031 – Taking A Look At Your Client’s CRO

00:01.59
Jeff
Hello and welcome to the WPSEO show. I am your co-host Jeff joined here by my co-host Pete who made me do the intro today. Hey Pete, how’s it going?

00:10.10
peteeveritt
Hey, I’m all good, Jeff, how are you?

00:11.90
Jeff
Did I have it long enough before I kicked it back to you? You tell I’m not comfortable doing this.

00:16.08
peteeveritt
Yeah, we should maybe say for the ah for for our avid listeners that ah we did start doing these kind of alternately, and then I’ve twigged that every time we get to the start of a show and I say, hey, do you want to do the show? Do you want to do the intro or should I do it? Jeff just always says, no, you do it, it’s fine. So I’m i’m reestablishing the alternating order here. So I informed him that he was doing the intro today.

00:42.30
peteeveritt
And you’ve done it.

00:42.56
Jeff
some Yeah, there’s just 45 seconds of us talking about but that’s fine.

00:42.86
peteeveritt
Look, we haven’t had to rerecord it.

00:48.36
Jeff
You know, no Pete has sometimes you have to treat your business partner and your friends kind of like your children. And that’s what Pete’s doing to me right now. He’s making me do the uncomfortable thing.

00:55.85
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, push you over the edge.

00:59.95
Jeff
Put putting me out there.

01:01.31
peteeveritt
Look, you’re either going to sink or swim. And and I know you’re not going to sink. It’s just you you you need a bit more confidence with these things. Just, you know.

01:09.53
Jeff
I do. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that. Okay. This is totally off topic, but I have to chime in right now because I’m so, I guess proud is the right word here. My oldest is 17 and she just got her first job yesterday.

01:21.37
Jeff
And this is, so this, you just, you set me up on the same path.

01:21.71
peteeveritt
Wow.

01:24.01
Jeff
I’m like, this is exactly what I was taking yesterday when I was just so so proud of, she went out and got it. And, uh, you know, this is the first one and she’s been trying for a little bit moves. you know, putting various levels of effort into it at times, you know, because it’s it’s scary. um But she got this one all on her own, and she is now going to be selling pumpkins at the pumpkin patch for Halloween season.

01:43.05
peteeveritt
Oh, check that out. That’s amazing.

01:45.39
Jeff
That’s a it’s a great first job, right?

01:45.30
peteeveritt
That’s amazing. This this also means this also means that in so in September, that means you get your first board and lodging payment, doesn’t it?

01:54.96
Jeff
We said after she’s 18 and graduates high school, there is definitely going to be some reframing of the responsibilities in this house. I joked for years that she wouldn’t be kicked out, but she would be getting pushed out. But I’ve looked at how much it costs to rent a place these days, and I’m not sure kids are leaving anytime soon anymore.

02:15.44
peteeveritt
my My dad listens to this show. ah He doesn’t understand a lot about what it’s about. So hey dad, if you when when you get to this one.

02:22.25
Jeff
Hey, Dad.

02:24.41
peteeveritt
But when I was at uni, ah my room was my room up until the Christmas holidays in my third year.

02:34.85
peteeveritt
And then I stayed in my room for one last time. And when I went home for the Easter holidays, it that that room was then now then known as Mum’s office. And the bed had gone, the desk was in, and I was in the guest room, and that was very much a, yeah, you’re not coming back.

02:52.86
Jeff
They waited no time. huh

02:54.38
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So ever since then I’ve been a guest in my parents’ house.

02:59.74
Jeff
when i When I moved out, I was 18, I graduated high school. I moved out and then my parents like sold that house and just packed up all the stuff. Because I left behind so much stuff. But they just conveniently decided to move to another house. And so yeah they pretty much packed my stuff up and either sold it or threw it away. I’ve never seen any of my baseball cards from my youth or anything.

03:21.70
peteeveritt
Ah, well, there we go.

03:22.97
Jeff
Thanks.

03:23.37
peteeveritt
There we go. Well, they they actually this discussion, because this really wasn’t planned. You see, you can do intros. This is it.

03:29.68
Jeff
I try.

03:29.90
peteeveritt
An intro is, you know, but trying to do something that’s a little bit, a little bit kind of off on a tangent to the main topic, but that can segue nicely.

03:30.16
Jeff
i’m try

03:40.34
peteeveritt
And we can segue here, because we’re actually talking about human usability a bit today.

03:44.30
Jeff
There you go.

03:44.94
peteeveritt
And what we’re now talking about is how your parents made their house non-human usable for you.

