Hello and welcome. It's episode 35, choosing the best hosting, boosting SEO with AI and of course some essential website tools as well. This is the 90 day website mastery podcast, the perfect companion to our 90 day website mastery program. As I said, it's the 35th episode. 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. We want you to feel proud of your website. In fact, web proud, Pascal, is that right? Well, indeed, that's a term that we're going to be mentioning a few times because we're a bit of a surprise in the kind of offering for our viewers and listeners. And listen, episode 35, I'm still a little surprised.
It's time that there's more to talk about and there's more to explore in that kind of fast-paced, fast-track way of making sure that you're making wise decisions about how to use your time to make your website have a greater impact for your business, for your audience, but also for you to really feel proud when you share that website address. Yeah, absolutely. We always have four segments to each episode.
We have the You Ask, We Answer. We have website stories where we have a look at perhaps an article that we found and we
dig deeper into it. We go to the website engine room where myself and Pascal share perhaps an app or a piece of kit that's going to help you as a website manager make your life easier perhaps you're a website content creator or manage your website and we always finish with the call to action what content cannot have a call to action where we give you one change or adjustment that you should be making to your website right now so as i said we do start with you ask we answer and that's
where we take lots of different questions that you've asked over different periods of time and we try and focus on one that we think is going to help the most to you guys, the people that are listening, the people that are watching. And by the way, let us know if you're listening or watching, get typing away, clicking buttons, letting us know what you think and what questions you've got. But let's move into You Ask, We Answer. Now, this question for episode 35 is
fascinating to me. So this came about during a recent kind of consultancy session with a client where they were asking me to review a proposal that I received from the web design agency. And as you go through the different kind of stages, which you and I would be very familiar, we've covered them in previous episodes, at the end, you always have the additional cost around hosting and maintenance. And the client reacted
saying, oh, that seems high. And actually, I thought, well, I don't think it is, but that's obviously part of different experiences. And I said to him, but that must be because they are suggesting a dedicated hosting. And they looked at me thinking, what do you mean? Is it not just hosting? I said, no, there's different ways in which you can obviously explore hosting. And typically, the conversation is either a shared hosting service or a
dedicated hosting service. And suddenly, myself having to explain the difference between the two, the pros and cons and so on. And I thought, you know what, as a little kind of challenge, as they say where I come from, I will ask Johnny. Ashley, your position on the difference between shared and dedicated and advantages and potential drawbacks to watch out for. What say you? So, I was always very much against shared. Actually,
let's take this a huge step back. I was always pro-shared because it was so cheap. I mean, it was brilliant. You could get, you know, I mean, you could get such cheap hosting and you still can, to be fair. But I think it's a really good point because most small businesses, you know, a lot of the types of businesses that we talk to on a daily basis, don't really consider what hosting actually is and the impacts of some of the decisions that are being made.
And ultimately, shared hosting, very simply, you are sharing a server, whether that be in the cloud or whether it be virtual or whether it be physical, you're sharing a server with other websites. Dedicated, you have your own server, again physical or virtual, where it's just your website on that server. And historically, from an SEO point of view, there would be huge concerns about the other websites
that are on that server. And so from an SEO point of view, it could have an impact from a speed, from a reliability, from a virus and malware point of view, lots and lots of different things. Now, the creme de la creme is to go dedicated, but it can be very expensive. You sort of get what you pay for as well. So, you know, dedicated service could be anything from, let's say, £50 a month all the way up to 500 maybe even a thousand pound a month depending on the type of website or the
server that you need. So it can be quite pricey but again going for a cheap dedicated server actually isn't quite as good as going for an expensive shared server now. So this is a difficult question to answer and I think the key thing really is not to just buy hosting without really understanding what it is you're buying. And if you're going down the shared route to at least have a good idea of who else is on that server and who's managing the server, I think that's probably the most
important thing. And if you're going down the dedicated route, a cheap dedicated server actually isn't always great. So yeah, I've just given some thoughts there, Pascal. I don't know if you want to challenge or ask any questions, but it's more about just understanding what it is you're buying. And for me, therefore, the conversation I had with a client was to try and invite them to imagine what this could be like. And essentially, I went into the realm of a shared office versus
your own office. Because with a shared office, you get occasionally additional services that can really help you out at the lower cost because you share essentially the maintenance and services. with your own office. Sometimes you have to be responsible for some of the maintenance of parts of the building and so on. So what you need to do really is
look at the contract. And even though this is done via your web design agency, ask them to share with you the terms and conditions and the services, what's included, what's excluded, and Listen, I know that some of it is particularly dry and optically interesting, but it will have a bearing on the performance of your
website. And I think you're right. There was certainly horror stories back in the days where people had shared hosting with websites which were either a very, very different type of activities and sectors, all the way to gambling and more. And that dedicated, sorry, that shared server was then blacklisted or sought by the search engine, and you could be lumped into that.
