Start With A Win - How to Build a POWERFUL Online Presence for Your Business | Tony Adams

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's probably one of the biggest weaknesses and opportunities in your business? It's your web presence and how you manage that. Today, on part one of this two-part series, we uncover some major secrets in that space with an online expert, and we share some easy ways and quick takeaways to improve your online presence on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. Coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, it's Adam Kantos, and I have

Starting point is 00:00:36 a question for you. Did you know that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine? Or that 75% of consumers say they will not visit a website again if it takes more than three seconds to load? How long does your website take to load? Or that 85% of consumers say they read online reviews before making a purchase decision? Let's face it, improving online presence can help businesses attract more customers, increase sales, and build a stronger brand. We dig deep into how to make the most of these topics today with Tony Adams. Tony is the chief of staff for Area 15 Ventures, a private investment group that acquires and grows companies. Full disclosure, I'm a partner in Area 15 Ventures and I work directly with Tony. Tony has an executive MBA from the Daniels College of Business at the

Starting point is 00:01:31 University of Denver where he got perfect grades. I would know he was my study partner there. He's a really smart guy. Tony's grown many businesses, finding great traction by combining a strategically designed online presence, great product and service, and incredible customer experience. He's worked in both small shops and large public companies to create major results. Tony is also an Army veteran. Tony, thanks for your service. Welcome to Start With A Win. Hey, thanks for having me. Hey, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Starting point is 00:02:05 How did you get into helping companies with their web presence and improving this whole online experience and speed and communication and outcomes? Yeah, you know, I think it really, if I look back in my history, you know, early 2000s, I was in the mortgage industry and this is pre-YouTube. So I actually used to make online explainer videos on how to get a mortgage, you know, different mortgage terms, things like that and would post them on the website. Now, you know, looking back at some of those videos that I still have, they're horrible. But you know, comparatively in the day, they were exceptional, you know, because no one was doing it.

Starting point is 00:02:43 No one had a platform really to put this stuff out. And so, you know, I realized that once I later on in my career was not in mortgages, you know, realized that, you know, having a good online presence and really creating a lot of value online for consumers really, you know, kind of set benchmarks that, you know, really helped you exceed your peers. Wow. And just to sidetrack a little bit, you brought up YouTube videos. And I know we're going to dig into social media during this episode of Start With A Win. But I was actually doing some research during the preparation for this podcast. And it was interesting. People listen up here. YouTube is the number one thing searched for on Google.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Yeah. I mean, it is the number two search engine, I think. Yeah, it really is. And a lot of people aren't using that capability. It has dynamic content because videos constantly roll. And it's the only place on the internet where your content can be five years, 10 years old and still be served up as the number one thing out there. Absolutely. So incredible. Thanks for bringing up YouTube. Everybody listen up here. We have a lot more tips and tricks going on. So Tony, a lot of our

Starting point is 00:04:01 listeners are in small business. How does improving your online presence really help a small business? Well, I really look at a website as being your 24-7, 365 employee that never stops working for you. And so you want to support that employee with everything that you got, basically, because they're never going to stop working for you and so being able to be optimized for search usability just making great content that people want to stay on your website and consume you know all of these are factors that contribute to you know really your online success and really not just your online success, but your business success. So many people want to review a website, even warm referrals.

Starting point is 00:04:56 I mean, I look at the stories of restaurants, for example. And if you get referred a restaurant by a good friend, what's the first thing you do? Look them up online, look them up online. You know, you look to see how they're doing in their reviews. You, maybe you look at their website to check out the menu. Um, and then you make the decision if you're going to actually go. So, you know, even these warm referrals that we get from friends and family and, you know, coworkers, coworkers, you know, they're all validated by your online presence. Okay. So you said look them up online. I agree with you. Look them up online. What does look them up online typically mean statistically? How do people look things up

Starting point is 00:05:35 online? Yeah. People, you know, look at a number of different channels. You know, Google is definitely a big inlet, you know, and maximizing your Google presence, you know, your Google business listing, your reviews, that kind of thing. You know, people will look on Yelp, people will look on Instagram, depending upon your business type, Facebook, you know, even potentially Pinterest. But, you know, your website, you know, your website is, you know, kind of that, that place where all of those channels should be leading people to. Awesome. And we have a lot of listeners who are like, I have relationships with my customers, so I don't need to worry about this. Is that a true statement? Or even if you have relationships with your customers, should you be worried about your online presence and why?

