Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense and most importantly so you can actually use Excellent. Well, today's episode is going to be about anxiety. douce the anxiety of your website visitors, so they're more likely to hire you. But I figured jokes would be a good way to start. Okay. And last week, I don't know if you remember we talked about AI? Yes, I do. And you had asked me. Yes. If you had any jokes. Does, like how many jokes? Yeah, that's right. I did. Guess what I did this week.

Meredith: 1:24

You wrote jokes. I didn't write jokes. Now. You asked me to write just

Meredith's Husband: 1:29

a AI to write some jokes about SEO? Oh, oh. So I figured I would share them because they're amazing. I hope you're sitting down. If you're driving, you'll probably need to pull over they need to pull over to be unsafe to drive and be laughing as hard. Okay, so number one, I went to chat GPT. And I said, tell me a joke about SEO. Just super simple. And it came back immediately. No problem. Why? And I'm reading this verbatim. So this is yeah. So I want to get the full effect of this. Why did the SEO specialist bring a ladder to work?

Meredith: 2:15

So he could reach the top ranking?

Meredith's Husband: 2:19

Yeah, that's pretty close. Here's here's here's the punchline, because they wanted to climb to the top of search engine rankings. So let's wait. Let's wait for the laughter to die down. Hold.

Meredith: 2:30

Hold.

Meredith's Husband: 2:31

Hold for applause. So I figured, okay, well, you know, any person could you mess up the first time. Let's get let's give Chad GPT a second chance. And maybe this was like a just joke online somewhere that maybe wasn't its own. Maybe this was not a chat. GPT joke. It just got it off a website somewhere. So I figured, tell me an original joke. Oh, about SEO. So meaning probably had to make this joke up, I think. Yeah. So the SEO version number two. Attempt number two. Why did the SEO expert break up with their significant other little ominous? Oh, geez. Especially for this podcast? Because they couldn't handle their partners duplicate content. Again, wait for the laughter to die down. I mean, that. Honestly, that could be like, extremely profound. Or just a terrible joke. I think it's just a terrible joke. I think it's just terrible. And I figured since I you know, I'm a baseball fan. I used to play baseball did baseball, you get three so you get three strikes. So I figured let's let's okay. Yeah. So so let's not leave it on the fence. Let's like really make a decision

Meredith: 3:46

and allow allow for chat GBT to

Meredith's Husband: 3:49

routinely did my hit a home run. You know that, you know, base the basis

Meredith: 3:53

we've got, you know, a walk and

Meredith's Husband: 3:56

strike. Oh, no, that was a two strikes. Two strikes. The final prompt. Tell me your best original joke about SEO. Okay. And here we go. Okay. Why did the SEO expert become a gardener? Because they wanted to optimize their organic growth of plants instead of just web traffic. Oh, see? Yeah. Okay. Can we get we need to need some sort of sound effects? or So what have we learned? I think that stand up comics are safe. GPT is not coming for your job. Your perhaps as far as that you're the only you're the only professionals I know of right now who really don't have to worry about this is true. GPT to any job?

Meredith: 4:44

Yeah. Yeah. But different now.

Meredith's Husband: 4:48

Back to our regularly scheduled episode program about anxiety and how you can reduce the anxiety of your website visitors so that they are more likely to hire you. Because for making somebody anxious with your website, that's probably somebody who's not going to hire you.

Meredith: 5:04

This is true. This is absolutely true. Okay, so

Meredith's Husband: 5:08

what does this mean? What do I mean by about inducing anxiety in website visitors, that's probably seeing or reducing inducing. So if you're inducing, that's something you want to avoid. What does that mean?

Meredith: 5:20

Okay, I have a good example. I've been looking for camera bags, camera backpacks, and so far, every camera website, the backpack Another website I go to is utterly overwhelming with information and so many different backpacks, yes, that offers so many different things, but you can't plug in the sizes. It is

Meredith's Husband: 5:48

that it's the number one reason too much information.

Meredith: 5:50

It's just too much.

Meredith's Husband: 5:52

It's too much too many possible decisions.

Meredith: 5:54

100%. And so I just literally went with what somebody recommended, right?

