Ep 36: How to improve your website without spending a ton of money with Tom Garfield
Conversions, behavioural analytics, SEO, backlinks, cyber security, the importance of having a good content strategy and how to avoid rage clicks are just some of the topics covered in this highly action packed episode of The Built Environment Marketing Show.
My guest is Tom Garfield from Tom Garfield Marketing and we take a deep dive into ‘How to improve your website without spending a ton of money’. This episode was recorded live on LinkedIn on Monday October 03 2022.
The Built Environment Marketing Show is the new name for Marketing In Times of Recovery cos who wants a podcast name tied to the state of the UK economy. And don’t worry it’s still hosted by marketing consultant Ayo Abbas from Abbas Marketing. The consultancy that bridges the gap between business strategy and tactical marketing for engineers and architects. Sign up for my monthly roundup here for the latest built environment marketing news
Ways you can support this show
If you like this show don’t forget that you can help me to spread the work by
Sharing about the show on social
Leaving us a review on Apple or Spotify
Or telling a friend about the show who you think will benefit.
Your support is much appreciated and helps more people to get to hear our interviews
Resources
The Abbas Marketing website
Tom Garfield Website
Microsoft Clarity
Google Analytics
Hotjar
Transcript.
Hello, and welcome to the first live recorded episode of my newly renamed podcast, the Built Environment Marketing Show. I'm still your host, Ayo Abbas, Founder and Director of Abbas Marketing. Having a podcast name tied to this space, the economy was no longer fun. So I decided to change things up and celebrate the new name. And the start of this next season of interviews. I decided the first five episodes of this show will be recorded live on LinkedIn throughout this week. This special week long interview series is a tactical deep dive on reasonably priced things that businesses can implement to give their marketing a boost. My first guest is Tom Garfield, and we're talking all about websites. Enjoy. Hello, and welcome to the first live built environment Marketing Show which is here on LinkedIn. And I am your host Ayo. And if you are joining us live, could you say where you're writing from, listening from in the comments, just so we can see that there are actually people here. Because before, I have spoken to people who weren't actually online, which is useful! Anyway, today, much might like my usual podcasts, this session will be a conversational chat. We'll have 30 minutes. But actually this time, we'll be taking questions from the floor. So, if you do have a question, feel free to put it in the comments. And we can answer those as we're going along or towards the end. And today we're kicking off with website websites, which are your digital shop fronts. So this special LinkedIn live is going to be a deep dive into how to improve your website without spending a tonne of money, which was obviously my alarm clock. But that was quite interesting. And my guest today is the highly knowledgeable Tom Garfield from Tom Garfield marketing. I asked Tom to introduce himself. Hi, Tom, can you say who you are and where you come from, what you do? Hello?
Tom Garfield 02:00
Yeah, so I'm Tom. I am a website consultant and website designer and I help service businesses improve their websites to generate leads and inquiries. So, we've got a heavy focus on conversion and making sure that websites actually do what we want them to do not just make them look pretty. And that's my thing.
Ayo Abbas 02:19
Okay, we've already got two hi's one from Frankie, one from as well and one from Ruth. So we've got we got people listening. Alright, so my first question is, why are websites so important in times like these?
Tom Garfield 02:35
Well, by times like these meaning like downturn, right? A bit of a maybe
Ayo Abbas 02:40
the 'R' word. That's what I'm saying?
Tom Garfield 02:45
The 'R' Word. Okay, cool. Well, I think websites are always important, and especially so and I think, I mean, marketing as a whole tends to be, from what I can see. And people often do this is if there's maybe a downturn, marketing budgets get slashed immediately is like the first thing you think is right, how can we make savings and that's important for sure. But marketing, and in this case, websites, I think are such an opportunity to keep your business afloat, if you rely on a steady stream of incoming leads, if you need plenty of new enquiries. It's really tempting to maybe cut your budgets. But if you do that, or if you're driving traffic to your website, and you cut your traffic generation, advertising or traffic generation, whatever it might be, then you're going to lose that traffic or you're going to lose part of that traffic and being able to continue to keep people coming to your website and keep people enquiring about your services is going to keep your business afloat, keep your revenue. And so I don't know, there might be a smaller pool of customers, perhaps you've relied on referrals or another stream of customers. But maybe that's going to slow down a little bit. Now maybe there are new opportunities for you to look at digitally ways you can maybe take some of your offline budget, maybe you've spent a lot of money on radio, or billboards or big conferences, or whatever it might be that you do. And maybe you could take some of that money and invest it in digital, which can typically be cheaper to generate in the same amount of interest potentially.
