Blab #26: Optimising Your Website for Success

Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know. Hello and welcome to episode number 26 of the Marketing Labs podcast. I'm your host today, Tom Haslam and the creative director here at Marketing Labs. A slow or clunky website can be a major turnoff for potential customers, but with the right techniques, you can turn your site into a conversion machine. Today we'll discuss some of the most common techniques and strategies to get your website firing on all cylinders. Joining me on today's blob is Nick Janway, our head of digital. How are you doing, Nick?

Hey Tom,

You ready for it? As always, we've also got Matt Janway, our CEO. How are you doing,

Mate? Afternoon. Yeah, pretty good.

Enjoying the vibe in the room.

Loving it. It's

Nice. Last but not least, Josh Stapleton.

Hi, how are we doing? It

Feels like deja vu. This

It does.

Why?

I'm not sure. My camera's

Definitely recording though. Someone wasn't recording the first time around. We tried this. Did Mother Josh,

I'll hold my hands up. I made a mistake. It does happen occasionally.

How are you doing anyway?

Yeah,

Really good. Full on burger.

Yeah, if my stomach's making noise, we might have to mute the mics and things.

Fair enough. Anyway, should we get going? Nice. Okay, so first off, I want to try and understand what success actually means when it comes to optimising your website for success. Like every business will have different objectives, so who wants to kick off on that side?

It's always about defining first, isn't it? No matter what you do, you need to understand what your goals might be. So an eCommerce website, the goals would be very different to a service led website. Might change things if you're in B2B versus direct to consumer or So yeah, first about defining your goals because that will change what your website is, how it behaves and how you push people through that journey.

I guess you have to take into account if they're doing ads, campaigns and things as well,

Like

Your website changes depending on that, doesn't it?

And where their traffic comes from. If you run a lot of Google ads or you generate most of your traffic from SEO, they're going to land on deeper pages of the website. If you don't really have much of that, but you've got a strong brand, chances are people land on the homepage and you can filter them that way. So all of these things matter in order to determine how you plan on moving people around your website to convert them. But that conversion is different for every type of website as well.

I guess landing pages are another one to add to that list. You might be landing on a deeper service page in the website, but you might equally say, come from an ad or something, be it in a very tailored specific landing page designed specifically for one goal like funnel kind of thing.

Yeah, the messaging might change completely on each one as well.

Yeah, and how you optimise that flow from landing page to, I dunno whether it's cart or whether it's contacting or something like that might be different for a landing page versus different pages on the website like service or homepage.

So when it comes to designing your website towards success, then how do you know what a business needs from its website? How would you go around that question?

I suppose ultimately that's defined by the business. So as Matt just mentioned, there's lots of different reasons for website and lots of different ways that you can optimise the website, but if you are an e-commerce business, you're going to want to make sure that your products are easily findable in the first instance. So whether that's external to site or finding your products on your site, you're going to want to make sure that your users can add them to basket easily. You want to make sure that your checkout process is simple. So there's loads and loads of different ways and obviously that will always be different depending on what your use case is, but I suppose it kind of condenses down to the same point of making it as easy as possible for your user to do what you need them to do. And as long as you do that and that's one of your primary objectives, then you can't really go wrong.

So what Nick and Joshua said, there just sounds like a lot of words, but to actually put meaning on it, if you imagine that you are an e-commerce business, but your website is designed in a way that actually just encourages people to call and all of the call to actions are just wrong and you're encouraging people to take a particular action that's not right for the purpose of the website, then from an e-commerce perspective, it's not going to work. And if you do the same thing for, let's just say your marketing lab's website and we're talking about adding a merch section, but all of the CTAs all the way around the website of visit our merch store, but actually that's not really what we want people to do on the website. It's just not going to perform. So it's really important to align your goals with how the website is built.

Yeah, signposting people to the right place and making the user journey as simple as possible. I guess success or optimising a website for success comes down to a few different things though. We'll talk about the technical side of things a little bit later, but I want to talk about responsiveness and how responsive design improves UX and ultimately conversion rates. What does anyone want to say on that?