Meredith's Husband: 6:00

So, there was a study done a while ago, and there's a bunch of studies, but there's one that I remember, and I might butcher this a little bit, but um, the core of the principle is, is there. So there was a store, and the store wanted to run a little test, you know, the, oh, you know, that displays that when you when you write when you walk into a store, sometimes there's a display right there. And that's usually what the store wants you to see most. It's what's on sale, whatever. It's usually like, kind of like, right in your face. Yeah, it's the same. It's kind of like going to a website, if there's a notification bar at the top of big announcement. It's right in your face right when you get there. So this was a kind of high end food store. And they were doing a special on jams. So for a while, and it was like a 10% 10% off jams or it wasn't that kind of jam, like 10% off any kind of jam. And on this table, they had like a couple dozen different types of jam. Okay. And so they measured sales. They also I don't know how they did it, but they somehow measured how much attention that got, like how many people went and actually looked at the table or something like that. So did you say half a dozen? No. Two dozen. So two dozen different types? Yeah, two different two dozen different types of gym 24. Then after a while, they changed, they changed that display. They kept everything the same, the deal was the same, but they just reduced the number of jams to six. Okay, so now we have six Same deal. Yeah, same spot, same table, same everything. So the the table when it had two dozen different types of jam got more foot traffic, like it got more interest from people. What do you suppose happened to the number of people who purchased jam when they reduced from two dozen to six?

Meredith: 7:52

Well, I would bet that the more people would buy it.

Meredith's Husband: 7:56

The the number of sales went up 1,000% 10x 10 times more people bought, the only thing that changed was they just took away decisions. So that's sounds to me like your camera bag, website. Story. Too many decisions. You just walk away.

Meredith: 8:11

Yeah, it's just too much. It's too much for me.

Meredith's Husband: 8:15

I've told the story before about the cereal aisle. Have an eye? Yeah, but I don't know. So when I was younger, when I was like college age and backpacking, I went to CES, I was in some small town or no town, very small city in Spain somewhere. And I was staying there for a while. So I went to the grocery store, also very small. And I went to get cereal. And I went there. And there were two types of cereal there. There's the kids cereal and the adult cereal. And it was like, Wow, that's so refreshing. And I got the adult cereal, you would probably get the children's series. But compare that to the killing to Whole Foods. Now. You walk into the cereal aisle and there's 4 trillion billion Yeah, quadruple. Billy spin types of cereal hour and, and I go look, I just go as happens every single time I go. I walked to the middle of the cereal aisle, I turn on a look at the cereal and I just stand there like an idiot. Like everybody else veering into oncoming headlights like that. For me. That's what what it feels like. But you see this in webs when you look at landing pages? Yeah, your landing pages what I mean by a landing page,

Meredith: 9:28

I think it would be when you Google something. And it leads you to a page. It's the page that Landon

Meredith's Husband: 9:35

if you click on an ad, if you Google something and you click on one of the ads, it's most likely going to take you to a landing page, okay, it's not going to be a whole lot of options. It's probably not going to be any navigation. It's just going to be that it's gonna be about that one thing you clicked on, right? And you have the option to buy it or do it or subscribe or whatever it is. That's the option. There are no other options. That's the landing page. Landing Pages convert we higher than website pages.

Meredith: 10:01

So what's the wait, what is the difference? So?

Meredith's Husband: 10:04

Yeah, so So the landing page has no options, right? Except no. Navigation. Yeah, you buy it or you don't buy it? And then sometimes you literally have to back out of the website or close that tab. Yes. Whereas a website is going to have full navigation. It's going to have lots of different options, etc. So landing pages convert way higher than website pages. So whenever I'm part of a project where there's a paid search component, so people are running ads on Google, somebody else manages that, but they have salutely will never send traffic to the website, they will have landing pages for everything. And they will, the guys I work with will refuse to send traffic that there they say that will not work, this will not be sustainable. You need customers, you need to control that. Now, what about a website? Because a website is a little different because you don't control exactly how people are coming to your website. People could come into the homepage, or they could come in through some other page or they could you don't even know what they're looking for. Are they looking for kids photos? Are they looking for photos for their birthday party? Or they just want to contact you? Or you know, where are they coming from? What are they are looking for? Alright, you don't really know. So SEO in terms of your website and SEO has to kind of walk a fine line between trying to be easy to navigate. Yeah, what also offer a bunch of different information cuz again, you don't know why people are there where they're coming from, they want to see. So it's got to do both of these correct? We don't have the ability that we do when we have a landing page to just offer one thing,