Starting point is 00:06:24 Well, exactly that. I mean, it kind of goes back to what I was saying about, you know, the friend that refers you a restaurant, you know, right. You know, you know, in real estate, you always hear, you know, I get all my clients by word of mouth. Well, yes. And, you know, in that person's mind, the customer journey might look like referral from friend, pick up the telephone and call you. And really that's not true. You know, it's referral from friend and then this big obscure journey online, finding every little tidbit of information they can about you, validating you, even looking at the clothes you're wearing and your profile photo, you know, you know, there's so many,

Starting point is 00:07:04 you know, complex data points in that decision before they finally pick up the phone, but it's all online. That's fascinating because it used to be somebody, when you'd said, hey, I need a mortgage guy, and you go, hey, use Tony. Okay, send me his phone number. But now, you don't send me his phone number, you send me his website. Yeah. Or you just send me his name or, you know, a link to his website or something like that. Or LinkedIn profile, right? Totally. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:29 So everything, everything goes back to online. Let's switch channels here briefly before we dig into these, these kind of five or six key aspects that you pointed out to me that people should be working on. And by the way, this podcast, this episode, and I think we're probably going to extend over into a second episode here and make this a two-part. There are a lot of bits, a lot of tools in here and tips that Tony's going to be sharing that have cost a lot of companies a lot of money to get from Tony, as well as a lot of trial and error on your part. And people are paying consultants for this. So pay attention, take notes. There's a lot of gold in this. But Tony, I wanted to ask you, what's the biggest mistake that businesses make when it comes to

Starting point is 00:08:13 their online presence? Biggest mistake, boy. You know, I think it, I think it honestly, it starts out with, you know, one of the biggest opportunities businesses have to improve their online presence. And that is fundamentally just submitting your website to Google. Oh, wow. It sounds really simple and kind of very low-level tip, right? But it's crazy how often I see this mistake made. You know, even from big creative agencies that say, hey, Tony, you know, we need a little bit of help optimizing this website, this kind of thing. You know, once I start digging in and I realize that, wow, this hasn't even been

Starting point is 00:09:00 submitted to Google yet and you've been running the website for two years. Really, you know, there is a way and a method to do that. It's called Google Search Console. So if you literally Google the words Google Search Console, there's a whole dashboard where you go in and you submit your website address and you submit some different characteristics of your website to Google so that Google can often and frequently re-scan it, re-optimize it, re-index things, and it actually helps you to rank on Google. So it's like telling Google that like, hey, I've got a website here. Oh, and by the way, this is the table of contents to that website so that you can better understand what I'm trying to put out onto the internet. So if you think about this from a human perspective, if you don't

Starting point is 00:09:53 submit your website to Google, you're just like another face in the crowd, in a big crowd. Absolutely. But if you submit it to Google, you're kind of in the VIP line. Is that a safe assumption? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So yeah, you're on the list. You're on. Oh, there you go. You're on the list. Yeah, that's cool. So you talked to me about essentially five categories of key pieces that we need to work on here. And we already started talking about websites. So these five categories are website, SEO, which is search engine optimization, social media, online reviews, and local search or map search, if you will. You mentioned submit your website to Google, but what are some of the other low-hanging fruit items that people can be looking at on their website to immediately make good changes? And what's some of the experience that you've had? Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:10:56 I think one of Google's number one ranking characteristics is how fast your website loads. Website speed. Yeah. So website speed is extremely important to not only usability, but in Google's eyes, how seriously you take your own website, really. A common flaw that I see and, you know, have to encourage businesses and business owners to optimize on their website. One is just their image quality and image size. You know, so often, I mean, we've got all these great cameras today, right? Right. You know, even the new iPhone. 48 megapixels on your iPhone.