Ayo Abbas 04:16
That's really interesting. I think one of the things that kind of caught my eye this week was that there's a piece of Gartner research that saying that, you know, people don't want to talk to salespeople, which I think is really interesting. So B2B people are saying I'd rather just have a digital experience, understand more about your products, no matter how complex your services are, no matter how complex but just do it online without someone picking up the phone to me and going. "Hi". So yeah, this huge drive towards actually I want to be the informed consumer, and buyer, even in the B2B space so you can actually turn around and go, I've already got to know enough up, and when I'm actually contacting you is actually roughly when I want to buy we've I've got a specific question rather than the other way round, which is how it's done. Okay, we'll get your content and stuff. So I think there is this whole thing about websites actually having more of a role. Yeah,
Tom Garfield 05:05
that's really interesting. If people are moving that way, I would say B2B websites typically don't do that very well, because they rely on sales teams or they rely on people pick up the phone and arranging meetings and that sort of stuff. So yeah, websites could be a really good opportunity for you to put all of that information or all of that content, turn it into web content, rather than relying on salespeople to push it. Whereas if people just don't like being sold to, I guess, yeah,
Ayo Abbas 05:33
I mean, to be honest, I hate it. You know, when I download something, and someone rings me up, like the next day, I don't know who they are. But be I also am, they're going, I don't want to talk to you. And then it puts me off. So I think that whole thing, I think is starting to die down. I think people are like, I want to be informed and get the information. And I'll contact you when I need you. Because I know you're there. Sorry.
Tom Garfield 05:57
Further in their decision making journey without having to talk to a salesperson, and then using the website or other information to be able to get the stuff they need before they talk to someone. Interesting.
Ayo Abbas 06:10
Next question. So in terms of like, I'm saying front end stuff. So I guess that's the appearance we're looking for. Right? So what what things should we be considering for our websites to kind of, I guess, make them work better?
Tom Garfield 06:23
Okay. So what you see a lot of the time is a website that if it's been it's been worked on quite well, it looks lovely. Sometimes it's designed is nice. It's got nice imagery, especially in like your well built environment, in architecture, whatever it might be. They invest a lot in photography, and that's really great. But one of the things I see that people need to be much more aware of is that when people land on the website, they're looking for inspiration, for sure. But they're also looking for reassurance. And as they get closer to that decision making process to the buying, decide to enquire, they want to be not only inspired by all of these wonderful things that they see to go, look how beautiful that building is, or look what this is, this is fantastic. But they then need to be reassured because they're going to start to almost get a pre buyer's remorse, which is, first thing is they are asking how good this could this be? How good could this project be? And they're really excited. And then there's the sort of thing am I going to enquire now? They then asked a different question, which is, how bad might this be? How could this go wrong? Maybe. And so you want to make sure that you are, you know, when you're getting close to that enquiry stage, you are using things like reassuring language, you're making sure that your process is really comprehensive and clear. You're proving your expertise with great testimonials from past clients. Perhaps you're giving insight into your people to sort of instil trust, and likeability. All of those things really matter. I think those are things that people don't do as well, because they're not, I don't know, maybe they're a bit harder to produce. They take a bit more effort, rather than just kind of publishing pictures. Also, front end stuff like mobile is huge. Mobile is 60% of all traffic now something like that, I'd have to go and update my knowledge on the exact percentage. But yeah, last time I checked, it was over 50% and changed.