Meredith: 11:33

right? Can we make landing pages? No, not really, for Shopify, or,

Meredith's Husband: 11:38

like, if you are running an ad campaign, yes, you would create landing pages. And then you'd know exactly where somebody is coming from, what they typed in and what they clicked on, you can then control it, you can want to have a landing page. But if somebody's just coming to your website, you need to have a few different options there. Right? Yet, we want to reduce anxiety. So what does this mean? How do we make it as easy as possible? So number one, is going to be your website navigation. Yes, the minutes simple. Keep it simple. The tendency is for people to think, okay, somebody's coming to my website, I'm gonna give them a whole bunch of different options, right? The more options you give them, the less likely they are to take any of them. It's just human nature. So you want to keep it simple. Give them the basics like for you. This is going to be your you have a page about children if page for events, pets, you have about you and contact and your blog. Yeah, you don't need to link in to all individual In fact, even that, probably don't even necessarily need a link to your blog and keep the blog at the bottom at the top. You just saved children pets events. Yeah. And contact. So number two is your CTAs calls to action. We've talked about this several times. Yes, you want to keep your calls to action. Simple. And you really only want to have one dominant Call to Action per page. So you have one, what do you want that person to do next? That's your button, whatever you want them to do now, in your footer, you might also have a subscribe to newsletter, something like that. That's fine. That's not unusual. No,

Meredith: 13:17

it's not unusual to

Meredith's Husband: 13:21

keep your CTA simple. Yes. The third thing that you might want to think about is just your content in general on the page, do you have a whole bunch of different options? You want to if you do you want to think about reducing them. Now this is not as common as putting a whole bunch of different options in like your navigation or having too many calls to action. Usually your content is going to be your content. But it's kind of related to your navigation in that you want to put all the information there that people are going to need. If you know somebody is going to need a piece of information, don't put it on a different page, right? Put it right on that page. Keep it simple. Yeah. On your blog posts, you will, most likely or hopefully at the bottom of a blog post have a couple of related posts. You don't have 100 of them. You have even a one or two. If somebody were reading that particular blog post you you probably have another one that you think oh, they might also be interested in this. Another area is your social media links. This is a pet peeve of mine. People putting a whole bunch of social media icons on there. Yeah, yeah. And that that's what you need to do. Yeah, if if you have 13 social media links, it's great. Super, that's what you want to do? No, that's unlikely. If you're active on one social media platform, link to that one, right? You don't you don't need to put eight. Because I guarantee if you were to track the number of people who if you have 10. And you were to track the number of people who click on all 10 at 90% are probably going to be going to one or maybe two of them if you don't need those others. And also the reason it's a pet peeve of mine, you don't want people leaving your website to go to your social media anyway.

Meredith: 15:00

I was going to say

Meredith's Husband: 15:02

yeah, you want people coming the other direction.

Meredith: 15:05

Exactly. You want them to kind of Depop so

Meredith's Husband: 15:08

back to your Start, which was an excellent story by the way that was perfect your camera back when it came a big Oh yeah, it was it was anxiety inducing. So what did you do you you didn't buy one did you didn't

Meredith: 15:19

buy I have notes of I've measurements. I was going there by camera bag.

Meredith's Husband: 15:25

You were going there? Yeah, yeah, you need a camera bag you need Yes, you need a camera bag urgently. And you went there and wasted time. Men got frustrated and left. I did many. So don't do that to you. But just imagine, instead of making things difficult with all these decisions, you want to make them calm. You want to give them the message, relax. Everything you need is right here. I've got you. Don't worry about it. Also, remember, this is kind of the first experience that your potential client is going to have with you. It'll be via your website, show them that you're going to take care of them. Don't overwhelm them and make them feel like they might not be reading the right page, or they might not have clicked the right link. Take care of them right here.

Meredith: 16:12

But wait, there's more. But wait, you don't want any.

Meredith's Husband: 16:16

Okay, so that's my advice for today. If you have any SEO jokes, you feel like we need to cleanse our palate a little bit. And you think they are funny, send them to me and I will read them. Till then, if you're finding these episodes helpful, I created something that I think you're going to find even more helpful. It explains the SEO process similar to these episodes in a way that I hope is new for you, but it also puts them in order so that you know what to do first and second and third through the entire SEO process. And I hope saves you a lot of time by giving you an actionable step by step plan. It's called the SEO roadmap, and you can find it at Meritus husband.com/roadmap.