Starting point is 00:11:41 It's crazy. And the image size is enormous. And so if you just take photos off your iPhone and throw them on your website, your website may never load. You know, so, you know, think about that for a second. You know, it actually takes a little bit of work and a little bit of energy to do some of these optimizations. They're not hard. You know, you just resize a photo to where and how you're using it. You know, think about like, you know, we resize a photo to where and how you're using it you know think about like you know we had a website here in the office recently that was using little thumbnail images

Starting point is 00:12:11 and was you know literally using you know the image size from the big giant like canon camera right oh wow um and so size of the image in even the image format. I'll introduce a format that, you know, a lot of people aren't familiar with, but it's compatible all the way across the internet. Like you've heard of JPEG. Yeah. You've heard of PNG. Yeah. But if you heard of WebP. No. So WebP is actually an image type. It was designed by Google and it is far more efficient than a JPEG, but it's also as flexible as a PNG where you can get like those cool transparent backgrounds. Right. But if you convert your web image into a WebP format, you're going to greatly decrease the image size, which increases your speed. So how do we convert into a WebP format?

Starting point is 00:13:10 Well, there are converters online. Again, you can easily Google them. They're found in Photoshop. You know, there's apps on the phone, there's apps on your computer, you know, maybe a $5, $10 plugin that you can, you know, buy and download, but definitely worth it because, believe it or not, you know, all of the browsers today are WebP compatible. Interesting. And we generally are amateur web developers. You go to Wix or Squarespace or maybe your company has a template or something like that that you can use in order to develop around their brand specifications. But ultimately, I remember building certain websites and you're right,

Starting point is 00:13:46 it always says recommended size on the image, but I always just load an image in there. Yeah. How do we test the speed of our website to find out if this is causing a problem? Yeah, well, there's lots of different online tools. You know, Google has one in particular, PageSpeed Insights. Again, Google that and it will take you right there. Webpagetest.org, it's kind of a nice online platform. You know, one of the things that you really have to think about too in terms of web page speed is how the end user is actually accessing your website. What do you mean by that? Well, a lot of web users today, you know, enter your website on the mobile device. And so depending upon your type of business, a lot of them aren't even connected to Wi-Fi. So, you know, they're using their cell phone signal. And so you have to think about your website and using your website and usability of your website on how that translates into using on a phone on a cell phone signal. And so that's one of the reasons why I like this webpagetest.org.

Starting point is 00:14:47 It's because it allows you to actually test your site on a cell phone connection and use a mobile browser. So you kind of get the best of both worlds and are able to see just how your website performs like out in the wild, we'll say. Fascinating. So give me an example of what the results are of increasing the speed of a website. Yeah. You know, some different reports, different stats that I've read and have seen recently.

Starting point is 00:15:17 One was, I mean, everybody I think knows the website Etsy. Yep. Etsy increased, actually Etsy tried adding more images. They wanted to make a more robust kind of landing page. And so they actually stacked on some weight onto their website. And it wasn't much. It was 160 kilobytes of images, which isn't much at all. But what they saw is that their bounce rate, basically how quickly people hit the back button bounce rate is someone hits your website and then goes, ooh, I don't like it, or it's taking too long to load, and they go back button. So Etsy actually saw an 11% increase in their bounce rate just by adding that tiny amount of imagery, so adding weight to their site. Walmart is actually a fantastic example. Walmart actually observed reducing

Starting point is 00:16:07 their website speed by every 100 milliseconds caused an increase in conversions by 1%. So think about that. I mean, 100 milliseconds is pretty much imperceptible to the eye. Right. At least if you just measure that single 100 milliseconds, Walmart saw this over many increments, but every 100 milliseconds, Walmart increased their conversion rate online by 1%. For a company like Walmart, those sales were staggering. Right. So when you think about a small business, I know you've done some speed work on some of our websites. You've seen massive percentages of increase of online ordering in the QSR, the quick service restaurant space, as a result of doing that. Give us an example of results that you've seen with that.

