Episode 263: The Critical Components to a High-Performing Website

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

This year, many distributors are in the process of rethinking their brand strategy and their visual identity, including, of course, their digital presence. And whether you are doing this or not, there are some big changes coming with Google Analytics on July 1st that everyone needs to act on now, which is why we invited our in-house expert on digital marketing, Luke Williams, to the SkewCast to talk about these topics. Luke is a digital marketing specialist in web enhancement Google Analytics, paid and organic search, and more. And today we talk about a few different topics. One, what he considers the most important elements on your website.

Two, which factors can affect the performance of your site the most.

Three, whether to outsource to a specialist like Luke or bring that expertise in-house. Four, where to make your biggest investments.

And finally, we talk about the potential impact of AI on search.

Hi friends, I'm Bobby Lehu, Chief Content Officer at Common Skew. To help even further with this topic, this week we published on our community page an article featuring even more tips by Luke. The article is about the 3 steps you can take to unlock an effective website design. So my recommendation is listen to this episode first to hear Luke's suggestions, and then visit community.commscue.com where we have a blueprint for the 3-step process to get you started. Today's episode is brought to you by Commscue, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with Luke.

Luke, welcome to the program.

Hey Bobby, it's nice to be here.

Yeah. Hey, you hop on a site, and as someone who optimizes websites, as I read in your bio in the intro, what's the first thing you notice, good or bad?

So I always look at the user experience first. So that's always the number one thing for me because if I go on there and there's a lot of clutter or I don't know where to go, I'm like, there is an issue on this site or maybe the company doesn't have their direction totally figured out.

Yeah. So Andy Christina has a 20-point checklist for a high-performing homepage and we'll link to that in the show notes. But of the 20 points or of your, probably you have your own checklist, What would you consider the top 5?

Yeah, that was a really good resource. I would recommend anybody who's looking at their website go there because it was, it was awesome for the homepage when I was going through it.

Yeah.

I'm going to group a few of them together because I do consider them one in one. But the first and most important is the hero image and the descriptive header. It's the first thing you see. You want that to be clear and get the image across right away. The second is the brief intro, and I combined that with any visual evidence you have because those usually go hand in hand as well.

Okay.

The third being the navigation menu, and then the fourth being the conversion copy, and fifth being call to action.

Okay.

How this goes down for me, and it's as a whole very simply to think about, is what do people see first? That's the order that I just went down in. Hero image, brief intro, usually the navigation menu because you scroll a little bit and you're like, okay, where am I going now?

Yeah.

And then your conversion copy and call to action. Where do you want people to go and what do they see first? That is the most important piece on the website.

What kinds of tools do you use? Talking about— let's shift to the just analytics itself and to analyze a website's performance. Can you give us an example?

Yeah, I have a few that are pretty good resources. So the first and one that will really impact your ranking is speed, just how quickly is your page loading. You just have to hit 2 seconds. If you're under 2 seconds in the page load speed, you're pretty good. If you're over 2 seconds, people are most likely going to bounce out. Yeah, because they're like, it's not responsive. So I have a website for that just called pagespeed.web. Uh, we can link that as well. Yep. Um, and the second good one is this website called WAVE. It's actually for making sure that your website is optimized for people with disabilities, and it's making sure that you don't have too high of a contrast on your text. But what it also does is show you if you have alt text or if you have the right hierarchy down on your website. So it's actually really good for just a double check on, do I have all of my Yeah, I'm like crossing all my T's and dotting all my I's.

Yeah, you know, speaking of alt text, there used to be all these ways to game a website. Google gets smarter and then people game it, and then Google gets smarter, and it's become far more authentic craft, I think, than it used to be. What kind of nerdy Luke things are you withholding? Because you, because you specialize this and maybe our audience doesn't. So I asked this sort of get inside your head. Maybe the technical aspect won't— we know we won't become experts like you, but it can open our minds to some new terms or things. What about What do you— what's in your toolkit? And, and give us a breakdown of some of the more intense technical things that you would consider.

Thing that I look at the most for all of this tech pieces is Google Analytics. It's really the number one tool to use, uh, because that's where you're able to get into all of that nitty-gritty. Yeah, there is a, is a bit of a learning curve into it, but once you start getting good with it that's where you can get all the nitty-gritty stuff. So when we're talking about different terms or things to look at, you know, engagement rate and bounce rate is a big one on Google Analytics. Just how often is somebody interacting or just leaving right away? Your website authority— how strong is your website presence? So, you know, are you a trusted source when people link to you? And then, you know, thinking of course about people's KPIs and what your own KPI is. So what's your time on page, click-through rate? Um, if we get to a bit of paid advertising, like what's your CPM? So you can evaluate, are you spending your money correctly? Are people going to the right pages? Are they staying there? That's where you get into those details a lot more.