Ayo Abbas 08:17
It changed a lot. When desktop suddenly went really high. I think it's like
Tom Garfield 08:21
Yeah, well, a lot of people, their computers not out and about. So that kind of changed a bit. But typically, mobile has been taking a much more dominant share over time since well, really, since kind of smartphones came about really 2011 is when it really started to take off the first mobile websites, first responsive websites, we're starting to come through that sort of time. And yeah, so people when they imagine their website, especially b2b, I think they imagine a desktop, they imagine a laptop, and they think about the website, if I was to ask you to picture your website, you'd probably think of it on a screen this size. But actually, if over half of your visitors are seeing your screen on this size, and you're not making considerations and decisions based on that size, then there's a mismatch there. So you need to make sure that your website is considered as a mobile first platform rather than a desktop first platform. And that matters. Effects people's experience.
Ayo Abbas 09:17
I say I think anyway, so you said that I was thinking yeah, actually, I think a desktop first. But you're right, it's mobile first, and then the other way around. Yeah,
Tom Garfield 09:27
you have to, you have to kind of cut to the chase. walls of text look even bigger on a mobile. So if you've got a nice big space on your desktop, you can get away with a lot more text, right? But if you get to a mobile level, and you have the same amount of text, that can end up being a really long scroll, and if you want to get people to your imagery or to an interaction button and wherever it might be, they're gonna have to scroll through our text and people aren't going to want to get through all of that and it's not as attractive but not as engaging.
Ayo Abbas 09:54
Okay, so I guess one of the things I want to add to that was just around being clear on what it If you do, because I might have a bugbear on websites is when you land on a website. And I don't have a clue what you do like that kind of above the fold or I land on it actually say, I designed buildings for this or or just like some USP some statement, which is quite clear on what you do. So, I think there's been this overall trend of being really arty and your language and how you describe yourself. But actually, you know what, let's be clear. Because you've got a couple of seconds to actually capture my, my attention. And to make sure also to reassure me, like you said, about the I'm in the right place. So I think there's all of those things that people can go back and just double check on your website on your homepage. Is it clear what you do? Can you easily contact me? Can you know, does it? Does it do all the things? I do? Because I think for me, that's
Tom Garfield 10:43
yeah, like, if you're? Yeah, I understand. Like, if you're, if you're vague on your website, people won't be interested, they will lose you, like if you let's say, you're an electrician, and you said, instead of saying, oh, electrician, I live in this area, this is how much you can you know, this is these are things I do, and this is how much roughly my cost. So you see I said you said we provide innovative, innovative residential illumination services, right. And your, your trend. I mean, it's they like. But that happens, that happens a lot, especially in in b2b where they sort of I guess, try to elevate the message a bit or something? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just, I can read a website. And I've done it so many times, way more times than you, you might think. And I'm sure we all have, but you can read through a website, and you can read through an entire homepage, and still be none the wiser as to what they actually do, how they do it, who they do it for. Yeah, so those statements need to be clear, not clever. And that's great. But
Ayo Abbas 11:47
what clear and clever, whoa. I'm joking, I know you can, especially with a good copy. So in terms of the back end stuff, and what you need to think about the back end is like all the kind of meta typing and data and the stuff that you need to do, right. I'm gonna leave that to you to describe show I don't do that.
Tom Garfield 12:07
Yeah, exactly. I'm less of a back end person myself. If that's something that people you know, care about. I think it is important. It's incredibly important. So I work with with developers, I build websites, myself, but I predominantly, if there's something really complex, I work with sort of super good developers. But the things that really matter that people don't see are speed. So, how fast your website loads, that's really, really important. Security. So the last thing anyone needs in a 'R' word world is something going wrong, your website getting hacked, or it breaking, and you need to spend money to fix it or anything like that. And you can prevent that with the decent maintenance schedule. So if you've got an agency that you work with, or whoever it is, that maintains your website for you, make sure that there is a security and hack prevention system in place that you've got, all your stuff is up to date, your plugins and your themes, or whatever it is the platform you're using. Make sure it's basically a tight ship, because otherwise, there are potential issues with breaking, hacking, those sorts of stuff. Yeah, and then, and then also, really, we'll move on to this bit, but it's the analytics side of things. So, making sure that when you're in your website, you are doing things to it to make sure that it's you know, helping you drive traffic helping you be found by the people that you want to be found by.
