Ep. 101 Website Traffic Myths

Tired of your marketing getting little results?
Get the 5 steps to get more subscribers, engagement, and SALES this week! (And make it EASY!)

I NEED THIS!

Home

Smart AF Show

Ep. 101 If You Build It They Will Come & Other Website Traffic Myths

by Torie Mathis | Smart AF Show

If You Build It They Will Come & Other Website Traffic Myths

Your website should be the powerful foundation for all of your digital marketing however, just because you build it doesn’t mean that customers will ever find it. Unfortunately, we see many business owners build an expensive, fancy website that never gets any traction.

In this episode, Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean uncover some common website traffic myths and what you can do to increase your website traffic for free and get more customers and profits from your website.

Mentioned in this episode: WP Engine 3 months free: https://toriemathis.com/wpengine

If you want to know how to get more website traffic, learn how to market your business online, integrate email marketing, and get better results from your content marketing strategy this episode is for you.

Listen or watch the full episode below:

SUBSCRIBE + LISTEN TO SMART AF ON:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 101

Torie: [00:00:00] Facebook’s my website. Now you don’t own Facebook. Like Facebook can,

Sean: [00:00:04] Should know that very much now.

Torie: [00:00:06] Right? Well, Facebook can totally take your stuff down if they want to, or they can just decide not to ever show your stuff. Like there’s this algorithm. And what percentage of your audience are they even showing your stuff? Like when it’s your website like you have a lot more troll over that.

Hey, what’s up. Torie Mathis, I am your host. And I am here with the one and only Sean Mathis, founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum.

Sean: [00:00:39] What’s going on.

Torie: [00:00:40] You know, we talked to a lot of business owners about their website, website design is one of the things for them. Last 15 years that we have had it as one of our main services.

And so we have talked to a lot of businesses about their websites. And one thing I think that a lot of people don’t realize, and it is a huge myth about business marketing is for the website. If you build it, they will come. And this is absolutely the farthest from the truth. In fact, I once sat down with this guy talking to him about his website, and he, I was talking to him about SEO, so about search engine optimization and how he could get more traffic to the website.

And so I asked him about his SEO about his keywords and what kind of things. And he told me I don’t need that. I pay Google and Google sends people to my website. Michael, you know, if you stop paying Google, no one is going to come to your website because your website isn’t even indexed by Google. And he really believed that it was

Sean: [00:01:37] literally the only time anybody saw him was when his ad that he pays.

Torie: [00:01:42] Wasn’t one of the search results, which rotates through everybody that pays. He didn’t even have enough information on his website for Google to find the website, to be able to show it on searches. He really just believed that because he paid Google that it would just be shown that’s brutal. It is.

And I, I feel really bad because. People spend so much money in so much time on their website. And they just think that because they have it, that that’s good enough. And that is definitely not true in order for your website to be an actual moneymaker for you, for it to get in front of a lot of people.

There are things that you have to have to get your website actually seen. So we’re gonna talk about a few of those things.

Sean: [00:02:25] A lot of them are. Easy and I mean, at the bare minimum completely free.

Torie: [00:02:33] Absolutely. And you know, we talk about some of these website builder type websites like Wix, or what’s the other one, like Squarespace and even like Shopify websites, like some of them on their lowest plan, they don’t even let you do these types of things like to have search engine optimization.

So though it’s very easy to put out a web. Anybody could put it out. You have to do a little bit more than just build a website. So the first thing we kind of talked about with search engine optimization or SEO, like you have to have SEO on your website for Google to be able to find your website, you submit it to Google so that they index your site and then show your site to searchers.

And so you definitely want to make sure that you have that squared away.

Sean: [00:03:14] That’s like a, so Miles Through Time, I’ve got a page on Miles Through Time that is all about the car museum and the SEO on, on specifically, one of those pages on the website is all car museum. That way anybody searching Google for car museum, not by miles through time.

Like they’re not looking for the name of my business. They’re looking for a thing, right. In this case, a car museum, but putting car museum in the SEO for Miles Through Time is what’s making it big, found on Google.

Torie: [00:03:46] You know, I’ve sat down with quite a few people and they’re like, I want to be found for let’s say tuna sandwiches, but the word tuna sandwich is never on their website.

Like Sean said, like you have to have, like, he has a whole entire page that’s written specifically for car museum because that’s what he wants to be found for. So search engine optimization has a lot to do with the content that you have on your website. And that’s definitely the second thing that you need to have.