Yeah, I'll take this. So I guess responsiveness for people that don't know is a website responding to size differences. So you might have your mobile device and your desktop device. The screens are basically portrait versus landscape and your website needs to be able to behave correctly on both of those sizes. So generally people tend to take a mobile first approach when they're developing a website nowadays because the majority of people are actually browsing on mobile and maybe in some industries that might be a little bit different, but generally speaking and if you are not aligning well, if you're not making your site accessible on mobile, you are not allowing a huge demographic of people to easily interact with it or buy your products or see your services, whatever it might be. So having it responsive working just as well on mobile as it just, yeah, there's massive potential. Generally speaking, most people's sites, if they're built recently, they've got modern best practises, they should be pretty irresponsive out of the box. But if you've got an old site and it's not been updated in a while, if it was built like 10 years ago or maybe longer, hopefully not, you might find some pages just aren't as easy to navigate or easy to interact with.

Has anyone come across a non-responsive website recently?

Actually, yeah, I have. Yeah, we were looking for carpets for the PO room last week. I think I found seven local businesses, two of them had just static websites.

Really? Yeah, I think that's quite uncommon these days to be fair, but

It's quite uncommon I suppose for they're probably sole traders and deal

Small business. You tend to find it quite a lot with smaller businesses. Maybe it's the kind of people that we, I dunno, we've made comments on this before where people will think a website is like a one purchase kind of thing and it's like we've bought it, we've got our website, that's it forever. And it's like, yeah, that thing's been sat there for 15 years, it still looks like it was born in the nineties or whatever. It still has the code that it had in the nineties and yeah,

So what's interesting, I was looking at some stats in prep for this podcast and 57% of all web users wouldn't recommend a company if they didn't have a responsive website.

That's quite interesting.

Just a bit possible. Yeah. Mobile accessible. Yeah. So if their website wasn't mobile accessible, chances are they wouldn't recommend them.

That's a big chunk

To

Be fair.

Yeah. Yeah. So that goes outside of just using the website. That's about your brand, that's about your business.

The impact that that is going to have on someone initially is quite important. You mentioned coding or code, outdated code, what impact does coding have on website optimization and performance? I know you have a go at me quite a lot about, that's a pretty big kind of worm, but put code there. Don't put code there. Make it really neat.

Josh's biggest beef is that you do things by eye instead of with,

But that's because my eye is class

Most of the time. Most the time. I dunno personally, I prefer doing aligning things mathematically versus optically and there's an argument for both. I'll give you that, but I dunno my way's better.

Can I just add your eye? Wasn't that class this week when you got plaster in it? Moving on.

Hang

On, you asked me a question. Yeah, just go on. Sorry. How code affects or how code can

Affect in its simplest form without opening that can

In its simplest form, I'll just peel a little bit of the can

Away. Okay,

So code, if it's old, it's probably an optimised. If you've got something that was written, I dunno 10, 15 years ago, there's probably newer better ways to do it nowadays. Maybe there's a different library of code that works better. It is more optimised, runs quicker and people will be using that library now. But back when your site was built, maybe they weren't using that or maybe it didn't even exist. So yeah, keeping on top of updates when packages and things are getting changed around and new stuff becomes available, better stuff becomes available, definitely helps optimise. You've also, so that's just to do with updates and things like that In terms of actually optimising code, there's various tools you can do that. I mean caching is just one off the bat. Having all your pages and things like that. Cached having CSS minified for people that don't understand code, this might sound a little bit weird. So CSS is your style sheets and having those compressed I guess for lack of a better word, makes them easier to send over the web

And makes things quicker. You don't let people in your style sheets.

I prefer not to keep people locked out, don't you? I do.

Can I add as well that technology changes over time? So internet protocols change how security works changes how browsers work changes. I mean we'll all know that every week or so there'll be an update to Google Chrome to whatever browser you use. That's all to keep on top of technology changes. So the websites themselves and the content management systems and the platforms, they all have to keep up with it as well and to add an extra layer of complexity, so does the server. So they might be on, let's just say PHP for example, but the latest version of the content management system might need PHP 8.3, but it was built on PP eight. So all of that again sort of comes back to Josh's point about maintaining it.