Now, for me, it's very much, you know, because you could go for, let's say, the dedicated service, but actually you're paying for a service that you don't need fully. It's a bit like, you know, having your own office, and then it's too big for you, so to speak. And vice versa, if you have a shared office, you almost are bound to the limits of space and so on and so
forth. So I was kind of making some suggestions, but I did ask my go-to assistant, Perplexity, to remind me of some of the things that you should be thinking about. if you're going to go for shared service. And to me, it's about this idea of clutter, almost. So ask and investigate how you can cache, for example, some of the files that people are
accessing on a regular basis. And one thing that was mentioned about perplexity, which I've forgotten, I shouldn't have because you mentioned it in a recent website call to action, is that content delivery network CDN You don't have to understand it much more than asking your design agency, what do we do about this? Optimize the code and the content. One thing that was recommended as well is don't keep too much of, for example, media files that you don't need at all.
WordPress is really, really tempting to use it almost like the busy inbox where you don't delete anything. So if you're using WordPress or any other, don't keep media files you don't use, don't keep like 10 different versions of the same article. So, you know, that kind of clutter can really help the performance of a shared service. But the old optimization is very important. But the number one question that I would ask you to ask your agencies and the hosting providers is around how
often do they keep this software? that they need updated and used to be given a log for that. And if you go for shared, one that I nearly forgot, but perplexity reminded me, particularly for mobile phone, you know, ask for the implementation of the Accelerated Mobile
Pages, AMP. It's kind of old hat now, you know, it's been mentioned by Google for many, many years and we take it for granted, but for you, as the business owner and the ultimate owner of the website, asking those questions can reveal that there are some ways and means for the shared service to perform better. But also, conversely, make sure that you ask the questions, I pay for the DK server.
Looking at the past 12 months, how we performed in terms of demand on the server, and am I paying for a bigger office than I need? all very good points. And in fact, the optimization points, I mean, I'd suggest to be perfectly honest, if you've got a WordPress website, even if you're on dedicated, you should be doing those optimizations as well. So more importantly, challenge your agency, challenge your hosting provider, and make
sure you know what you are buying. Let's move on to website stories. Now in this part of the show, Joni and I share our reactions, our views, our kind of comments on the specific piece of content. It could be an article, it could be a podcast, a video, an infographic. And today we're going for an article from Search Engine Land. It's been a while since we mentioned them on the show. Joni and I love SEO, so of course we would be
consulting their content regularly. This was written by Julianne McCoy, a founder of firstmovers.ai, and the title is as follows. AI SEO, how to be visible in Google, AI overviews, chatbots, and large
language models. And you and I have had this conversation pretty much from the get-go when these AI summaries started to kind of worm their way into the search engine results, primarily Google, now they're all doing it, but also this idea of a near future, perhaps even present now, where people spend longer on chat GPT, copilot, Gemini, perplexity, and now meta AI. More about this in a moment.