You can not just have a pit, a website with just a bunch of pictures. You have to have a website that actually has content on it. And then. You structure your content and you write your content and kind of have a content plan so that you are being found for what your audience is searching for in Sean’s case, they’re searching for a car museum.

So a lot of the content that’s on the website is written around that key phrase.

Sean: [00:04:38] Yeah. And I mean, it, unless you’ve got a name of your business, that is like the search terms, it is not about the name of your business, which I think a lot of people get caught up on is like, ah, you know, like miles their time.

Like if they don’t know miles your time, they’re not searching for Miles Through Time. So if they already know, then that’s easy, fine. Like I don’t have to go hunt and try to get people to find Miles Through Times. They’re already searching for it. By name, they’re looking for Car museum.

Torie: [00:05:07] Where they’re looking for a thing to do things to do or a day trip from Atlanta.

Right? So whatever your business is, you want to go and do some research and figure out what terms are, are your audience searching for? What are they doing? What are they doing when they go online and to figure out what words they’re using and what terms they’re using, that way that you can build your content.

For those terms, because Google wants to show people results that they like that work for them. So if you are showing up as content that they really want, for example, you know, car museum or a day trip from Atlanta, and it really is a day trip from Atlanta that the content matches that search term, Google is going to show your content even more.

And that is exactly what you want.

Sean: [00:05:51] Right. And in this case, car museum is not the homepage of Miles Through Time’s website. It is a complete, separate page that can be found in the whole website of itself. But like, I think people think that when they search for something, it’s pulling up like the homepage of the website and it totally isn’t, in some cases, it’ll pull up the contact page.

Cases it’ll pull up. Just the about page

Torie: [00:06:16] Blog posts are really, really great because you can be hyper-specific on one post and just really go into one specific topic, which is your keyword. And so that one topic is what you want to be found for. And you can just go to town on that one topic, that one thing.

So I think a lot of people think maybe they have to shove all those words on their homepage. That’s not how it works. And you didn’t, maybe you don’t want a bazillion pages on your site, but maybe blog posts are more the way you want to go so that you can be a little bit more specific and highlight all those different terms that you want to be found for.

You know, and that is one thing that I always worry when people have these one page websites. Like, I don’t know if you could really, if, if you want to be found online for many different search terms, I don’t think you can do it with a one page website. I think that a one-page website maybe has its place.

If you’re something, maybe an event or something that’s not going to last a really long time, you just got to get something up really quick. Otherwise, I would brand new with no. Right. You don’t want to build onto it. Seeing that these people don’t want to get their business going until they have like this, you know, humongous website, you know, this $5,000 crazy thing like to start off, you do not need that.

Plus in the beginning, you got to be a little bit flexible and you gotta be able to adapt. You really know exactly like so many things change in like the first year or two of your business that I wouldn’t lock yourself down on this big, crazy website. You can build it a little bit at a time. I think it’s better to get the basic setup, you know, and maybe if that’s a one-page website or a little five-page website, and then just start adding to it and figuring out how to do these little things, and then you have a good foundation to grow from, and then you can figure out like, you know, for search terms, you know, Sean didn’t have every single search term when he first started the Miles Through Time website.

In fact, the Miles Through Time website was pretty crappy when we first started, because we just had to get something. We didn’t have a museum. Like there was nothing. So like to create a website from scratch. No content, no pictures, no anything. And you know, when Sean first started, it was an automotive museum, but he wasn’t sure what was going to take off.

So he also did vehicle consignment and vehicle storage. And, you know, he really didn’t know which of those things was going to be the thing, because it was a new business. And so if he would have spent all this money and all this time getting all that, like incredibly polished and perfect. You feel stuck in it, like you don’t want to do that.

So starting off small is great, but I think you always need to be adding to your content and adjusting to what’s working. And so my second thing, I guess that would be my third because I talked about SEO. I talked about content. The next thing is analytics. Like you really need to be able to have some type of analytics on your website so that you can see what’s working and what’s not because that’s super powerful.

And a lot of the analytics are free. Like for example, Google analytics. I’m sure a lot of the website builders have something on there and you can still stick Google analytics on there. It’s a really good way that you can see exactly where your traffic’s coming from, how long people are staying on your website.

You can see something that’s called your bounce rate, which means how many people are leaving after they get to your website and only are staying on one page and then leave. Because it’s better. If people stay and check out a couple of pages before they leave. So there’s lots of different things that you can see.