Ayo Abbas 13:31
Fantastic. Thank you for that. That's one of those things, I'd like to talk about that part. Because I always think it's that's the bit where people forget about it. Like they kind of think it's just the front end of a site. And they don't think actually about the back end and the tagging and all that kind of stuff to actually make sure your website works and shows up where it should. I always think that's the stuff that isn't necessarily that glamorous. So people are often they're going oh, you know, they don't even ask questions about it. It's just about the look and feel of your site doesn't like your site isn't going to work.
Tom Garfield 14:02
That's right. I'll give you a really good example, actually. So in there was a WordPress website, it was a potential client that came to me said, no one's finding me on Google, I'm not getting any, any traffic, whatever. And so you have a look at the website. And they haven't touched the login. They hadn't looked at the login at all, it was just launched in it had been about 18 months, something like that. I went into the site. And there is a setting in WordPress that basically says Don't let my website appear in Google. And you can take that sometimes people take it when they're developing a website or for any other reason. And you could basically essentially turn off and say Google's not allowed to not allow you request it. And Google usually obeys it, which is basically don't index my website and Google and that was ticked. And it was all it took was an antic. Obviously, it took, you know a bit of time to then reindex but they'd lost 18 months of potential because whoever built the website had forgotten to turn this off. And so just like a review, like that took 18 months to actually happen and No one realised because the agency that built the website didn't revisit it, the customer didn't revisit it. And it was just lost. And it just wasn't there. So no one was finding it. And it took 18 months for someone to come and have a look and check.
Ayo Abbas 15:13
I mean, I've also heard as well, I've always I've heard horror stories of like people developing a new website with a new agency. And then, I think, from abroad, and they weren't that good to be honest. And they just started a new site and didn't bring any of the kind of good domain stuff or domain reputation from the old site. So all of their existing traffic and history or just disappeared. And I think that kind of thing of actually educating yourself enough to know the questions to ask whoever you're going to work with, on your job, so that you kind of get back continue, can you continue to kind of not you don't under your good work? And I think that's one of the things that you do need to be mindful of? Because it's like, yeah, you do need to know,
Tom Garfield 15:55
there's a lot that goes into a website, there's a lot that goes into a website is why one of the reasons I love them so much is because that it takes a lot of different skills and a lot of different areas to do it well. And you know, so it's a bit of a classic joke in the SEO world is leaving sort of leaving SEO to the last minute, when you're launching a new website, you just kind of go, Oh, we're about to launch a new website, could you just do a bit of SEO on it, and something like that as a typical thought process of someone that doesn't really know about how this all works. But actually, you need to be considerate of that sort of stuff, right from the beginning, when you're even creating a brief for a project, you need to have all of that stuff in mind. And so I just, you've got to be really, really wary that you're not missing something you don't even know exists, because that can really cause genuine problems for you. So as
Ayo Abbas 16:41
you spoke about SEO, can you can you kind of introduce what kind of Search Engine Optimisation, which is SEO is just like people who don't know?
Tom Garfield 16:49
Yeah, really, really quick definition is, it's about making sure that Google sees your website as something that deserves and can get found by the people you want to get found for in a Google search. So if somebody is looking for architects in a certain geographical area, let's say London, if they Google architects in London, Google will look at all of the websites that are relevant for that search query. So if it's people that are architects, obviously, they're sort of look at where they're based, look at the kind of content that's on the website, all of those things. And then it will determine whether or not you deserve to come up highly for that result, based on hundreds of factors in Google's algorithm that determine the quality of your website, the relevance of your website, how robust your website is, all of these different factors that go into it. And it basically makes sure that, you know, you come up and people click on your website link, instead of you being buried down in page 23456, which is essentially, nobody goes yeah, like, you know, if you're an architect in London, and you don't come up with a search term architect in London, then you're missing out on that opportunity.