where they get the information they need without having to access, to begin with, search in your result, but also without clicking on the link to access your website. So there is a future of that kind of zero-click behavior that we've known about for a while. Now this article is great because it breaks things down into Very understandable elements of what to do about this AI SEO, the appeal and popularity of the AI summaries, and then
what to do about it. But just to begin with, to get your reaction, AI summaries, do you like them? Are you worried about the impact on website traffic? Um, there is a concern over website traffic for sure. Uh, as a user though, I do like them. Uh, and so it's, uh, that balance really. Um, and, um, you know, potentially, uh, the mitigation is plowing more money into things like Google ads, which ensures your visibility on, uh, on the SERPs pages, um, or just optimizing to
get into those AI results. So, so yes, I like them, but like with everything, it does bring a challenge and it just keeps, it just means that we just have to continuously be at the top of our game, thinking about it from a technical SEO point of view, but also considering other channels. For example, as I said, Google ads and making sure that we're actually at the top of the page, nevermind what
results are being shown. And for me, the best way to illustrate what those AI summaries are, they're to me like mini search engine results pages. They stand the precursors, like the exact summary of what's actually going to be below. So in a way which, obviously, this article is studying, it's these examples. There's research-based kind of illustrations and
more. So Julia is kind of trying to suggest that actually, if you think about it, there's something comforting, which is that those AI summaries or those AI-driven search results are totally reliant on what is currently available on a search engine database. So there is logic in what's happening here. And there's a significant overlap between the traditional, I mean,
is that correct? traditional search engine experience, funny me like a couple of years, and the AI powered one, and she's sharing four elements to kind of look into. I'm going to go through them rather rapidly. Please follow the link in the show notes. We have the article for you to consult. But number one, continue to do what you're doing. to rank well on the traditional Google search engine results pages. So we're talking about high
quality, authoritative content. Do not neglect technical SEO and schema markup if you don't know what it is. Ask, study, ask AI to give you a summary. And importantly, do optimize on branded content. Don't just do some vague notions of what you do. Really make people learn about the language of what you do. Number two, be really intentional in targeting what people seek out, which is really more something to do with information than making a purchasing decision. It's almost
like an 80-20. So what's called, you know, commonly top of funnel keywords should be part of what you do because they do appear very frequently on AI-powered summaries. Number three, almost like a close cousin to what we mentioned a moment ago, go for relevant queries and long-term keywords. So for example, you know, people say the vast majority of people look for, for example, how to choose black shoes for
men. That's the full sentence. And now with AI Summary, people can write a 10 line kind of query as opposed to just black shoes. So go back to what you've done with your optimization and extend the relevancy in terms of queries. And then the number four, it's again an extension to what's been mentioned, which is the idea of match your content effort, but also I would say by extension implicitly design images, videos, and so on, match
all of that to the search intent. So if someone is looking for how to do something, then there has to be copy images, web page layout, and so on, that is matching that search intent. And as a reminder, There's two types of search intents in terms of what people do on the internet. They look for a specific website, we call this globally navigational intent. They're looking to buy something, transactional intent, but the vast majority want to learn something new, and that's called informational
intent. And do you have that experience on your website is part of the elements of reflection. So listen, AI overviews, the chatbots, the large language models, they're all kind of taking now and entering the world of search. And they're there to really provide ease and
convenience. And listen, I was pretty shocked when Google I.O. this year the seal of google student saying we're gonna make search so easy and so convenient you want to search anymore it was a bizarre phrase but the more you think about what's up in the more realize that that's true so they are some concerns they always in which you can you know kind of piggyback but ultimately. Right now, the logic and the practices are the same.
It may just be that you're being caught out because you've not done enough with regard to traditional SEO, if I'm going to use that term, and you've got to really now get down to getting on with taking action for those AI-powered search
experiences. Do you think there's an element, just reflecting as you've been talking there, And do you think there's an element from the likes of Google that are, how do we stop the leaky bucket of people moving to Ploplexity and moving to ChatGPT instead of using the traditional search engine where they make a huge amount of money from Google Ads?
And so do you think that, you know, I'm just reflecting and I'm thinking, is one of actually their biggest reasons of incorporating AI search into that search page, because they're trying to get people back to ensure that they can keep charging for adverts. Well, for sure. And listen, you know, it's all about, you know, who do
we keep on our properties? And with regard to, um, Google, you know, they have the whole ecosystem of Google maps of Google search of Google images and YouTube and so on, but they want to keep you on their properties on their land. And they don't really want you to move elsewhere. And, and I think what's interesting for them is the threat was primarily social networks, but now we have independent platforms like a perplexity like chat GPT and a few others are going to come along
particularly national. So for example in France they have something called mistrial which is actually pretty good and so it goes on. So for me this idea of how do we kind of continue to evolve the search experience and we're always thinking from a business point of view but as a user if you have a simple question usually they are a simple question and you can give a quick summary with the ability to click on that link symbol that most people want.
