day and then get on with the work with your team. That wraps up episode 29 of the 9 Today Website Mastery podcast, your audio companion to the 9 Today Website Mastery
program. For more information, visit 9 today, marketingmastery.com where you can book a discovery call with either myself or Pascal. It's goodbye for now. We'll leave you with a fun video and audio montage to enjoy whilst you review your notes and actions and take those action and take those steps forward. Please do subscribe. Leave us a review. It would mean a huge amount. Let us know what you think of the show. Tweet us, or should I say X us? No, I don't see X us.
Tweet us. Let us know on LinkedIn. But more importantly, leave a review. Let us know and let other people know what you think. It would make a huge difference to us. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the video or the audio montage, depending on whether you're listening or watching. Take care. Bye. Hey! I'm gonna make it I'm gonna make it I'm gonna make it