You mentioned there's a big shift happening in Google Analytics, and a big one. You mentioned that Google's migrating from Universal Analytics, UA, to Google Analytics GA4 and not process UA. So, so everyone really needs to migrate as soon as possible. Google stated on July 1st of this year UA will stop processing data. Break that down for us non-techie types. What does all that mean?

Yeah, so it means that Google is upgrading. They're going from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Okay. And they're not going to support Windows 7 anymore. So what that means is on July 1st, if you go into Google Analytics Universal— so, uh, Universal Analytics— you'll have all of your past data, but then you'll just show zeros. They're not going to take any more of that data. Okay, they're doing a complete shift to GA4, and on July 1st, GA4 is the only thing that you'll be able to use to for Google to look at that data.

I got it. So Universal will give me my historical, but I'll basically have a blank slate when it comes to anything future. Nothing will show.

Exactly.

That's what it means by will stop processing data.

Yeah, they're not going to track it for the old platform anymore, right?

It's huge. It's huge. I'm glad we're talking about this. Thank you for bringing this up for our audience. What's the distinction between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics, or does it even matter?

It does— the way that they're doing things is different now. It matters because if you are used to Universal Analytics, it will look different in GA4. So now is also a great time to get into it and learn it a little bit because that's what the future will be. Yeah, right. On a basic level, Universal Analytics looked at sessions. So I'm going on to this website, how long am I on it for, um, you know, what, what am I doing on it, but not that granular. It's like you got a page view or you're going to this page, it doesn't show you all the clicks and what people are doing. GA4 is event-based, so it shows you every single thing that happens. Go to this page and you click on this button, and then you go to this page, you're there for a minute, you watch a video for this long. It cares about events instead of sessions, and that's why you can't bring the data over, because they're different models.

Interesting. So you think that this shift in how we search online, how we bounce around so quickly, how a million tabs open— you think this is part of that shift that they're managing? You know, it's no longer we're really hunkering down and staying on a page. We're, we're everywhere, and it's sort of managing that event structure. It's almost like chasing the customer journey but through digitally, through their experience online.

Is that—

am I wrapping that up?

100%. Okay, we are barely on pages, we're on it for like a minute or two. So let's track granularly what's happening on those pages.

So I don't need to export any data, my old data will still be there on the Universal side. What's— is there any migration process? Do you have a few suggestions on how we get started? How do I, how do I tell my colleagues or my team? How do we, how do we make sure that we're on GA4?

Yeah, if you go on to Google Analytics and you're on the old platform right now, you'll get hit with a pop-up to migrate over. Okay, there are also a lot of great resources just to build it from scratch because you have to redo some Google Tag Manager stuff and set that up for GA4, and you have to set up different events for yourself. So I think we can link something else in the show notes that I actually use for our migration over that made it really simple and easy to use.

Okay, we'll get into that. Um, a lot of folks don't have a specialist like you on their team. They might have marketing folks that generalize, um, but do you think an entrepreneur, let's say you're running a small business, 10 to 20 people, is this the kind of thing that I'm better to outsource with people who know what they're doing, or should someone on my team adopt part of this process part-time and learn it? What's your take?

If you have someone who's interested in it, it's usually better to have them learn it and keep it in-house because they have a lot of investment. They'll really care about— great business and be able to understand your objectives. Yeah, um, if you don't have that and you are a small team, then it's totally fine to outsource it. And you can usually outsource it with them also doing your paid media, and they can just be an entire marketing department, uh, for some thousand dollars a year, which is a great way to supplement yourself and not get bogged down if you are a small team with, um, with a lot of extra work.

Okay, this might be a dumb question, but I'm assuming GA4 is going to impact our SEO just because it's going to tell us more about what's going on our website, will it have a major impact on our SEO? Not by just deploying it, but maybe understanding the data better.

Yeah, it totally could, because you know more specifically what people are doing. Um, now it is separate from SEO, so SEO is making sure that your site is set up well and that you're showing people authentic information. Uh, so a big— just a signal that you might be off could be your bounce rate. And that's where GA4 could help out a little bit and say like, okay, um, you know, why are they bouncing out? What page are they going to? And are they even scrolling? That's the information you could use to improve your SEO.

A recommendation you had was the Analytics Mania. Um, is that— is that the resource you were mentioning? We'll link to that website. And, uh, there's a YouTube channel, really good YouTube channel as well.

Yeah, that's the one. I watched their videos and they were all free on YouTube and I was just skipping through the different pieces that I needed. Uh, but I did, you know, I hit some obstacles while I'm doing the migration and I was just able to search on their site and the— he was hitting the answers right away, which usually you have to go to a few different places.