And then, you know, within a few seconds, you kind of go, ah, brilliant, I kind of got what I needed here. And the beauty of being able to save those searches for a more deep dive kind of, you know, interaction, I think is interesting. But you're right, it is competing for our time budget. You know, the average, certainly in the UK, person spends, to the tune of 69 hours a day online. And they want that the vast majority to be on their
platforms. It just reminds me of Google trying Google plus trying to be the king of, uh, of social networks, but failing, but the Gemini Gemini Gemini is doing well. Uh, and, uh, and I, I am embraced with, with, um, uh, AI on search pages.
Um, I think the key points for me, uh, like I've already said, and, and, and like the article talks about, uh, focus on best practices, focus on, uh, top of the funnel keywords, um, and, uh, and, and really consider, um, you know, what you would normally do from an SEO point of view, make sure you're doing that stuff. So, uh, uh, a good topic. Let's move on to our third segment, which is the website engine room.
Next segment of the show, we select two apps, two software solutions, maybe a piece of kit that can make life easier as a content creator and website manager. So Johnny, what is your selection for episode 35? So we've been talking a lot about AI and this one is AI videos. Now you know this is becoming a bit scary in the fact that you are starting to potentially see videos online that are made with AI but
you don't necessarily know. And one of the tools that came up in a number of conversations was SendPotion.com. SendPotion.com. As we say, all the links will always be in the show notes. It's a way to make AI videos from text in your own face and voice. You can customize video backgrounds, turn screen recordings to AI videos, and much more. It's worth having a play with just to get a feel for where things are going and how easy some of this is. Now, you know, we always
advocate for authenticity. We advocate for being real, for really good content. But just like we talk about AI as in chat GPT, Gemini, perplexity, we talk about it being a digital assistant. We talk about it how it fits in the workflow. It's all about what you say to it, how you use it, where you use it in the workflow. Likewise, AI videos have a place, and it's just about how you use them, and it's about being authentic with them. But yeah, SendPotion,
it's worth having a look. They have a free version, and their pricing isn't too bad. From a lot of the videos I've seen produced, it's worth having a play. Thank you very much. And listen, you know, part of what we do with regard to the website engine room is to ask you to have a play to experiment, because this is the precursor of maybe the next evolution of
what this platform is all about. And, you know, I said this in the masterclass that I host on AI and digital marketing, this idea of becoming a skilled operator of the tools of the time. And I think ScentPotion, at first you can go, well, why would I want to have a copy of myself? with my voice and my face out there. I said, well, maybe because in six months time, you're going to discover a very valid use case about this, but this time you're ready to email. And I think really
my selection is a bit like this. So Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and many more. has released their kind of large-range model. So a competitor to GPT, to Gemini, to Copilot, and the others, meta.ai. So what I've done, I've done the experiment where I've literally copied and pasted the same prompts, the same briefing, the same instructions that I have recorded on the other platform. And I have to say, the
results are better. It's more conversational, which we understand coming from the social network. It's a bit more detailed. It's a bit more kind of keen to help out. But that's what happens when you wait for the others to get on with their stuff. You can kind of look at what they've been up to and then release you on one. But there's also from the conference that was delivered a few weeks ago now, where Meta are really seeing things like the smart classes and VideoGen, which is
their version of text-to-video. So we're going to see, again, a lot of platforms fighting for our attention and our budget. But I thought meta.ai would be a very, very helpful additional team member as part of the digital assistant. And I've also put in the show notes, Johnny, a link to the official website for meta.ai. So meta.ai takes you right into the belly of the chatbot, so to speak, but ai.meta.com, you can spend some time to study what they
have in mind. Interestingly, they are thinking of creating also some AI characters. So a real kind of virtual representation of your system. I wonder whether there's a link between that and SendPotion, where maybe the future is not so much a copy of you, Johnny, but a mascot of sorts that the business has adopted that can be part of the experience with customer interaction. Thanks very much, Pascal. Yeah, let us have a play.