You know, if you’re especially like Sean puts money in Facebook ads. So if he looked at his analytics and saw nobody was coming to the website from Facebook, you would think, well, maybe I shouldn’t be spending my money or maybe something’s broken. And the connection is me, you know, maybe there’s something going on with my, maybe my Facebook ads are shut off and I didn’t even really, like, there are things that, that information is telling you that like, you have to have those analytics on there to be able to know what’s going on.

Sean: [00:10:01] Well, specifically with the ad. Cause like, if you look at the analytics for Facebook and ad and I can see, Hey, people are you know, engaging with that ad or, you know, looking at it, seeing it, doing whatever they’re doing. And then I go and look at the analytics on the website and like, well, it’s not transitioning from that Facebook, like to an actual visit to the website.

That’s a major disconnect because ultimately that Facebook doesn’t do it any damn good.

Torie: [00:10:26] Alright. So, and Sean, has it set up that anybody that lands on the website, the pop-up comes up to sign up for his newsletter and you an email, an email address is so much more powerful than anything that you’re going to get on Facebook because that gives you that direct connection to people.

So like that’s another important way that you, like, you would want to know that information people are actually coming through, because then you could know how many people are coming in and then how many people are actually signing up for the email list. And you could actually figure out for however many people are coming from Facebook, how many of them are actually signing up for the newsletter?

Sean: [00:10:59] And really a lot of that is just like, there’s so many different ways that you can just blow through some cash. But, you know, marketing your business online, that if you don’t look at these kinds of statistics on your website and your social media, like you, you can be overspending greatly. And for no reason, I mean, all you gotta do is look at it.

Torie: [00:11:23] Some people are like, well, I don’t want to get involved in that. Or it’s difficult or I’m not in the numbers or whatever. Yeah. All of these programs have made it really easy and really easy to understand. It’s not like you have to like, you know, go run through all these reports and things like that. A lot of these are just, they’re already set up and it’s set up in numbers.

It’s set up in a graph. It’s set up in all these different ways that if you’re a numbers person, you can just look at numbers. If you like pictures, like literally like there’s graphs and stuff like that, that makes it really easy for you. As a business owner as not a numbers person, as not even being like, really familiar with the actual program that you can really go in there and understand what’s going on and you can’t break it.

So you just have to go through and click around and check stuff out. So if you don’t have analytics any type of analytics on your website, or you don’t know, ask your website person or, you know, whoever’s handling that. And it’s something that like, there’s no way to get past data. So this is something that you want to do now.

And we talk about data all the time. Like, collect the data, even if you’re not looking at it, like right. The second. It is so amazing to have that past data to look at because then you can start to see trends. You can start to see what’s working and what’s not, or what did work, or you can see maybe what types of, when of your business is slow so that maybe you could do some special type of promotions too, you know, to ride through those slow times.

And without data, you don’t have the information that you need to make those decisions. So just getting something like Google analytics, right. Like today, do it today. It’s going to mean that from today on like, you’re always going to have that data.

Sean: [00:12:54] Yeah. And the same, the same types of analytics are on your Google business page. And it’s, it’s exact same thing. Your, your Google business page is just about as important as your website is simply because so many people use Google. And I mean, that stuff is completely free.

Torie: [00:13:14] Absolutely. So when talking about the content that you have on your website, you also want to make sure that you’re always updating your website. You want to make sure that like you’re putting out a blog post, I would say weekly would be great at least monthly so that you have some type of fresh content coming out because Google does like that you’re putting fresh content on there. It gives them a reason to ping your site and to like re you know, to index another page so that they know that you’re an active website, lots of websites get put up, and then they.

Because nobody ever does anything to them. And if, if. Nobody’s going to them. If, if Google’s not putting them out as a search result and somebody actually engaging with that content, because remember Google wants to give people good search results. Like it’s possible that your website will not get found by people.

So putting out that fresh content and always doing a little bit more on there keeping it fresh, keeping it current is something that you always need to be working on.

Sean: [00:14:06] If you’ve got a website check to see if you’ve got a. On the very bottom footer of your website and make sure that thing is today’s year. Cause there’s a lot of them out there that you, you scroll down and you’re like, that this thing hasn’t been updated since 2009 and I mean, it’s a, it’s a dead giveaway. So already you, I mean, you can tell websites changed so often that it doesn’t take very long for them to look dated. So you’ve already got a dated website.