03:51.65
Jeff
by selling it. i so I suppose by definition that would be correct.

03:58.04
peteeveritt
See how I did that?

03:59.20
Jeff
yeah

03:59.10
peteeveritt
It’s it’s like, seamless.

04:01.54
Jeff
True professionals here everybody.

04:02.37
peteeveritt
so

04:02.94
Jeff
True professionals.

04:04.78
peteeveritt
Can you tell yet? We can’t. So um today we’re going to talk a bit around the topic of conversion rate optimization or CRO.

04:16.18
peteeveritt
um And the key thing to mention right at the top of the show is that neither me or Jeff are professing to be CRO specialists.

04:26.56
Jeff
New.

04:27.55
peteeveritt
That’s not us at all. um However, we’ve been in this game a little while and we’ve seen a lot of websites and we’ve fixed a lot of stuff that has proven to but sort of lead to reasonable results and We thought it’d be a good topic to sort of share about on the show, because it’s not something that we’ve had, we’ve we’ve kind of covered particularly, and so CRO and SEO really are kind of linked together.

04:55.07
peteeveritt
You can get all the traffic that you want, but if somebody can’t convert when they get to the page, then it’s all kind of in vain anyway.

05:00.86
Jeff
Yeah, here we are.

05:01.43
peteeveritt
So here we are.

05:04.36
Jeff
Yeah, a lot of these things are kind of funny. You’ll you’ll probably, if if this was a list, right? If we publish this list in a blog post or something, you’d go down these and go, oh yeah, obviously, yeah, obviously. But do you know how many times these things get forgotten about or just, you know, through the nature of, I don’t know, plugin updates or some, you know, things happening over a couple of months or years or whatever that, you know, something breaks and they’re small enough that they go unnoticed.

05:28.84
Jeff
But they don’t go unnoticed by the people visiting your website. you know I mean, this could um actually, this is a really good example, a perfect example. And this is a site that we inherited at SEO Hive. I forget the name. I’m not going even going to try to name it. But there was it was a big college. And they already had a good amount of traffic, like 20,000 visitors a month. and And just part of our audit, one of the things that came up was, hey, there’s a couple of broken links. And they were in the footer. So of course, the footer is on every single page and post on the site. And it was a big site. so there was literally thousands of them.

06:00.33
Jeff
I was going to say tens of thousands, but there wasn’t that many.

06:00.59
peteeveritt
Yeah.

06:02.75
Jeff
um And just by fixing one link, which took three minutes or something, you know but who knows it how long it was out there, their traffic increased that next month by 10,000 visitors.

06:13.70
Jeff
It was like a 25% increase in traffic or something, and it was already a substantial amount. And it was one of those things where you’re just like, wow, like five minutes of, you know, kind of using your, your, your brain and your eyes a little bit to look for an issue. Or honestly, that came up in an audit. So I don’t even want to take credit that we were some sleuths, but we fixed it, you know, and it makes an immense, immense improvement on things. You know, it can, it can make an immense improvement of things.

06:38.72
peteeveritt
Absolutely. where I had a site, this is no word of a a lie, last week, a new client site, a new client to us that had a site built within kind of last year, 18 months by a freelancer that lived locally to them, Elementa site.

06:55.95
peteeveritt
ah that had some of its own challenges, but the key thing was they’d, they came to me and they said, look, we, we basically had zero inquiries since this, uh, since this site went live. Um, so the first thing I did was went to try and submit an inquiry form and the form didn’t work.

07:12.11
peteeveritt
So that was why they hadn’t got any inquiries through their website because nobody could submit the flipping thing.

07:14.80
Jeff
Yeah.

07:18.33
peteeveritt
And it.

07:18.69
Jeff
That’s probably the most common one, honestly. that’s i i I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

07:21.98
peteeveritt
Yeah.

07:23.87
Jeff
When I say probably 80% of websites that we inherit for like maintenance or care or for redesign, their contact forms don’t work. like The vast majority of them, their contact forms don’t work, whether you know whether the form’s broken or an email issue or something like that, but most of them.

07:37.42
Jeff
It’s like, how long have you been trying to have customers contact you? I’m so sorry.

07:40.98
peteeveritt
Yeah. And and this this kind of gets right down to the crux of what CRO is, conversion rate optimization is, which is how easy is it for a user that doesn’t know this website to take the desired action on the site that’s going to help the the user get the outcome that they they want and for the business to get the lead or the sale or whatever the conversion metric is at the other side.