Yeah, it's quite an important one that we talk about quite a lot. So I want to move on to, we talk about site speed quite a lot and there's a stat for you here, 47% of users expect a to load in two seconds or less. So that in itself is quite important, but what do you think the main consequences are of a slow loading website?

People are intolerant to that now. They, it's become normal for websites to work very quickly and I think that's a good thing broadly. So if you've got a website that isn't as fast as your competitors, for example, users probably will prefer to use your competitors because they expect that from websites, they get that everywhere else on the web.

Web users are lazy as well, aren't they? This is the thing

We all are.

There's

Quite a lot that plays into this one though that I always think is that, let's take that use case of the website is just slow, but they're on an even poorer broadband or internet connection. That's probably going to be times by,

Well, it's all the more reason actually outside of the uk, more so where in places like America where they don't by default have unlimited internet and things like that, the heavier your website is, the more of their data you are using. So specifically Google have an agenda against this for the right reasons, but mostly for the US audience because it's just using all their data up. You come back to a large image, for example, an image that's 10 megabytes versus an image that's a hundred kilobytes a hundred times the size and that's using people's data up as they're browsing your website.

Yeah, images are a great one actually. And going back to the slow internet speed, that's another one that is going to annoy users and you might not even notice this yourself if your internet's quicker, so say you've got full fibre connection or whatever you are going to your site, it's loading really quickly. You are absolutely chuffed about that. But someone down the road who's on still copper lines, theirs is taking absolutely age to load and unless you are aware of the potential of image sizes, also file sizes like different files that have been served. You could actually be making a certain demographic bounce from your website just by them having slower internet.

You mentioned as well, Josh earlier that there's stats around mobile and obviously lots of mobile traffic is on devices that are 4G or less potentially as well. So that's a significant factor in speed. So there's a lot to bear in mind with that. It's not just a case of my laptop works brilliantly. It does for everyone else. You need to be aware of lots of the variables. There you go.

Yeah, just another stat for you. Every second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Yeah, so I think that was Amazon's own stats,

If

I've read rightly so. Amazon themselves have tested that. I would argue actually the impact of that for Amazon is probably less than your average business. I dare say every second for an average business makes a bigger difference than that. I think Google had some stats on this a few years ago and I can't remember what they were, but I think it was something like 20%.

That's interesting. Josh, you touched on content and images and things like that. If you take into account video content as well, what role does content play when it comes to website optimization and how would you create better content for both UX and conversion rates when it comes to site speed and performance?

I'll handle video separately. We can also talk about written content and things like that video. I guess generally speaking, you want to be careful with video. A lot of people would want to use it and have a video autoplay or something like that. Not really good. This is less so optimization, but it's probably worth touching on anyway. It's like maybe don't have it autoplay and have volume on and things like that because people get annoyed by it and Google gets annoyed by it. If you are having something in a hero section, this is one that I see quite often is they'll have a video, maybe drone footage or whatever it may be in a hero section, first thing that loads on the page. If you are loading a huge video file, like multiple tens of megabytes, that's going to be impacting your performance. You want to make sure, although it's the first thing people are seeing, you probably want it to be quite heavily compressed and a small file size so that it's loading quickly and if people want to see a fancy video, have a fancy video later on in the page and have that loaded dynamically after you've actually loaded the page.

So yeah, keeping the page size small is probably the main thing to touch on

There. I guess it is about balance, isn't it, in terms of making the site optimal from a speed and performance perspective. But when it comes down to UX and conversion rates, according to HubSpot, 72% of people would rather learn about a product via video. So there's an argument to say that imagine every page has video on it. How's that going to impact a site?

You can have both though I'm sure Josh will go into the technicalities of this and is better explaining it to me, but having the video load later on in the sequence. So calling it later once the core, the fold kind of thing, loads first.