And it literally says on the bottom that it’s, it’s old. Like you’re lucky that’s if anybody sees it really and it’s such a super easy fix. And if you’re good at posting on social media, and when I say good, I use it loosely. Like it’s not hard, like the bare minimum type stuff, just something right.

You’re posting something relative. Relevant to your business, think of a blog post. Is that kind of on steroids to coin a term of a friend of ours? Just think of it as a, as a post that you can instead of, you know, one picture and like a sentence or a few words, you know, maybe it’s a couple of pictures and few paragraphs or something like that. And then turn that into something that you can then share that blog post onto social media, as opposed to so that when somebody clicks that thing, they’re going back to your website and they can learn more about what it is that you’re doing. And that’s going to help drive a lot of engagement.

The Miles Through Time website. I see a lot come from social media. And a lot of times that is you know, I’ll, I’ll look at the analytics that we just talked about. Not, I don’t even dive into it real deep. I’ll look at the picture, right. I’ll be like, Hey, I’ll show I spin the laptop around and I’ll show it to her.

I’m like, look at this. And all of a sudden it’s down. So I’ll, I’ll create a blog post real quick, super simple. And it’s something that I can then share on social media that I literally could have taken that same little bit of, of content that I put on a blog post and just stuck it straight on to Facebook.

But then like, that’s it like all I’m going to get from that as alike, and comment or something like that. Whereas instead, I took that and stuck it as a blog post, shared it on social media. Now, when they see it, they’re able to actually come back to what I want them to do and, and drive that traffic, which broadens the whole spectrum of like how people can find you like you need people going to your website on a consistent basis for Google to go out. That is a good website. Let’s show more of that. So more people will go to it and it creates that snowball effect.

Torie: [00:16:41] Well, I think some people keep so much stuff on Facebook that they’re like, oh, I don’t even really need to use my website or update my, I’m doing so much of this stuff.

Facebook’s my website. Now you don’t own Facebook. Like can, should know that very much so now. Right? Well, Facebook, I can totally take your stuff down if they want to, or they can just decide not to ever show your stuff. Like there’s this algorithm and what percentage of your audience are they even showing your stuff?

Like when it’s your website like you have a lot more control over that. And when it’s your email list, like you have a lot of control about that. You email somebody and you are getting into their email box, right? You post something on Facebook. Yeah. There’s like a, maybe the Facebook shows it to me. What 5% of your audience, like you don’t know without paying.

So you really want to utilize the ways that you have the most control. So my suggestion is to fish on Facebook to drive people back to your website, definitely make that relationship and do things on Facebook and post and be interesting. Okay. Also, you want to bring people back to your home, to your website, where you have a little bit more control over the experience and exactly what they’re seeing because then you can really guide them through.

I want them to do this and I want them to see this and then I want them to sign up and I want them to feel this way. And there’s, you can really guide that whole customer journey where you can’t do that on Facebook. You can’t do that on Instagram. You don’t know where they’re clicking or what they’re seeing.

And it’s always like a shiny object were oh, cat video. Oh my, grandma. Oh, you know, all of these other things that you have competing really own that, that experience that people have on your website and get people to go there so that you can control the experience and you can get their email address.

Sean: [00:18:28] Yeah. I then like we’ve said it quite a few times, your, your website is your home. So whether you have a brick and mortar business, or you’ve got an online business, your website is like your digital tool bag, all these other things, Facebook, Google business, like everything that has to do that, that’s out there online.

Those are all your tools, you know, They’re a part of it, but they’re, they’re not the main thing. They’re not what holds everything together. You want them to go to your home, you know? Cause that’s where you’re then going to be able to capture that email and sell them your product and have them learn more about you on there too.

And if, if you don’t like you’re, you’re, you’re leaving, fade up to stuff that’s just outside of your control. And the thing is, is you don’t even realize it half the time. Right?

Torie: [00:19:15] I think about some of these restaurants like I want to see a menu before I go to a restaurant. It just, makes me feel better.

I know. I know. Well, you can find real food. Okay. So for food pickup, I’m going to go to Google or to TripAdvisor or something like that, because then it’s people showing the photo it’s not a photo or something. If you want to see pictures of the food, then that’s like a really good way to get that user generated content from Google, from TripAdvisor, from those places.

So I think there’s a place for that. However, if I want to see the menu and stuff, That’s something that you need to take control over and have them come back to your website and easily find your menu. So that, and it’s the updated menu. It’s not people taking these pictures from their phone of like pieces of the menu that they liked.