08:08.12
peteeveritt
In its most basic form, that’s exactly what CRO is. And it’s just a shame that so many people don’t view websites quite with that level of simplicity.

08:18.48
Jeff
Yeah, yeah. And you know, admittedly, i’m I’m sure we’ve both launched a site or two or dozens that may have had, you know, one of these things or a couple of like it it happens.

08:30.24
Jeff
And that’s why we’re talking about it, because I mean, all all the people we know make these mistakes. I’m not trying to bad mouth anybody, but it’s so common.

08:36.19
peteeveritt
Oh, yeah.

08:39.65
Jeff
and maybe I don’t know. Maybe I’m being mean by saying making these mistakes. They are omitting these checks. They are they are, you know, letting these kind of slip under the rug or or things like that.

08:48.97
peteeveritt
ah And, you know, we’ve all done it. We’ve all sent sites live and left that discouraged search engine box ticked. its It’s little things like that. But unfortunately, it’s the attention to detail that that can have the biggest impact. You know, if you went and if you went and bought a car from the showroom and it had no wheels on it, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t say, oh, yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll sort that later. You know, it’s it it’s kind of that level of thing.

09:14.34
peteeveritt
You know, if you had no van door handles, you couldn’t get in, you know, it whatever. It’s just it’s the it’s the little bits, but they’re often the most practical things that can make a difference to the to the client company.

09:29.58
Jeff
ah you You mentioned earlier that we’re not you know CRO specialists by any means and that’s you know that’s a whole other breed of of of people and what they do and can go in and can really you know optimize and you know they can tweak your conversion and be able to, you know let’s make these couple of changes and you know see what kind of results I have.

09:46.65
Jeff
That’s fantastic, and it it has a place, absolutely. I think really what we’re talking about is the the the basics, right? The CRO, like, just don’t forget these couple things, otherwise you’re really going to be embarrassed or someone’s going to be bad.

09:59.41
peteeveritt
so Just before we get onto those couple of things, now that we’ve managed to pad and fill 10 minutes, I do just want to pick you up on breed of people. Breed? Is that really where we’re going with this episode?

10:12.36
Jeff
um ah You know what? I am not the most eloquent with my ah vocabulary sometimes, but I’m pretty confident that that is a relatively normal ah metaphor in the United States, but I could definitely be using that wrong.

10:29.47
peteeveritt
i I wish this was live and I’d be now putting up saying, right, so who wants me to push Jeff on which breed he is? And which breed does he think I am?

10:40.63
Jeff
I mean, I wasn’t going to get into that, might and you know, fine details, but you don’t ever say, that Oh, he’s a different breed. Like you’re talking about like athletes or something like that. Like, uh, you know, like a running back that can just, you know, plow through the line every time.

10:53.07
Jeff
Oh, he’s a different breed of a football player or something. He doesn’t ever say that. Not the bet. Okay. Not the best, uh, is the metaphor. I don’t know. I guess that I’m not eloquent with my speech.

11:03.32
Jeff
It’s vital podcast full time.

11:03.87
peteeveritt
It’s all right. It’s all right. So all of that confidence I gave you through that intro, just like smashed out the part.

11:06.71
Jeff
And

11:09.64
Jeff
Pull it right back out. Just take it right back out for me.

11:11.11
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely.

11:11.76
Jeff
Thanks a lot.

11:12.55
peteeveritt
Absolutely. No problem at all.

11:13.47
Jeff
You see the abuse i have to I have to take, everybody? Pete, be a buddy, not a bully.

11:19.11
peteeveritt
Oh, oh, oh, that’s that’s harsh.

11:23.44
Jeff
My daughter said that to me when she was totally bullying me.

11:30.28
peteeveritt
Oh dear. Right. So where where do you want to begin? Where where would you start when you’re checking a site for CRO?

11:36.85
Jeff
Well, I guess, I mean, we could probably kind of start the beginning of who or what kind of websites is before, and obviously all of them. um But looking at it, I mean, you have to kind of look at the the workflow, right, or how these things happen. And if you’re onboarding a brand new client that you didn’t build your site, you definitely want to be looking through these things, because that’s where I see it most often.