There's lots of ways of doing kind of laser load or calling things afterwards or loading images and then playing on click or there's loads of ways of making that page weight reduce until there's an action that's completed. You can kind of have the best of both worlds in that instance. Or like Josh said, you could do something on different kind of dimensions. So whether you played the full video or play a video on a laptop, but maybe not on mobile for example, and maybe the user clicks to play on mobile. So there's lots of different ways of approaching that I'm sure Josh will go into.

To be fair, you've covered most of it there. So the things I were going to touch on, you've already touched on, but having them say on your product page for example, for example on your product page, you could have the video as the last image in the carousel or not image, it's a video, but you go through all the images and then oh look, there's a video that has not had to load. As soon as the page is loaded, that's loaded, I dunno, five, 10 seconds, 20 seconds after you've looked through all the other images. So that's not affecting your load time. People aren't going to bounce off of the page because of that. With the example, with it being a hero section, my best advice there is have the video just be short and compressed because that is loading straight away and it could be impacting load speed. So you want that to be as fast as it possibly can be.

I was going to say I want to drop in a pet peeve of mine actually. Now is, I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't have video on hero images or at the top of pages. Maybe I am a tiny bit, but sometimes it is. Okay. My biggest pet peeve is when those videos actually just have no purpose and what's the point. And even more so when they're just so long and they're on this long reel that's like a minute long and nobody's sat there watching it, they're just going to scroll down. So it's just completely unnecessary and I don't think that adds to UX at all.

Well, what's also important to realise there is say you have got this large hero video playing, you might have a H one in there, you've definitely not got much content in there, so you're actually pushing other important information below the fold

By

Having that

Information that helps convert as well. By the way, so we're talking about content here, we're talking about video, but in a minute I guess we'll be moving on to other types of content and in my opinion, one of the biggest benefits of what your content is and how it's written and the messaging is for users and how it converts them and explains what it is that the purpose I guess, of the page and the website. And the best way of doing that is with words

Still.

Just a quick, okay, this is the head of it's clear what we do.

I am going to argue with you that I disagree because not everyone likes to read. Most people consume visually. So if we use an example of a website that we launched recently, connect storage systems, they've got a video in the hero and I'd look at that as opposed to the text,

But okay, so the call to action on that, what if the button didn't have any text on?

Well, I wouldn't do that. I would put a button on the text.

Well, that's why the text is important.

The text is important from a button perspective, but not the descriptive words that you're,

Okay. Well if you landed on that website, you didn't know what they did.

That's a good point. I've been on a few sites where I've say a client has said, oh, let's have a look. Can you have a look at our site? Or something like that, but not a client, a potential client say, can you have a look at our site? And without having any background on them, I'll go to the website and I'll literally flick through maybe two or three pages and still be unaware of what they actually do. They'll have very vague language or very niche industry terms that maybe a layman wouldn't understand. And having that kind of experience when you hit the site isn't ideal. So if you've just got a video there and a very niche heading

On it or no, even I think I'm arguing the fact that there should be both. There should definitely be, if

It depends on the video though, doesn't it?

If

The video add value,

Going back to your product page thing, that's a great place for it because a hundred percent yeah, video sell

The product explainer

Video really sell.

Yeah, I think from a service business perspective though, if you are showing everything that you do in one video, you're going to show off your services and the way you work straight away. Aren't

It like a show reel?

Yeah,

Yeah, I think so. I just think there's a place for it and in my opinion, I don't think it's in that hero image. Was it me and you Nick that was looking at this? It might have been me and you actually, Tom, incredibly well done video for me. One of the best I've seen in ages was on the DGI I website.

Yeah, that is good.

Do you know on the VR drone?

Yeah,

It was on that. We were looking at that recently and they've got such a fantastic video further down the product page that actually really does sell it so well,

But go in an extra level to that they have theirs in the hero, but also on a slider with specific messaging for that video. It's quite so relevant.

Oh yeah, it is relevant.

Well, they're a prime example of it done well by they're using great messaging and great video together. And

Snappy and short though, that's the thing. No one's going to sit there watching it. The longer video further down the page, that's like 15 minutes long. Yeah, people will click and watch that.

The other thing though is if the video is short, people will sit there and watch it. People have got a short attention span these days. Yeah,

They have.