Ayo Abbas 17:56
It's a really hard search term to come up for actually just 100. And because you're gonna have all the big massive, Norman Foster, you know what I mean? You're gonna have all these big ones. Yeah. So you might want to look, you want to look at something a bit smaller than wouldn't you are more? Yeah, definitely a bit like that. You know what I mean? It will be
Tom Garfield 18:20
searched for as well, though. So you have to make sure so keyword good keyword research is the foundation really is understanding what it is that people look for. What it is that super relevant architects in London is very broad term, right? And that's often what what people will think, oh, I need to get found for the rest of the broadest term possible, because it's got the most traffic. But one, the market is very saturated now. there's a lot of SEO work being done over the last however many years, 20 years or whatever. And so some of the people that occupy the top spots are largely unmovable for certain broad terms. So it's about getting really niche and understanding, right, there's 1000s of keywords that people search for, how can we find the ones that have still got some opportunity, still super relevant to what we do? So yeah, just just, I think if you're looking at SEO, I mean, if we're talking about this being in the context of not spending a lot of money to do SEO really well, not that you have to spend a lot of money in the same way that you might with advertising, but you either have to have a lot of expertise and a lot of resource to do it in house, or you end up having to spend a significant amount of money to make it worth it. Because it takes a lot of effort. It takes time. And it takes a lot of skill to do well. And you can't do SEO on the cheap. If you try and find someone that's offering it cheaply. Say let's say for example, someone says right 300 pounds a month with all your SEO will get you found for architects in London. Run away is not going to happen. You're wasting your money. Don't do anything, just don't do SEO. If you're going to do it cheap. If you're ready to invest proper money, that's good. But if you if you're trying to get it done on the cheap, just you're gonna waste your money. 100%
Ayo Abbas 19:56
SEO is a long, long game as well. It's not like Yeah,
Tom Garfield 19:59
exactly. Say if we're talking about a short term economic downturn, hopefully short term, who knows. But if we're talking about what can we do now, in order to try and generate more leads and inquiries. SEO is typically something that takes time, you know, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't start now, you should start with a decent content strategy and start start generating stuff that people are interested in. And yeah, I would say you should always be starting SEO, but it might not be something you want to do in the short term to expect those results to come through.
Ayo Abbas 20:30
Now, because I always say submit a long term play at least. And you have to put out content on YouTube to even start to register. Really.
Tom Garfield 20:39
I think it's a mindset thing. Really, you have to be willing to wait for things to work.
Ayo Abbas 20:43
I'm not checking. stuff then. Okay, so I've actually had a question which was emailed into me today. Oh, lovely. Okay. That's true. I'm Ella Orr so she asked, she said, sorry she can't make it. She said. Can you ask Tom? How do you go about getting more backlinks? Okay. Links might be the first back.
Tom Garfield 21:09
Yeah. So first thing, backlinks are links that point to your website, from other places on the internet. So they're not links that you have on your website, they are links that come to you from other sites. So let's say there was an industry journal like architecture or journal or something like that, that published a piece of content that showcased some really great work in your industry or something. And they publish that article on their website, and it published the name of the company and it linked to the website. That is a link from that website to your website. Google thinks they're quite good. And it takes into account the number and quality of those links in its algorithm. So whether or not it thinks you should be ranking higher on Google is determined by a couple of things. It's what your content is all about. So if that's the relevance, it really is, is this content that's useful and relevant to the search that's being carried out. And then in order to really determine which ones come in come up, in which order, it's about your, I guess, deserve ability might be a good way of explaining it. It's, um, which websites are popular enough or which websites are credible enough to deserve to be found for these searches? And one of the major factors is the volume and quality of backlinks. So if you are getting linked to from highly reputable industry sources, or lots of different places that are telling people basically, because a link is basically saying click on this, if they're telling people to come to your website, then Google sees that as almost like a little vote for your website to say this is a good website to visit. Because they wouldn't link to you Otherwise, they wouldn't. Yeah, they wouldn't want to do it if your website was bad, or wasn't relevant for the search or whatever. So that's what
Ayo Abbas 22:47
more how to get more backlinks, then.