11:54.77
Jeff
um And you know I don’t know, i we’re not speaking to what you’re doing for everybody. you know If you just sign up a ah client for hosting, maybe that’s not in your agreement. um you know If you’re doing a care plan, I would argue that you’re this is kind of in your role now. I’m not saying you have to go do a bunch of hours of development, but you know you’re you’re kind of responsible for at least bringing these things up and you know whether it’s in your scope of doing it or not. but um But at the same time, old clients, your existing clients, the ones you’ve had on the care plan for months or years or whatever, go check these things every now and then, you know check their check their form. um I like to actually change it back to our email address for a few minutes, do a test, and just verify it comes through. um But it doesn’t hurt to leave it and let it go to them, verify. Because I guess if I know that the server’s sending the email to us properly, it should be getting to them safely, although that’s not always the case. but

12:44.52
Jeff
You know, do that. It isn’t just in a note to say, hey, this is just your web team checking your form, you know what I mean? And they’ll they might reply and go, hey, thanks, you know, but you know, if you can verify they’re being sent things, things like that.

12:50.15
peteeveritt
Yeah.

12:55.15
Jeff
um

12:55.66
peteeveritt
Nobody’s going to complain if they get an extra email from you showing them that you’re actually testing something on their website to make sure it’s good for that.

12:59.23
Jeff
No, no.

13:04.14
Jeff
They will complain about the one spam that gets through, even though you have recapture and everything on there, but you know, that’s a topic for a whole nother day.

13:10.89
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a very different one. Yeah. Let’s, let’s just skip over that.

13:18.18
Jeff
Um, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, contact forms are a great one. And it also look at the actual site. Is it, you know, visual, like the visualization of it loaded up in an incognito browser? Is your caching causing a problem? You know, check these things because can tell you how many times you look at it when you’re logged in and oh, look, everything log, everything’s loading correctly. And then you look in an incognito browser and actually all that lazy loaded images aren’t displaying for people.

13:44.51
Jeff
And I mean, I can’t tell you how often we see those things come come over the desk and nobody noticed them for various reasons.

13:51.44
peteeveritt
And you know, similar thing with the contact form goes for an e-commerce site. I’m not necessarily suggesting that you go and put a payment through to make sure it’s going in there, but just go and check some orders. You know, yeah have they taken orders and the payments have gone through okay in the last two or three days?

14:05.32
peteeveritt
That would, you know, all of the orders have notes to to do with the success of the success of the payment. So you can you can still get that information and just do a bit of, just give it a bit of TLC from from time to time.

14:17.69
peteeveritt
I think that’s the key with that one.

14:17.89
Jeff
Yeah. Yeah. I’m just talking a lot of usability, but these things can be, you know, they can make the needle move as far as finances too.

14:20.44
peteeveritt
beer.

14:25.73
Jeff
It could be about checkouts. It could be about, you know, new leads. It’s not all about broken images and how people can browse the site, but these are all the things that people need to do on there. And if these, you know, things aren’t connected properly or aren’t functioning or there’s broken links and it’s a, it’s a frustrating experience for users.

14:42.03
Jeff
And what they do is they close the tap and they move on.

14:45.66
peteeveritt
Absolutely. Now depending on how the website’s structured, If the website uses particular conversion pages or squeeze pages, they might be called, um in order to generate leads, in order to funnel traffic through particular gateways, then you can also look at the Google Analytics and see things like the bounce rate, the exit rate,

15:07.98
peteeveritt
on those pages as well. This is now maybe making this job, like putting another layer into this into this job for you, because now you’ve got to go and you know open up Google Analytics and find their account and make sure that that that the trackings you know find the page that’s been tracked and all that kind of stuff. But that can also indicate whether actually when people get to a page, whether they actually know what to what to do or not.

15:30.91
Jeff
Yeah, if if everybody closes the tab or closes the tab on a certain page, something wrong with that page. Maybe it’s a content, maybe it’s functional, but there’s probably a reason. um And you know what, it could be a simple, this is a little more on the nose with CRO, but it could be as simple as, is there a call to action missing?

15:48.14
Jeff
Did we write all this stuff and tell them the story, then not simply ask them to contact us or to purchase or you fill out whatever it is?

15:52.42
peteeveritt
No.

15:56.24
Jeff
um So sometimes it’s just real basic like that.

15:58.54
peteeveritt
Yeah, or look at the devices that are being used. you know If you’ve got a page that’s really quite long, ahb quite long anyway, but then 85% of the traffic’s coming in on mobile, then that page is gonna be like Herculean kind of scrolling in order to get to the call to action that’s at the bottom.

16:14.18
peteeveritt
So maybe maybe you need some jump links, maybe you need some extra buttons higher up, maybe you need to include the call to action further up on the form or whatever it is further up the page in order to to make it far more obvious to users on mobile because that’s what the vast majority of traffic is.

16:28.37
Jeff
Yeah.