Sean: [00:20:00] Sorry, which may or may not be current because that update is key. Cause I’ve seen that where I’m like. Where did we go? We went someplace and you wanted to the crab cakes, crab cakes. And we specifically went to this restaurant because there was a picture of a menu with crab cakes on it, and Torie was craving and crab cakes.

And we’d go there and we’re like, we’re looking at the menu and that there’s no damn crab cakes on the crab cakes.

Torie: [00:20:26] Zero crab cakes.

Sean: [00:20:27] There was no crab, like we don’t have those anymore. Like, well, what the hell, man?

Torie: [00:20:31] Like, you need to keep that stuff updated now. I kind of don’t want to go there cause I can’t trust that you’re going to update your stuff. Yeah. So you have control over the content on your website. And then, the journey that people are taking. So you really need to make sure that your content matches that. So don’t just rely on your Facebook stuff. Don’t just rely on Google business, but use those as tools to fish for people and get them to your website.

So you control the experience so that you get them to do what you want them to do. You have the call to action. That is the perfect one. Whether it’s to download this or sign up for their email or grab this coupon or watch this video so that they love you. You have so much control when you get there. So take that control and really work on the content that’s on your website.

I think that it’s super important. And I think that it’s something that’s overlooked because Facebook is easy because Google is easy and everything like those are really great tools and definitely uses those. But don’t let easy turn into lazy that you’re not taking care of your house. So you’re not taking care of your home because you got to take care of.

So another thing that you want for your website, and like Sean said, websites are changing all the time is that your website needs to be fast. It needs to be secure and it needs to be mobile ready, which means that no matter what device somebody is pulling it up on that it works fantastic. A lot of the new types of websites, how they are built.

Automatically do this. This doesn’t mean that you need two different websites. It’s one website and it does the exact same thing. It moves and changes and adjusts based on the people that are going to be coming to it, to based on, based on their device that they’re on there.

Sean: [00:22:03] Now, if you don’t have that like that’s a dead giveaway. Your website is way too old.

Torie: [00:22:09] And I think that you lose people. Like if somebody pulls up your website and they have to start pinching or to like like they’re going to leave, they’re going to go find something.

Sean: [00:22:16] Yeah. Are still, there’s quite a few of them that, that they’re definitely not mobile friendly website.

Torie: [00:22:21] So if your website is like that, it’s time for a little update, little upgrade, you could do a little bit better than that. And websites, like we said, they’re a little bit easier now. Like they’re more accessible. Two business owners. It used to be hard. It used to be lots of coding and it’s not as bad. Okay.

Sean: [00:22:36] But where they were selling apps and making it all super over-complicate like, you don’t need, like, unless you’re like, you really need a nap. Cause you’ve got this fantastic software program or game or whatever. Like you don’t need that. You just need a Mo mobile version of your website. And it’s the same thing. It’s automatic. You don’t have to, you don’t have to do anything.

Torie: [00:22:57] And you also want to have, what’s called an SSL certificate on your website, which is a secure certificate, which you get usually through wherever you are hosting your website, you’re like WP engine or blue host or wherever you host, they do that.

So that your, the, if you. Have content on there that like people are putting their email address or whatnot on there that it’s encrypted. It makes it more secure. And these days Google doesn’t want to show websites that aren’t secure. It’ll actually pop up that says this website may not be secure.

It’s a really big red flag for people. So you want to make sure that your website is secure for any visitors that are,

Sean: [00:23:31] it’s definitely a red flag for people. Cause I’ve been contacted a few times for various things. That something happens with the certificate, like expires or something and people know automatically like, Ooh, well, and now if you had a, if you had a certificate on there and it does expire and you’ve, haven’t done what you needed to do, like it pops up a whole warning page again and locks it down because it’s trying to pull up the S the HTTP S but you don’t have it, but on the backend, like, it’s, that’s what it’s trying to pull up. So it won’t even pull up the non-secure websites. So it’s, it’s down in the the realm of things. But then even just I think it’s safari or Chrome, one of those.

It was like, kind of Torie was saying, it says it’s not secure. Even that in the little tiny section, up at the top where the browser is, where you type in you know, the name of the website, it’s enough to go and be and have people be like, there’s nothing wrong with the website. It’s just, there’s no secure certificate on it.

So even like all of our websites we are all of our clients, we’ve been switching them over and making sure that they actually have those.