Tom Garfield 22:49
Well, there's, there's lots of different ways this is such a big topic, it's not really something that you can explain in the amount of time that we've got but largely doing doing things like like so PR basically is the way you would get decent quality backlinks and and, you know, you might, your audience might be familiar with, with more traditional PR being sort of featured in magazines, being featured in sort of things and appearing on even being a guest on podcast can sometimes generate a link if they publish that page on their website. So basically, PR, I would say it's probably in the time that we've got now to explain it, I would say you want to do PR is trying to PR get people to link to your website through PR. Yeah, I like that. There's lots of other ways, but that's good. I think PR
Ayo Abbas 23:37
is a good one anyway, and probably the simplest one and like even the podcast one, I think how many links you get from like Apple and all these different Spotify and all of those because they all host your website, and it's got show notes which link back into your into my website. So you've got all of those which are also avenues for building up your reputation and your
Tom Garfield 23:55
tribe try and go for quality over quantity. So relevance. So don't just try and get links in any old place. Like if there's a industry body that has a publication, for example, that is highly relevant to your sector, then that's a really good option to look at finding ways to be showcased in their content somehow.
Ayo Abbas 24:13
Fantastic. Okay, so next question. So, which isn't from Allah? So any tips on driving traffic to your website?
Tom Garfield 24:21
Yeah, I mean, well, content creation, from an SEO point of view, you know, making sure that you're regularly publishing content on your website. There's lots and lots of ways to drive traffic. It depends on your individual business and how you go about doing it. You know, social media being one. If you are interested in you like using social media, then that can be a great way of driving traffic to your website. Again, PR digital PR backlinks aren't just for getting those lovely Google benefits. Those links actually get looked at by humans and they can click on those links and then come to your website. So yeah, backlinks a good way referrals referral links from other places. On There any partnerships that you could develop with people in adjacent industries, where they get a lot of traffic to their website, and let's say So one example is like, so for example, I worked with a nutritionist who teamed up with a yoga teacher, and they did like a joint thing. And they've got basically the same audience. So they've got people who are interested in looking after their health, people are interested in doing, you know, doing that kind of whole health, health and wellbeing thing, nutrition and, you know, go go hand in hand, is there a similar partnership that you could maybe try and find, you know, set up a relationship in some way feature on each other's websites, whatever it might be. And then you've got
Ayo Abbas 25:39
your thing. I guess architects, if they're working with like their wider partners, like structural engineers, and all of that the whole kind of design team could actually do something, something more collaborative, in terms of how they actually promote the whole project, and actually not just showcasing their own in inputs, but actually talking about the wider team, like
Tom Garfield 25:57
a shared case study is a really, really good option for businesses that work closely together on projects. Shared case studies are great, great idea. Fantastic.
Ayo Abbas 26:06
And on to your favourite topic, which is conversions. Firstly, why conversions?
Tom Garfield 26:11
Okay, so conversions are essentially people doing the thing you want them to do when they're on your website. And typically in in service businesses, that is, pick up the phone, send you an email, fill out a form, book, an appointment of some kind, those are the kind of main things we want people to do, and when they land on our website. And so being able to track those events, so being able to understand when someone rings, your friends, the phone number, when someone clicks on the email address, when someone fills out a form, that is what we would call a conversion. And understanding how many of those we get where they come from, and how we can improve our websites to generate more of them is basically the thing I do. And I'm working towards kind of doing as well as I can for as many of my clients as possible, because that's really what we want websites to do. Largely, if we're a service we want. We don't necessarily want people to browse our pictures, we don't want a website that looks lovely. What we really want is new inquiries. And so yeah, that's what a conversion is.
Ayo Abbas 27:12
Any tips on I guess getting better at getting more of them?