16:28.46
peteeveritt
So, you know, there’s there’s loads and loads of connotations to this. um But we would bet our bottom dollar that the vast majority of people listening to this podcast either have never checked these things or haven’t checked these things since site a site maybe went live.

16:46.39
peteeveritt
And that could be a year, 18 months, two years ago.

16:51.11
Jeff
Yeah.

16:52.60
peteeveritt
So please go do it.

16:52.79
Jeff
that it happens. It happens. And these things, I mean, I don’t, I don’t want to sound opportunistic, but if if you find some of these things and you know, you’re like, Hey, dear client, look what I just found out. You’re gonna look like a dang hero.

17:08.22
peteeveritt
Yeah, i I literally had that, the call before this this call ah to to record this episode. um I’ve been doing some fractional work with a ah company in the States and ah they use HubSpot for all of their lead gen stuff. And literally we were clicking through the website and there’s the short code for the HubSpot form. The form’s not loading.

17:34.72
Jeff
the plugin get deactivated or is it old or who knows yeah the old phantom short codes

17:37.72
peteeveritt
No, they i I don’t know what they did. They fixed it, they did something, but my job was to tell them it was busted. That was it. So there you go. It happened.

17:54.94
peteeveritt
ah I don’t know. So yeah, so make sure you’re checking these things. Make sure you’re doing it semi-regularly and also make sure you’re checking you’re checking that back to the client so that they know,

18:05.48
peteeveritt
you know ah look Well, you you run a lot more care plans than I do. I know that we we don’t necessarily have a specific check on this, like on a schedule every time, but we do do a we do do a visual check every time we run some updates. And I often try and get the team to, you know, just every time we’re running an update or They know the schedule of the clients that we have.

18:29.38
peteeveritt
So every time we’re running these updates, maybe once or twice a month, you know just check a handful of sites. And then next month, check a different handful of sites. And you we kind of work work random over the course of six or eight months.

18:36.72
Jeff
Yeah.

18:40.02
peteeveritt
But um yeah, you you run a lot more of these things. So how would you schedule this into like ah a process for your maintenance clients?

18:48.71
Jeff
Well, I kind of hate to say it, but and a lot of it depends on kind of what your scope of agreement is with that client. And to be truthful, most of ours are kind of like on the basic hosting and just WordPress maintenance side. So, you know, coming up and saying, Hey, we, you know, fully manually audit your site and, you know, found these every month simply isn’t in the cards for most of them.

19:07.68
Jeff
um But the ones that are on like an actual care plan, and you know we’ve kind of, we’re not really toying with the marketing terms of it, but you know we’re kind of looking at our care plans as a growth plan, a marketing plan, A, we help you with whatever you need within the agreed amount of time plan. um And so for those, yeah, you know we we are doing a lot more when it comes to kind of covering their butt a little bit, you know what I mean? As far as just like, are they doing things that are helpful? um and We don’t have a specific plan, but one thing we definitely do beyond just the visual regression testing, which you mentioned, which is which is great for just making sure you know WordPress didn’t go down because of that update and things. But when we do an update around, for example, WooCommerce, you know whether it’s one of their add-ons or WooCommerce itself,

19:53.18
Jeff
we’re going to go kind of test those things out. You know, again, it’s like you mentioned, we may not do a full test transaction, but we’re going to go to the checkout, make sure it’s coming up, that it’s at least taking or willing to take our credit card. Because the first thing I’ve seen is, oh, you don’t have a processor, those things always fail on WooCommerce, you know, and it’s a real obvious one. And that’s, that’s why no one’s filling it out. um Or if the, you know, the contact form plugin will go check the contact form, you know, and then that’s not a foolproof method by any means, but it at least kind of covers, covers the but when you’re, ah How many times can i use button one sentence, but it kind of covers yourself when you’re, you know, making things that are directly related to obviously those updates. So but that’s kind of how we approach it. But, you know, and then we go into like our manage clients here at SEO hive that, you know, we’re, we’re doing a lot more when it comes to, Hey, can we do some strategic thinking for you? Can we, what can we do to

20:43.22
Jeff
increase your sales because that’s obviously if you’re caring for a website, you want to increase your sales, but that’s clearly not your website host or your you know your WordPress maintenance guy’s ah responsibility. so yeah we’re you know I guess me and the various people, we’re a little all over the place, but ah but it’s ah you know I think we’ve we’ve been able to come in a bunch of different ways or different directions. and gosh, I hate to say it, but I feel like I can predict almost every issue you’re ever going to get on the site.