Torie: [00:24:34] And if you think about it like there’s lots of. Crappy people out there that put up shit websites that are trying to scam people. So whatever you can do to put your best foot forward and to get a security certificate is definitely a best foot forward thing. It’s less than a hundred dollars a year. It makes people feel better. It makes you know, your website more secure. You definitely want to go with that.

Sean: [00:24:55] I would like to say we, we have WP engine we’ve got we’ll put a link of it in the description of this video or wherever you’re listening, you can find it on the, was it Toriemathis.com/resources they’re got, they’ve got three months free and they give you the SSL. So you don’t have to deal with it because a lot, cause a lot of the hosts that they make you pay completely and then you have to connect it. And every, like it’s so automatic with WP engine that which is then going to give you that the potential risk for that certificate expiring, and then your website’s down until you realize it. And believe me, emails are easy to miss. So now even if it’s like, like GoDaddy will do that. If, if you’ve missed it and you’ve missed the email telling you that it’s expired, you’re not going to know until a friendly customer. Let’s you know, at that point, like how many, how many customers did you lose?

So like with anything, man, I wanna set it and forget it when it. When you can, right. You know, I don’t need to keep updating my SSL certificate, just do it. You know, it’s not going to change.

Torie: [00:26:00] You know, and that’s going into some of the next, the next things that you need to do with a website that, you know, this whole thing is about. You cannot set it and forget it. There are things that you need to do and you need to maintain your website and having an SSL certificate or making sure that those things are current is part of maintaining your website, making sure that your website is secure as part of maintaining your website. We do a lot of things all of our clients because we realized that. You don’t know what needs to be done to a website. You don’t want to keep up with all of this stuff, because it really is a lot of stuff and things change all the time. You don’t want to make sure that your website works on every single device. So finding somebody that can maintain your website, I think is essential website packages.

For maintenance, you know, most of everybody is about the same price and what they’ll do. And what we do for our clients is just make sure that everything is okay. A lot of them like we do we’ll even give you updates. So they’ll put a blog post on there, or they’ll change your phone number, add some staff photos, or, you know, whatever those types of things are so that you don’t even have to worry about it.

Also, the security that’s on your website, not your SSL certificate, but actually making sure that your website does not get hacked is something that you have to have on your website. Because trust me, it happens. Even to secure websites. And so that leads to backups. You want to make sure whatever you’re doing with your website, that and to me, that’s part of maintenance is making sure that your website is constantly backed up because if something does happen and something does slip through, because even I had one of my websites somehow, you know, even with security it lovely, every single link that you clicked on on my website got sent to porn. Fantastic.

Sean: [00:27:29] And that’s the thing is this like the SSL certificate, the security measures that you put on with, like, none of that prevents that stuff from happening.

Torie: [00:27:38] It makes it less likely, but man shit still happens. So you really want to be prepared, especially, you know, you work really hard at getting, you know, your customers trust you work really hard at, you know, working on content and things like that.

Having these little ways that things are just like that extra layer, that extra layer of what if, you know, put my best foot forward, make sure it’s secure. But what if something does happen? Like making sure that you have backed up is, is another level of things that you need to make sure that your website is. And then you need to make sure that you know what to do with those backups, which, you know because we’ve been doing this for so long like however our websites are backed up. We know how to get them back up like that. There are things that you have to do to make sure that you can do that. And so having somebody that can help you out in case something does happen and be able to get your website up really quick is super important.

We actually have like 24 7 monitoring for a lot of our websites. So we’ll instantly get an email. Anything happens. And you know, some of the websites will automatically do software updates, which is really great because we love to set it and forget it. But sometimes update tab and a little too soon, like this website, isn’t ready to jive with this website update.

And so things happen in the break. So you have to revert things back. And again, if you don’t have these types of things there that you can tell, you’re going to have to wait until some customer finds that your website is down. And that is, that is not fun.

Sean: [00:28:59] Yeah. There’s so many moving parts to like a legitimate website that you don’t necessarily need to be bothered with. Right. Like it’s too much, like who cares. Right. But it really is important because like they all have to work together and although you could easily, you know, Update, you could just as easily, completely screw everything up.

Torie: [00:29:25] So I would, you know, people worry about what their budget is for their website. And I totally understand that. Especially being a beginning business owner or somebody that’s still just really trying to ramp stuff up, I would rather have you spend less money upfront and in a place where your website is maintained and someone’s looking after you and you know that everything’s cool.