Tom Garfield 27:16
Well, yes. So the first the first thing, and this is what people don't do much of is a real deep understanding of your current situation. So you've got a website, you probably haven't really assessed its performance. First of all, what are your objectives? You need something to measure, you need your conversions? What are your conversion metrics? Are they website forms, are they phone numbers, whatever it might be multiples, usually. And then understanding how many of them you want, how many of them you're currently getting. And then you can go about analysing your website, there's quite a technical process, there's a lot involved, there are offline things you can do online things you can do. But largely it comes down to analysing your website's performance, finding areas that maybe are preventing people from converting. And making improvements, testing is an important thing, you can do something called AV testing on your website, which is where you will send half of your traffic to one version of a page, or half of your traffic to another version of your page, analyse the performance. So which one gets more conversions, and then you keep the winner. And then you do it again, with a different variation of your testing. But really, I think the first stage and the first thing people should start doing is getting a really deep understanding of their current website performance. So is the information on there what people actually want? Is there anything that's missing? Are there any objections that you're not handling on your website that you could be handling? So if someone comes on to the website, they land on it, and then they browse around a little bit? And then they leave? What made them leave? That's the question is, was why did they leave? It could be all the way from the source of the traffic, it could be that they weren't even a relevant person in the first place. Or it could be that they are super relevant, but they didn't find what they wanted on your website, in order to give them the confidence to make an inquiry. Yeah. And there are different ways to do that.
Ayo Abbas 29:06
I was gonna say, how do you find why people leave? Because I've done stuff like, I mean, I've used stuff on my website, like Hotjar, and stuff like that. See, where people are clicking on what they're interested in that told me? Absolutely tonnes because I know when I redid my website, I could see on the services pages, which was one page that people were clicking on the titles of the services expecting more, but they didn't get it. You know what I mean? So
Tom Garfield 29:29
that's a classic example. Yeah, yeah. So that that whole world is called behaviour analytics. And so it's about analysing the behaviour of your users on the website. And you can either do that with tools like you've just described, hot jar is one version of that, and that includes things like session recording, so you can literally record a session. It's all private is all anonymous, so there's no issues there. But what it does is it will show you the mouse moving around the screen. It will show you where they click where they don't click it show how far they scroll, which pages they look at and you can sit and watch this recording. And so many people are so surprised.
Ayo Abbas 30:05
It's so hypnotic, you sort of sit there watching it go, Oh, yeah. And you sort of realise like, oh, they always could care. And it doesn't go anywhere. And you kind of see what works in your website. It's fascinating seriously, and that matters,
Tom Garfield 30:16
right? really matter. So a lot of people don't connect that too. Well, we're the ones that matter will surely if they want to see my stuff, they'll just pick up the phone. But web users are often fickle. And they'll just leave if it's like, Ah, this is annoying, and they'll just go on. Yeah, they'll find another website that they do like or something. But yeah, so understanding that and being able to make it this is a skill, right, this is a highly skilled thing to do is you can definitely do some yourself, and you can definitely go some way and understanding this. But doing this is an entire industry, right? This is my job. So I think it's really important to understand money. Okay, not spending money. If people do want to spend money they can. But if they don't want to, then there's a learning curve. You have to Yeah, well, yeah, it's something that you have to get good at, it's not something that you can just pop it all on, have a look at and then go, Oh, I know exactly what the issue is, you know, developing that expertise takes time, but it's definitely something that people should all people should watch their customers use that website. And you can do the real life version of that as well, it's quite important is you can watch session recordings. But one of the things that are really, really good to do is actually get some customers and ask them to participate in an exercise with you, and sit them down at your website and say you're a potential customer, or your potential, we're looking at our services for the first time, and browse the website and look to make an inquiry and You Your eyes will be opened by the way people use your website, you will not be what you expect. You can even embody it yourself, you can pretend if you need to go so far to get into character. And pretend that you're your own customer, you have to really like yeah, you have to really get into the character of it, pretend that you're not you're in business, and browse your website for the first time with fresh eyes as if you were your customer looking for your services. And even that can go a long way and open your eyes to whether your website is doing what you want.
Ayo Abbas 32:05
I guess that's all marketing isn't anything we will say talk about putting yourself in the customers shoes and all that kind of stuff. Because I think that's the thing is that you suddenly start doing that you're like, actually, I'm doing this wrong, or I'm saying this manner. And this is what they're actually asking, isn't it? And and also, I think the other thing is, I always say like when it comes to creating content or anything is actually what a customer is asking you now. So those questions that people are asking you when you're out and about are the ones that should be covered on your website, and can make it a lot easier and a lot more kind of functional as well. So I think there is this whole thing around. Yeah, what customers are actually saying right now.