21:11.62
Jeff
Half the time when I learned I got, hold on, let’s go over here. I bet this is broken. You know, maybe I’m just becoming too skeptical, but it’s pattern recognition.

21:19.23
peteeveritt
we I also sort of tie it occasionally tie it into some like odd jobs that come through. So um we had a job come through last week from a client of ours that we haven’t worked with in, I don’t know, six months or so. They’re not on a maintenance plan or anything like that with us. They take care of themselves. But they needed they needed something.

21:43.68
peteeveritt
And when we bill our time, we always bill the minimum bill that you can have is 15 minutes with us. Because at the end of the day, you know let’s face it, ah if a client makes a request, their email comes in.

21:55.14
peteeveritt
We have to read the email. We have to go and log into the site. We might have to download the latest version of changes from the repo. We then have to go and make the change. We then have to upload it. We then have to go and test it. We then have to email the client to tell them that we’ve done it.

22:07.16
peteeveritt
We then might have to generate an invoice in order to for the work.

22:09.24
Jeff
yeah

22:10.04
peteeveritt
So all of a sudden, there’s quite a lot to get done in 15 minutes.

22:12.48
Jeff
A two-minute task turns into 30 minutes very quickly.

22:12.80
peteeveritt
but

22:15.09
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely, without even thinking about it. And that’s not that’s not being you know stupid or anything. it’s just It’s just all this stuff takes time. um But if we’re if we’re in with an inner client’s site anyway, one that we haven’t um we haven’t touched for a while, and they have sent a small change through, be it 15 minutes, half an hour kind of worth of time, ah you know if we’ve only taken seven minutes and we’re already pushing the thing live, well then go and test the contact form. Go and go and just you know check an extra few pages on mobile. you know while you’re While you’re doing the browser testing for the thing you’ve done, just go and check that the nav works and maybe the search bar works and all of that kind of stuff, because it’s just good stuff to do and you’re there anyway.

22:59.68
peteeveritt
They’re paying for this time.

22:59.82
Jeff
Yeah.

23:00.72
peteeveritt
It’s not like you’re you’re giving it to them for free. And you know what? If that opens up a meaningful conversation where you can go back to them and say, hey, just just while I was there, you know, we’ve we’ve done your job, but just while we were there, we tested the search bar and that wasn’t working or we we tested your contact form or we, you know, you might have received that test from us.

23:17.98
peteeveritt
We were just checking that it was all all hunky-dory for you. It’s keeping that position of you as that kind of authority, as that reliable, trusted partner for all of this web stuff.

23:30.60
peteeveritt
It’s cementing back to the client that they don’t need to look anywhere else for any other web support because you have their best interests at heart. Even if you’re just tagging it onto, as I say, some random thing that’s come through the door that week.

23:42.18
Jeff
Yeah. if it’s a j Especially if it’s adjacent to what you’re doing, just look a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper.

23:43.09
peteeveritt
There’s loads of ways.

23:48.69
Jeff
You you made a good point about you know we when we’re in this role, we are their trusted expert, their go-to, whatever it is. and I mean, for better or worse sometimes. But like just this last week, I had one of our clients go, hey, so you know we got this thing about this domain and our GoDaddy account.

24:05.90
Jeff
I don’t manage your GoDaddy account.” They’re like, you don’t manage your GoDaddy account? And I’m like, your company with like 50 locations and like 200 domains in there, and we manage one website for you.

24:16.23
Jeff
No, we don’t manage your GoDaddy account. But at the same time, it was like, oh, that’s really nice that you guys like, you think of us that like that. You got that much trust in us that you, you know, for like $100 a month, you think that we’re managing your entire IT team, basically.

24:25.45
peteeveritt
Go.

24:30.88
Jeff
like

24:32.43
peteeveritt
It happens, ah literally very similar thing happened today. I had a ah client who had a question about um the sending address of their invites from their Outlook calendar and they wanted to know how they changed it.

24:45.99
peteeveritt
I’m like, I have no, I don’t, I have nothing to do with your 365 setup. we We build your website. That was it. i But you know, they, they think of me that way.

24:56.27
peteeveritt
It’s, it’s computer related. So Pete must know about it.

24:59.93
Jeff
Yeah. ah i really I kind of don’t want to share this one, but I had somebody actually book a paid meeting a couple of weeks ago and didn’t tell me why for any reason.

25:00.32
peteeveritt
So great.

25:03.97
peteeveritt
So.

25:08.06
Jeff
and I tried to get an agenda ahead of time so I could be prepared and make sure to help them with whatever it is they really need help. It turns out they needed to learn how to upload PSD files, ah which turned into teaching them how to save for web.