But if you're watching a ten second clip of a guy snowboarding down the mountain, you're like, okay, that's pretty cool. And then 10 seconds are up, you're like, oh, this guy's surfing now.

Yeah, I think we'll agree to disagree on some elements, but I think it's just a balancing act. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Alright, so we've discussed image and video content a little bit, but what about written content? How does that affect optimization of a website

Affects a lot, doesn't it actually written content? So it affects how you're perceived as a brand. It affects how your website might be optimised and how useful it is from an SEO perspective, how you can be found. It affects conversions, how you push people through to the right page and on that conversion journey. Yeah, it does a big job actually a very big job.

I think the same rules apply, don't they, is to content as they do video, it needs to serve a purpose. If you're just putting content there for content's sake, then it's going to do no one any good,

Not be

Too big. Yeah,

Same with video.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Be streamlined, be purposeful. Match the intent or answer the questions that the user's looking for or whatever the purpose is on your website and just make sure you do a good job. And then you can always optimise and you can always try and enhance and you can always change and tweak, that's absolutely fine, but it needs to serve a purpose. And that's the same with all content that you have on your website

Intent again. So we're 20 odd minutes in and that's the first mention of intent. But actually arguably for this whole topic, again, it's one of the most important things for content specifically, you've got to match what people want. Otherwise your page just isn't going to work very well.

I think written content is the most important thing. If anything, obviously everything's got to look nice, it's got to feel nice, you've got to get people to the right place. But first of all, if your content's not SEO optimised, then it's not going to get found by Google and not going to get crawled properly. And if it doesn't answer the question of the user, then you know where to be seen. Are you? No.

Also, if it's not digestible, if it is just a wall of text, no one's reading that.

No.

It wants to be easy to understand, easy to read,

Consumable. Yeah,

I think those two things are almost interchangeable now anyway, Tom. So if something's not fit for user, you're probably not going to run very well anyway. Even it's SEO optimised

The other way round may be less so, but that way round. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean you can have something that's good for SEO potentially good for SEO, that's terrible for the user, but like Nick said, it wouldn't perform, but you could have something that's great for the user but not very good for SEO and it might not be found. So we are always advocates, aren't we, of UX first, really. There should be very little. If anything that you would say that has to be done for SEO that would damage ux.

No,

It's not. That's not been a thing for ages.

No, I think there's some interesting points there. One last thing I want to touch on this side is any common mistakes to avoid when designing for mobile? I'll kick off with one is tech's been too small in buttons or buttons too close together, too close together, things like that. But I dunno if anyone else has got any others.

I've got a big one. We used to see this all the time when Google first moved to mobile indexing. Mobile crawling, sorry, is when websites remove elements entirely from the mobile view of their site. So we had a client who removed, I think it was a long description from their product pages on mobile because for exactly that reason, they didn't want a wall of text. The best way of dealing with that is to say, well, why have we got this wall of text and how can we improve it? Not let's remove it. Because when Google started crawling their website, the mobile version of their website, they lost so many keyword rankings because they removed half of the content on the page or more than it that Google understood to drive users to the website. So yeah, absolutely you need to make sure that you are displaying the information that's relevant to users still, but you have to display it in a way that works for them. You can't just have a wall of text like Josh says,

And

Works for the device as well.

The device. Yeah,

And a really quick way to solve that one is just whacking it in a accordion.

Absolutely.

And then your text is there, but it's also hidden and you can easily expand it and see it.

Right. So we've touched a little bit on content conversion rates, optimising for better ux, things like that. What about the technical side for website success? How do technical aspects of a website impact optimization?

You could start anywhere with this. This is a massive, massive area, but ultimately there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of signals that you pass to browsers to search engines, and they're all technical signals that have an impact on various things. So for example, you hreflang there. That's one of many, many, many things that could impact a website's performance and usability. But what Hreflang does is if you've got multiple versions of your website in different locations, it ensures that you are telling search engines which one is right for users in different locations. So let's just say you've got a UK and the US version, the H ref Lang, they point to each other and they basically say, this is the UK version, this is the US version. And then Google in the US would show the US version and the UK would show the UK version. But if you got that wrong, people would be, not only would people be visiting the wrong version of the page for the wrong location, which could by the way also be a different language, but also you are losing out on the right people finding your website in the first place. So it's not great for SEO, but terrible for user experience, but there's hundreds of those examples.