Tom Garfield 32:38
Exercise where the company once where we listened to the sales team speaking to customers, and we took what the sales team said, and we put that on the website. And yeah, it helped. It helped a lot increase conversions. And people, you know, you're fighting objectives. The salespeople are great, because they know what people are objecting to, they know what questions get asked. So put that on your website, there's no reason not to.
Ayo Abbas 33:01
Fantastic. Now on to my kind of final question for for the kind of session really. So in terms of the special episodes, I'm going to do a special bit where I'm talking about top kind of tools and resources that people can use. So it's a quick fire round. So any kind of tools and resources that people can use to improve their kinds of websites, and a reason why you think it works?
Tom Garfield 33:22
Well, yeah, I guess the best, most appropriate one to talk about now, as soon as we've been talking about behaviour analytics is a free tool. It's completely free. It's by Microsoft, it's called Microsoft Clarity. And it's that behaviour analytics tool. So you install a little bit of code on your website. And then it starts to record people using your site. Again, all private, all anonymous, but what it will do is it'll give you data on sessions, number of clicks, people clicked on stuff that you can watch people use your website, you know, the mouse on the screen, you can look at something called rage clicks, which is when people get so frustrated when something isn't working that they just Yeah, so extract scroll depth number of pages looked at and you can you can you can get some really interesting insights into where how your website's performing and how people are using your website.
Ayo Abbas 34:21
Fantastic. I mean, I guess the other stuff that I kind of had on my mind was like Google Analytics, I still forgot. Yeah. In terms of traffic and kind of knowing all of that.
Tom Garfield 34:32
Alright, in fact, actually, this is something to make people aware of is that Google Analytics in June 2023, are moving to a new version of Google Analytics, Google Analytics for and I'm only really starting to get to grips with it properly. Now I've been working on it kind of behind the scenes is a completely reimagining, really of how Google Analytics works. If you currently work with an agency or if you currently work with a web provider, ask them about Google Analytics for because if you're currently got a and Universal Analytics, which is the old version of Google Analytics, the current version is going, Yeah, it's gonna be gone. So all of your conversion data, all of your setups, for your events, anything that you've got in there, that will track your conversions is going to be gone by June and you need to have transitioned over to Google Analytics for. So even if you've never looked at Google Analytics, if your business uses it, and you trust your agency, then just ask the question next time you have a chat with them. So are we looking at implementing Google Analytics for
Ayo Abbas 35:29
you can actually just set it up in the background right now and
Tom Garfield 35:32
still run they're running.
Ayo Abbas 35:35
So you can still collect data for you. So you're not gonna go into Google Analytics for completely empty from scratch, you could say actually run in over a year for data. So yeah, no, I didn't see at all.
Tom Garfield 35:46
But it does require a bit more setup. So that's the one of the things is it's good. It's got some really good stuff in there. But it requires some more customization than the previous version analytics did.
Ayo Abbas 35:59
No worries. Thank you so much. Fantastic tip at the end. Thanks so much for being a great guest, Tom, and how do my listeners find out more about you and what you do a website where
Tom Garfield 36:09
you'll be surprised to learn that I predominantly like to promote my website, which is Tom, just www.TomGarfield.co.uK. It's got links to all of my social medias and everything. I'm currently redesigning it live, as well, where I'm half redesigning it live, I've decided to just do it live. So you might find some broken bits on there if you want. Yeah, hopefully. Right? Well, I'm redesigning it in between work and looking after my three year old daughter, so sometimes, you know, halfway through changing something and she'll say, Dad, can you pretend to be a dog and then I'll have to go and do that instead of work. So yeah, I
Ayo Abbas 36:54
Thank you so much for being an awesome guest. Thanks so much for listening to the built environment marketing show. Don't forget to check out the show notes which will have useful links and resources connected to this episode. You can find that www.abbasmarketing.com. And of course, if you liked the show, please do share it with others on social as it helps more people to find us. See you soon.