Yeah, that's really good.

It was awesome. Yeah.

Speaking of the investment, how much time and energy should we be spending on our websites in the age of Twitter, TikTok, and IG, and now AI? I mean, can an argument be made that— I know this is a dumb question, but can the argument be made that it's not as crucial now?

This is actually a really interesting one, and I take it back to one of my favorite shows. It's Shark Tank. On Shark Tank, they'll always ask, or often they'll ask, is this a product or is it a brand? And if you're a product, then you might not need a website. You just need a storefront because you're just trying to sell one thing. So you're trying to go big on TikTok or on Instagram. You're going viral to push this sale of a product, of a product. If you are a brand, it's really worth your while to have a website because your website is where you tell the story of your business. You show your value add, that you're more than just a product. You can really supply your clients with different resources and different advantages. So to be able to control your story on your own site, one spot everybody goes to, that's really, really valuable.

I thought I would just ask it. I know it sounds obvious, but also it's a platform you own as opposed to someone else owning everything else. And so, um, are What are the hidden investments to making a really good website experience great? Is it, is it, are we spending more time in design, analytics, backend development, SEO? I mean, that's a really general question, but trying to give folks a handle on, as there are a lot of folks are rebranding and actually repositioning their brand strategy. And so they're going through this process and many have already just done it or they're about to do it. Um, where would you encourage them to spend most of their time and energy? With the biggest ROI?

Yeah, the first thing would be design and user experience. Okay, so do people enjoy going to your website, and are they getting the information that they need? If that's not true, then your backend stuff won't matter because you're having no traffic to your site. Yeah, great. So you want to— like, doing a rebrand is totally fair doing a revamp, revamp is also good. You're just changing around the navigation, you're using past information, but making sure that your design feels on brand and the customers can get to where they want within a page or two. That would be the best ROI because after that, the other pieces do fall in. Like you have to have good backend pieces if you're getting a lot of traffic. But it all starts with that first design aspect.

You are currently revamping the Common Skew website, and you've got many priorities with that. But what are you trying to resolve?

It was really the customer journey. So there was a lot of incredible info on the Common Skew site, and it had really good design. Like, Lucia, our designer, is just incredible.

Yeah.

That carries over to the website. It was all really nice. So what my role here was just streamlining a bit, taking things out from different pages, maybe rewriting some of the copy and making sure that as we talk about that design piece was on the same level, or maybe I should say that user experience piece is on the same level as our design.

It seems like a battle for many of us, us included, but particularly agencies and distributors who can sell a million different types of products, that one of the toughest things to reconcile are these competing ideas or too much information. Is that— is that a— that's a big battle for everybody.

Yes, that is a huge problem.

Uh, let's switch to, um, AI real quick. I mean, do you see— how do you see AI impacting websites? I mean, we're all in this sort of nascent journey where we're not quite sure. We're all playing with it and figuring it out, and we're hearing all kinds of things from the doomsday doomsdayers to the optimists. Um, but Google and Bing's Chat AI are— you know, there was an article, and I think it was in, uh, Wired— it was another magazine— but it was going to change search forever. And if so, what's your gut on potentially how it would change search?

Yeah, it's, um, it's kind of a twofold for me. So I think your website will always be very important, so you should still have a website because when people do find you, you want it to be on brand. The search aspect is interesting, uh, because I'm not sure how it'll operate, as nobody does, into the future and how it will evolve. Uh, my basic thought on it is that like ChatGPT is actually just trying to do what— or could do what Google is doing with Google search engine. It's just a way more sophisticated version of it. So where I'm at is, you know, you still have to have your good keywords and you're good. You still have to have those same general principles because that's what ChatGPT I think will go off of. Yeah. And then if you have a strong website, ChatGPT is able to go through it, see what you're about. They're more likely to recommend you if somebody's looking for a product search. So I don't think it's that disruptive. Now, but right, um, it will definitely have an impact on how people find you.

I noticed yesterday, just in my own user experience, and this is just my experience, that I'm using Notion on occasion, and inside Notion there's an AI option where you can do research, right? So I can say, I can ask it whatever I'm— what, whatever document I'm working on. And then in Reader, uh, Readwise's reader product, which is like a pocket competitor, they have a thing called Ghost Reader, and you can actually ask the article questions. So whatever article you read— and it was reading this really intense tech article with Kevin Kelly, and there were terms I didn't understand. It was inline, right? So that was like a— that was pretty cool experience. I didn't have to jump out and go anywhere. I didn't have to disrupt my own workflow. So there could be some potential changes down the road. I don't know. I, I totally agree with you. Not that I have any expertise like you do, but having our own property, having our own domain, is still going to be vital going forward.