Canonical

Good one.

You can tackle this one then Nick.

Oh, canonical.

Yeah, I just did hre. Langs.

I think there's lots to talk about From a technical optimization perspective, we would look at lots of different things when we're putting a technical audit together.

It depends what you're optimising for as well. And there's a variety of different aspects to that. It could be SEO, it could be speed, it could be a service setup, it could be loads and loads of things. Like Matt said, all of those things will be slightly different for each of those purposes. So yeah, you can't cover that all in one question unfortunately. But

In fact, each one of those is probably its own podcast. I mean you go onto that pagination that wouldn't impact B2B business websites, but it would e-commerce and pagination each page when you're on an e-commerce store and you see page 1, 2, 3, 4 in a category, each one of those should self canonise to itself, but also really should have a bit of code that says previous and next. So Google understand the relationships between those pages. Common mistake there is a lot of websites will canonise back to the page one and that doesn't really help search engines understand Google have said in the last year or two that they can sort of understand that anyway, so it's not necessarily something you need to do, but we have seen that when it isn't implemented properly, Google struggle. So again, that's as Nick says, that wouldn't impact some websites and it would others.

Yeah.

Have you got anything to say on the technical side, Josh?

Not so much like SEO technical stuff, I guess mean most of the stuff I'm thinking of just goes back to how a website's built, and I was actually tempted to bring this one up in the last question that you had. This is maybe not so much a common mistake for your general website admin, but it's more so the person that's putting the site together or developing pages and things like that. And that's developing pages for mobile and developing pages for desktop or developing a single page that works on both, but having some elements, as Matt mentioned a minute ago, be visible on mobile or desktop or vice versa. And I mean it is a way to do it. I mean, not hiding things don't do that, but it is a way to do it. Have two different designs in mind, but generally you want to be actually making something that works on all sizes and it's just the one design. And to do that, you do need to have a bit of a grasp of how responsive layouts work and how you can change the position of certain items and things like that on the page. But doing it effectively and in the smallest amount of code possible, like HMR code, like actual elements on page can make a big difference.

Nice. I'll

Go for

One

God,

Then massive logos

And headers.

Yeah, massive logos and headers. I thought.

White

Space.

No, no more technical things for me. I'm burnt out.

Lack of white space.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Like

Cramming things together.

Nothing worse is there. You got to let the design breathe and the content breathe.

Well that's another point actually that enables the content. We spent a good section talking about why content's important if you don't let it breathe and it's not enabled, it just looks like it's all there.

It goes

Back to it being

Digestible.

Yeah, exactly. Nice. Alright. Quickly we talk about technical aspects of a website and we obviously do technical SEO audits, but if somebody out there wanted to just check the technical side of their website quickly and just get a few tips, are there any tools out there that people can use?

Yeah, it depends what you need to do, I suppose, on what you're looking for. Again, which is a little bit of a sit on the fence answer. But for SEO for example, you could use something like GT Metrics that has a solution that can detect test speed,

Although you don't have to pay for it. If you want the more thorough version of that, you could use search console as an example. If you have that on your site, that will give you quite a lot of information about a variety of aspects actually, not just SEO, but how users find your website, how users interact with your website to a degree, and then their experience of your website as well. And there's a lot of paid tools as well, which you wouldn't necessarily have to buy, but obviously you can do. So things like SEMrush, it's quite expensive depending on which package you get and depending on what you need it for. So it might not be the right solution for everybody, but those detailed tools that offer a lot, a variety of different ways of analysing your website I think can be quite a good way of checking lots of things. And then there's tools that aren't necessarily technical. It also do provide value. So things like user testing for example can be fantastic for

Websites. Yeah, that's a good one.