Let us know what you think. Our final segment, we always finish with the website call to action. Now this is about the one change or one adjustment you should be making right now to your website. Jonny, what is your recommendation? So really simply break down your forms, make them easier to fill out, add trust signals and pre-tick marketing opt-ins. So with clauses making it clear that you're following privacy policies and TNCs, but what I'm talking about here is contact forms or any type of
form that you've got on your website. How could you break it down and how could you take people on a journey and get them to fill that out and I think a bit of it is using behavioral science. I think it's about the wording, I think it's about adding those trust signals, I think it's about just simply breaking it down and making it into a workflow. Now, I do not advocate these guys whatsoever. However, Ocean Finance, the credit card, please do not apply and I absolutely don't advocate
them. However, Whoever is in their marketing department knows how to create a really, really good form. So if you Google, apply for an Ocean Finance credit card, I'll put the link in the chat notes. As I said, please don't apply. And this is not what this is about. But have a look at their so simple form. It's so clever. The wording, it just, It breaks the whole thing down. The wording's extremely clever. It starts using the data that you're putting in. It starts straight away
using in some of the next pages. And as I said, it adds lots of trust signals as well. So it's using behavioral science. It's breaking the forms down. Have a look at Ocean Finances, apply credit card, and that will be my call to action. Break your forms down, get more people converting. It's all about conversion rates. What's yours, Pascal? Well, I want to break things down also, but I want to talk about the regular content marketing or the
content ideas meeting. And I want people to kind of almost rethink and reset the agenda for that meeting. But to begin with, I think it's wholly appropriate for this to become the AI and content marketing meeting. I would suggest a couple of hours a month is probably what you need to think through what you're going to be doing for the coming month or quarter. So I would say six elements to your new agenda of sort. Number one is you're celebrating your wins. People do
that often enough. So what's worked well, you know, what are we kind of getting in terms of commercial wins, but about operational wins, but also technological wins. So can we list all those wins? Because in there, it could be the spark of an idea, which is for the second item on the agenda, which is let's get creative. Any new content ideas, questions that our customers have been asking recently, any new formats or even events we should be tapping into. So that kind of takes care
of the part of the meeting. The next thing should be exploring AI tools and apps and collectively with your, you know, with your teammates, explore what's working well, what's not working and being them, but also any new tools that we should be testing, perhaps recommended by Johnny and Pascal. Number four on the agenda, Then schedule that content and look at themes and topics and ideally look at the next
quarter if you can. But you should also spend some time, which is item number five on the agenda, on just some notional ideas of how you're going to spread the word. Because I think people, Jonny, spend still a lot of time on the content creation, but not on the promotion of that content. So then it lives on your website, no one knows about it, it goes on social media, we don't get enough shares. The spreading
of the word is very important. And then the final item is when you assign the task and the deadline, ask yourself the question, can AI help with the productivity and keeping it on track? And I think this AI content marketing meeting needs to be just a bit more broken down now than it is now. Six suggestions, they are in the show notes for you to review. I think that's going to make a big difference. Fantastic. What great call to actions as
always. We have found ourselves in many recent episodes talking lots about AI, but rightly so. Like we always say, it's a great digital assistant. It's all about embracing it, but it's about understanding how to get the most out of it. We talked about hosting. virtual shared servers or dedicated servers, find out, do you even know what your website is hosted on? That would be a question. And if you don't know the answer, start asking some questions because I imagine that a
few of you don't. And if you do know the answer, start challenging them in terms of when was the software last updated, what other websites are on there, et cetera, et cetera. And we've covered some great apps and tools and some good call to actions. It's a time to go through your show notes and reflect and bite-size this down and start putting some of these things
into place. And of course, visit the 90-day website, masterymarketing.com website, where you can get There's an e-book full of lots of the tools that we've gone through. And we have the action randomizer, which gives you those bite-sized call-to-actions. So if you've got a little gap on a Friday afternoon, roll the dice on our website, and it'll give you a bite-sized little thing that you could go in action right now on your website. Pascal, great episode. Thank you
very much. You reminded me of the mantra of, I want to bring back to the four. It's all about very simple things done very well, very often on, on that note, you couldn't have said it any better. Thank you so much for joining us. Please do reply on our social medias. Let us know what you think. give us some topics to discuss. We really enjoy helping you start making you feel proud of your website again. Thanks for joining us. We will see you all soon. Take care. Bye-bye.