Owning it and being able to say what you want to say on it is so important. So yeah, somebody just like for common SKU, if they're like, what is common SKU good for? What's its use? Yeah, you still want to have something like that on your website so that ChatGPT or those apps that you're talking about can pull that because that's ultimately what they'll use to figure out what you're good for.

This is going to sound like I'm, I'm going to throw you a fastball or an easy one right down the pipe here, but Content. Content at one time, and I'm assuming it still does, played a vital role in search. And how important is the content experience now for brands?

So content is still very important, but I put it to what do you want to prioritize on? Yeah. Um, I was actually talking to somebody who's just getting into digital marketing a few weeks ago. They presented the same question. And the thing with content is it comes down to time. As you know, it takes a long time to make good content. Yeah, if you don't have good content, then nobody's really going to want to read it. So it takes a while to build up that audience and build that trust. So if you are a small business and you just don't have time to put out a blog post every 2 weeks that's actual good content, then it won't be worth your time. Great. But if you, if you can invest in it and you have somebody who is dedicated to it, it can have huge benefits. But it's, it's all about time management at the end of the day.

Yeah, really great point. Um, let's talk a little bit about Luke. Where do you go to like sharpen the saw in your, your toolbox. We already mentioned one resource. Where do you go to learn more about your specialty? What sites or people do you follow in your profession?

Yeah, a great site to follow is Search Engine Journal. Uh, that's one that I will go on every once in a while. They're a bit spammy, uh, they got a lot of ads in there, but they're a news piece, so I get it. Uh, but they got really good articles and they always have good links out. And then somebody who I love to follow is not a search guy, but Seth Godin. It's— he's always the best. Yeah. Yeah.

I was about to ask what brands or people inspire you the most. Retail, consumer. I know you're a big concertgoer. What sort of brands like inspire you?

Yeah, my brands are all about feel good. I like— I'm a very positive person and I think that comes out with the brands a lot. So I have a music festival I really like, Bonnaroo. Their slogan is radiate positivity. And all the pieces that they come out with are really accepting. Really, it's just to make you happy. The brand that I really like is actually similar to that. It's Chubbies Shorts. They— it's a really colorful brand that, you know, their emails used to be the— I would wake up and I would read every one of their emails. They were just so fun. So those would be the two that I, I really like to look at for some inspiration.

That's cool. What's on your desk today? I like to ask this question because it gives us a glimpse into your world. We talked a lot about your world in this episode, but what's in your— what's on your desk today?

Yeah. So right now we're actually still a little bit early in Google Ads and paid advertising. So it is that I wake up, I come to my desk have some coffee and look at our ads and see what can I improve. How did yesterday go and how did the past week go? So I will usually spend an hour or so just looking at that to make sure that we're spending our money appropriately and getting new conversions in. Uh, and then a lot, as we spoke about a little bit, is the website stuff. So, you know, what we're actually doing is going through every single page and we're scraping everything seeing what is good, what are other websites that we can take some inspiration from, and what's the copy, what are the designs that we should put in there. So that has been for the past little bit the big piece that I'm working on. So, um, that's what I'll generally focus on for a majority of the day.

Okay, how about the best thing you've read, listened to, watched, binged, uh, what's, what's impacted your thinking recently? And it can be just fun.

Fun-wise, um, I love using TikTok, and what I've actually realized about myself is I might have like ADD. I'm not totally sure, but the TikToks that I've been liking are videos. It'll be like South Park or Family Guy, and then they've got Subway Surfer on the bottom, and I find I'm listening to the top part of it and I'm watching Subway Surfer, and they keep me really retained. So what it's made me learn is I, you know, I always listen to music and that might be why I work pretty well because I've always got two things coming in, but one's quieter that I can focus on.

That's interesting. Okay, last question. Last best concert you've been to?

It would be Thomas Rhett. He did this big stadium tour. I got the final one, the final show on that tour in Ottawa. Now, I don't usually like stadium series. I sometimes find them scripted, like, you know, they're always going to walk through the crowd, they've got their big lights. I really like the authentic piece of these smaller intimate shows. Uh, that he was awesome. They had a lot of surprises, and you could tell that he was breaking a few times. But, and by breaking, I mean he's just laughing. Like he can't finish the words because what's going on on stage is insane. Um, so that was, that was really enjoyable and a bit out of— I don't usually go to concert shows or country shows either, so. Right, yeah, really changed it up for me.

That's really good. Well, Luke, thanks for joining, my friend. Really, thank you for sharing some really valuable information with us today, especially around the Google Analytics and just website. And so many people are revamping and rebranding. It's really timely and helpful. So thanks a lot, my friend.

Hey, it was great to come on. Thanks, Bobby. This was a lot of fun.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.skucast.com. Community.comandskew.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.