25:24.53
peteeveritt
But it’s it’s just one of those it’s just one of those things. that That said, I think the key thing with all of this, and this this goes for CRO and that this discussion we’ve been having as it goes for a lot of stuff in business, which is actually a little bit of proactivity takes you along a long way.

25:41.51
Jeff
Yeah, yeah.

25:42.37
peteeveritt
So the the lady that emailed me about her 365 calendar address, in the back of my head, I knew that I’d been in touch with an IT t company about her DNS settings at some point in the past. So a quick search on my email meant that I could say, look, that’s not really our scope. I think it’s probably to do with the fact that your info address is a forwarding thing, but I can’t confirm that. We don’t look after that.

26:08.48
peteeveritt
But I know I have been in touch with XYZ other company about changes to your domain name. They’re your IT company and they probably look after this. So that would be the next place to go. And, you know, don’t just.

26:21.30
peteeveritt
When I grew up, my dad, my dad, the one that kicked me out of my house that we were talking about right at the start of this call, he very much drilled into me, you know, don’t give me problems, give me solutions. And that’s kind of what you’re trying to do here. A little bit of proactivity where you don’t just say, no, no, that’s nothing to do with me, but that’s nothing to do with me. But try here, at least you’re then still giving value, you’re being proactive. And likewise with the CRO stuff.

26:49.52
peteeveritt
if If this isn’t part of your everyday routine, then actually, that’s that’s fine. you know Either find a way for it to be part of your everyday routine or just hook it into something else. Like we say, minor changes that come along.

27:00.38
peteeveritt
Just go and test the contact form. It’ll take you seconds. But if they then go and get a test email from you and then ah a one line afterwards saying, hey, yeah, we did that thing that you paid us for. We also tested your contact forms while we were there.

27:11.68
peteeveritt
It’s only positioning you as a good in a good light. that’s all it you know There’s no bad to any of this.

27:15.12
Jeff
Yeah.

27:18.39
Jeff
Yep. And, you know, I almost want to say you can’t fault somebody for maybe missing some of these things and you can’t, like I said, we’ve all, we’ve all made these mistakes, but you know who will fault you is your client. If somebody else catches these things and brings it to their attention, you know what I mean?

27:30.68
peteeveritt
Yeah.

27:31.98
Jeff
I mean, that’s just, that’s just embarrassing right there. Hey, did you guys know this? And, uh, you’ve been sitting and going, uh, we’ve been charging you how much every month and you haven’t been getting any leads because of our mistakes. Sorry.

27:42.35
Jeff
I mean, that doesn’t look good. So, you know, I don’t want to. put that much pressure on everybody. But it’s just, that’s that’s what these things can lead into. And they can they can also you know be super minor and not even be in existence. So you know take a few minutes and yeah. Anyway, this is a great way to show a lot of value. I mean, and it opens up the doors to more conversations too, which I know isn’t even the purpose of this and we’re not going to get into it. But you know you bring these things up and well, okay, you know actually maybe we can do this bit of work over here because that was a really good solution and it brings this idea to the table now or something. so

28:15.10
peteeveritt
Yeah.

28:15.33
Jeff
can lead into more work and you know obviously just continuing to cement yourself as your client’s best asset.

28:21.23
peteeveritt
And the more that you get into that in more websites, the more that you can say to your client, hey, look, I tested your contact form, it was working absolutely fine. But just just so you’re aware, we’ve been doing quite a lot of work over here, and we’ve seen like contact forms that are set up like this actually convert better. Now, you know I know this isn’t really the scope of this project, but if you were to be interested in a conversation about that, more than happy to, or whatever it might be.

28:45.37
peteeveritt
It’s just, it’s about, you’re right, it’s about be having that upfront value that can lead to so many other things because you’ve been proactive about it, because you you have taken the initiative rasison rather than anything else. and And, you know, initiative, in the game that we play, we where we deal with a lot of agencies of varying sizes from freelancers through to bigger agencies,

29:12.41
peteeveritt
you you find that it’s that initiative that sets a lot of people out from the rest of the the crowd.

29:15.70
Jeff
Mm hmm.

29:20.48
peteeveritt
um And those that take initiative, they end up with better clients, more reclaring revenue, running out of time, needing to expand, or or being able to pick and choose their work that they want to do, and having that security of of longevity in business.

29:36.48
peteeveritt
And those that don’t take the initiative that are kind of waiting for the world to happen to them, they’re the ones that are scratching around trying to find projects, always trying to get things at the the lowest value, don’t have a lot of recurring revenue, and are generally just struggling a lot more.