Just understanding actually people who have no bias towards your product or your website actually what the they think do they find it easy to use are things where they was expecting to find them. That can be incredibly valuable for optimization

UX especially. Not so much SEO, but how people are interacting,

How respond. You can ask specific questions you was it easy to find out what we did

And watch their sessions. You can say, can you try and find this or do this and you can literally watch them. Yeah, set specific

Tasks.

Yeah, yeah, they were really useful tools that Nick's just put there. I've got a couple I could add to that as well. So the first one, Microsoft Clarity.

I think Microsoft Clarity is decent. The JavaScript's a little bit heavy, so you wouldn't put it on a website with, I don't think you should really at least put it on a website that's on let's say a budget server or isn't particularly well optimised. However, it's incredibly useful for lots of things like that. So I'd highly recommend that goes without saying even though a lot of people there's less affinity for this product now than there used to be. But Google Analytics, I gather a lot of data from that as well for free. So same as Clarity is free as well, by the way. So finally Nick mentioned Google Search Console, which is I think it's probably one of the most underused SEO tools there is. I think it gives you so much great information, but also Microsoft Search Console Webmaster tools, sorry as it's called, is very similar to Google's, but it also gives you quite a lot more data. It gives you less data based. The advantage of Google search consoles, it gives you Google data on how many impressions you're getting for your pages and keywords and so on. Microsoft still does give you that, but obviously there's much less volume. However, the other tools it gives you on crawling and things is better than Google search console. So you have really recommend that. Nice

One. Similar to what Nick mentioned, user testing. So instead of paying for user testing, you can also instal something like Hotjar, which is able to monitor how people are interacting with your site. You can literally see their mouse moving around and see hotspots and things like that, which is pretty handy. Some for more technical Cody kind of related things, I don't actually have one off the top of my head for this, but I'm sure they are available is something that can check whether your page is using Symantec HTML. And that basically means whether HT ML tags on your site are used correctly. So H one through to H six for your headers, P tags for your paragraphs anchors for your links nav, footer body, all the rest of them, if they're not used correctly, that can throw Google off quite heavily. Like if it's looking for a nav element and can't find a nav that's going to be hindering you massively.

And another one, we can probably find a link for this one, but I dunno off the top of my head, Google brought out a text and colour and background kind of accessibility checker, which is allowing you to put in your brand colours for example, and it will tell you whether your primary colour and your secondary colour for example, or your text colours work accessibly. So if the text is too dark and the button is too dark, you might not be able to see it very well and Google can see things like this and also not very fond of those things. Nice.

Lighthouse is also quite good for that as well, which is free.

Yeah,

There's quite a lot of tests as part of the lighthouse platform that would do a variety of different tests like that.

GT metrics might have that as well, specifically the colour stuff. Another one on that actually, again, these will probably do it too, but it's font sizes. Maybe not all of your text on your page is tiny, but sometimes you might have some bits that are really small and yeah, it's not good. People can't read it. I've got another one actually another tool or kind of a tool service I guess is a CDM content delivery network. So you can offload a load of your heavy assets on your server to A CDN and it makes things get sent to your users quicker. Really good for optimising speed.

Nice. Sorry to prolong this. I think I wanted to say something a couple of minutes ago actually, and Josh has just reminded me, the purpose of all of these tools is to test. So I know we've mentioned this a lot, it's probably the thing we mentioned second most behind intent is test, just test everything. All of these give you data, but unless you're testing that data isn't that important. So you've got to test everything you possibly can to just continually try and improve.

Nice. Some good insights there. I've enjoyed it. Have you enjoyed it? Cheers Nick. Cheers Matt. It's alright. Anytime. Cheers, Josh. You're very welcome. Tom, would everyone like to just wave at the camera? So that's all the time we have for today. Thanks to the ML team for sharing their expertise on website optimization. Today we covered the importance of speed, mobile friendliness and technical optimization. Learn that even the smallest changes can make a big impact on UX and conversion rates. From optimising images to streamlining code, we explored the key strategies to get your website sprinting towards success. Remember to take action on these tips and start optimising your website today. Tune in next time for more insights and expert advice on marketing blobs. Bye for now.