And then start to gradually build things up as you, as you need to. So you may put a little bit less money in the very beginning, but you’re going to have to put money out monthly for a really good hosting for security, for backups, and things like that. And hopefully for somebody that can help you out, if something does happen or to be able to update your website with some of these things so that you don’t have to do it.

Sean: [00:30:05] Really good affordable insurance, a necessary evil, like we all have to pay insurance on our cars and it sucks. You still looking for the best possible insurance in case anything ever happens. But at the same time, like you don’t want to like overpay for something and hope and hopefully you’ve never had to but man, when it comes to time and you, you need to use it, you’ll be glad you do. And I mean, it was years ago now, but like we’re, we’re glad we have all this stuff set up for websites. Now I get AF I don’t know how long that was years ago now. All kinds of shit broke on us and it was an absolute nightmare.

And from there, like. Everybody goes on some sort of maintenance plan to ensure that that kind of stuff doesn’t happen again because it happens all the time.

Torie: [00:30:51] It does. And it’s unfortunate. Like I think even to, you know, the best websites or, or whatnot, it definitely does happen. And so knowing what you’re going to do for that is definitely important. What else did I have your website to be easy and simple also, I think you know, there’s some people that set it and forget it and never do anything. And so the website dies. Then there are other people that want to make so many bells and whistles and so many things and, you know, have it be this overly.

I think that simple is better. You know, we talk about that. People’s attention span is only so great. You only have so many seconds to hook people in. So making sure that you have like one call to action, you give people a nice customer journey. When they come to your website, it’s easy to find your contact information.

If you’re a restaurant, it’s easy to find the menu, you know, whatever people are coming into that every single thing doesn’t have to be on the home page. We talked about, you know, making content specific for specific keywords, you don’t need to shove every single thing on one page. And kind of thinking of those types of things, when you, when you’re started or even thinking of like your website now, how it could be simplified or how it could be a little bit better.

One thing that I’m really big on is making sure that the user experience is good so that people don’t get lost on a website because I think that’s one of the most frustrating things when people are trying to find something and can’t find it and, and things are too complicated. So keeping things a little bit simple I think it’s always a really great thing.

Sean: [00:32:10] Yeah. Super easy to put way too much crap on there, which is, could be good information, but the minutes it’s not organized and you start overlapping pages. And like, man.

Torie: [00:32:23] We’ve had a few clients that they’re like, can you put more things in the navigation? And everyone has to have a drop down and have like 15 items and it ends up too much.

Sean: [00:32:31] Like you literally overwhelm them and make it so confusing. Like, they’ll go somewhere easier. Like it’s super easy. To get open up a new who have to say, like, don’t, don’t think people are going to go through all that and be like, I really like this business’s name. So I’m going to give it about 15 minutes to figure out through as many pages as I can define the damn menu for the restaurant they’re not.

Torie: [00:32:59] So just because you build a website does not mean that people are going to come to it. There are some things that you need to do. There are definitely some best practices. So we talked about some of those one being that you have to have some search engine optimization, you have to have like those keywords and tags on.

The site you have to have new content. You want to put out content, like if you want to be found for tacos, you have to have the word tacos on your website, right? Also, you need to have your website be fast and secure. A security certificate is great to be on there. Your website needs to be updated.

You can’t leave your website, you know, up there with old content to die. So some of these things are really going to help you start to set a good foundation, to get more people to your website. Anything that I missed you on methods?

Sean: [00:33:44] I don’t believe so.

Torie: [00:33:45] I don’t believe so. So some of the things that are really going to help you out to get more people to your website, because that is what we all want.

We want to grow our business. And I think that that’s a great thing that you can do to get more people to your website. So did you know that we have new shows every Tuesday and Thursday?

Sean: [00:34:03] I did.

Torie: [00:34:04] Sean’s here for them. We have new shows every Tuesday and Thursday. We talk about ways to grow your business smarter, how to get better at social media, how to get more people to your damn website.

So we would love it if you would join us. And I have a special thing, we just got this printed. We have the smart AF magazine is now out. We did have this just digitally and now you can actually get this in hard copy if that’s what you want, because some people actually feel it in their hands. It is so you can get this digitally.

You can also get it in hard copy and you can get this at a

SmartAFmag.com. If you want to grab a copy of this for yourself. And so we hope that you enjoyed this episode and we will see you on the next one.