29:50.79
Jeff
Yeah.

29:50.83
peteeveritt
um and And it just comes down to that little mindset shift of, and it’s not going to change the world overnight, I’m not i’m not saying that, I’m not criticising anybody here, I’m just saying we speak to a lot of people and you can tell those that have that proactive kind of mantra to them versus those that just let life happen.

30:11.60
Jeff
There’s, I think in our world, there’s a lot of freelancers probably more so than larger agencies, but there’s a lot of folks that are really happy to get the project, but then they’re just happy to get it off their plate as well. its They’re just trying to get from start to finish and get that check and move on. And I’m not saying they don’t care or anything like that, but that’s what they’re focused on.

30:31.20
Jeff
if you are focused on the client and keeping them long-term, even if it’s just a hosting plan or something like that, you can be their best friend and you can be there for them when they need those things. so I always look at it long-term. I’m happy to take that project and you know make a couple thousand dollars off the bat, but I’d much rather have that client on, even though something low like $100 a month, and continue to be there for them over time and let that evolve and you know everything like that. so I think a lot of people are just focused on turning the projects around.

31:00.58
Jeff
And that’s where these type of things get missed all the time. You know, I mean, how many conversations we see where, oh, we finished the site and here you go. Here’s the, here’s the backup. Go ahead and launch it on your hosting now. And you know, Bob, the plumber is like, what?

31:11.76
Jeff
That’s what I’m paying you for. I don’t have to do all that stuff.

31:13.12
peteeveritt
not Not Bob the plumber again.

31:14.55
Jeff
ah Yeah, he’s doing, he’s doing, he’s doing good.

31:15.97
peteeveritt
Oh, man, he crops.

31:17.84
Jeff
He got over COVID and he’s back in action.

31:18.15
peteeveritt
He crops up but every flipping. He’s been mentioned more times than Carl Van Dusen. I’m sure of it.

31:23.64
Jeff
He might have, oh, we should do an audit and find out that would really hurt Kyle’s feelings.

31:27.99
peteeveritt
Well, Carl’s just been mentioned again.

31:29.28
Jeff
Sorry, Kyle.

31:30.79
peteeveritt
They’ll keep the fields going. So look, we don’t.

31:32.71
Jeff
i heard I heard Bob the Plumber’s a Dallas Cowboys fan, though.

31:32.98
peteeveritt
we don’t

31:35.19
Jeff
Only Kyle’s going to appreciate that.

31:39.00
peteeveritt
Look, we don’t often do like a rallying call on this ah on this show. So why don’t we bring this episode into land with one, which is go right now, unless you’re driving, listening to this, but go, if you don’t do this stuff naturally, go and put a an appointment in your diary for some point in the next week for 30 minutes.

31:48.67
Jeff
Yeah.

31:58.58
peteeveritt
And in that 30 minutes, I want you to think about how you can start being a bit more proactive with your customers. That might mean that you need a list. i don’t I don’t want you to go every week to round every customer, because that that could be insane if you’ve got hundreds of them. But, you know, that might mean that you need a list of your customers. And every week, you while you have a coffee, you spend 20 or 30 minutes going and checking out five of them a week. And every so often, you’ll get round the entire list um all the time. go and Go and do some CRO checks. Go and check in with the client. Just go and say hi.

32:32.34
peteeveritt
Unless they’re a client you really don’t want to work with again, you know, if you, those, those clients, you want to position yourselves as the trustee advisor, go and just make a plan for how you can systematize that a little bit, just with a little bit of time investment. And let’s try and get some, some proactive, uh, agencies listening to this show. I’d love to know if, if anything comes to, comes to fruition of that. So if you get any, any positivity at all from, from doing some of those actions, email us hello at SEO hive.co. And, um, yeah, we’d love to hear those stories.

33:02.81
Jeff
Yeah, that’d be great. I think that we kind of focus more on the kind of the problems and fixing those type of things. But as we said, this is something that can really allow you to be in a position to show them a lot of value and make some big, big moves and big changes and stuff. So just tell us some of those positive things that you found or come up with or, you know, have ideas about that’d be great.

33:22.10
peteeveritt
Cool, right. Well, it shows that when we start a podcast that is talking about broken forms and which clients you should be worrying about this stuff for, we actually get onto into something meaningful. So I hope you’ve really enjoyed the show and got something out of it. um Show notes for this episode will be linked somewhere. Go and find them if you need them. And yeah, we hope we can see you in the next show. See you later.