Starting point is 00:16:58 Oh, sure. You know, so we, you know, we internally here, we had a website that, you know, just needed a huge amount of optimization. And so, you know, we were able to speed the thing up. I think the percentage was like 3,400% increase in speed. Wow. Like insane amount of speed. And so, you know, halved. We literally split the bounce rate in half. You know, we saw conversion rates, click-through rates, et cetera, double.

Starting point is 00:17:36 And, you know, this is just, you know, just some basic level optimization, honestly. You know, doing the things to the images, you know, making sure we're using appropriate images, image size, image formatting, good hosting. You know, that's another, I think, important place that you can invest a little bit of money in. You know, I had a client a few years back that owned a law firm and, you know, drove a really nice car and had multiple locations. And one of our first meetings about the website was he was bragging about how his website hosting only cost him $10 a month. And I was like, well, that's costing you actually a lot more than, you know, $10 a month because of how crappy it is. So, you know, investing in good hosting that's fast and robust. I mean, that's an easy upgrade. So with respect, let's put a bow on this website thing. Quick action items that somebody can take, things they can look at and improvements they can

Starting point is 00:18:35 make in order to see relatively quick results on their website. And by the way, listeners, I don't care if you're the CEO of a public company, a huge company, or you're a solopreneur hanging your own website up. This is important because a significant amount of your customers comes from your website and Google's desire to send people there because of your load speed and really how your website's constructed. Tony mentioned mobile. So we've always heard the term mobile first because so many websites are being looked at on mobile. But ultimately, most website templates are compatible between mobile and a desktop or a laptop or something like that. But give us two or three key things that somebody can write down right now

Starting point is 00:19:25 as they're listening to this and then go do at the end of this episode to test and update their website. Yeah. I mean, you know, first thing I would say is just read some of the basic steps and tips that Google has available to you right now. And if you go to their developer website, developers.google.com, it's actually, you'll be greeted with a three question survey. And after you answer those questions, you will literally be given a prescription of what you should do next. So that's easy. And, you know, a lot of people try to, try to skirt around, you know, what Google says, you know, is the best way to rank on their search engine. But at the end of the day, if you just listen to what Google says, you can actually do pretty well.

Starting point is 00:20:16 And then test it, test what you've done, you know, test your, test your existing website. So you at least get a benchmark and do it before you do any improvements so you know, you know, how far you've come. And, you know, that's the webpage test.org, tools.pingdom.com, another great site. Tells you speed, tells you how fat your website is, basically how much weight you have. But, you know, also, you know, just take a real good hard look at it, you know, on your mobile device. I mean, you know, a lot of times I see websites that, you know, might look nice on the desktop, but you pull up on a mobile device and you have to scroll down a ways before you really

Starting point is 00:20:58 delve into any content or see the first call to action. You know, all of that stuff should be, you know, the term is above the fold. So as soon as that webpage loads on your phone, you should have a clear direction and understanding about what to do next on that site. That's a great point. And for everybody above the fold is when you open a website, there's the line at the bottom of your device, the bottom of the screen you're looking at. Anything above that line is above the fold. Anything below that line is below the fold. So when you look at a website, you should be able to look at it and know what the brand is or the name of the company and know what they do. And ultimately, that's what it boils down to. People want to know where they're landing.

Starting point is 00:21:37 And if people search through the web so quickly that if it doesn't load or they don't know what the site is, they move on because we're giving it just a fraction of a moment, you know, maybe I think like between one and two seconds to actually see what the website is that we've gone to. And if it's not instantaneous to us, the name and essentially the why we move on. Yeah. And then it brings up a thought too. I'll just mention really quickly here. And you know, a lot of people think that, you know, or, you know, people may, uh, bring up that,

Starting point is 00:22:10 oh, I don't actually get any real sales online or it's not really helping my business. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. And, but also, you know, there's a lot of improvement there. And so if you find yourself in that boat, sometimes you got to ask yourself, well, am I asking too much too soon? And what I mean by that is the call to action, right? You know, you got to, I mean, that's why it's called a customer journey, right? Like you got to go from point A to point Z and there's a path along the way. You know, we don't have teleporters that just take you, you know? And so a lot of times when people get first introduced to your brand on your website, you know, it's, you know, order now, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, right? And so you're introducing that too soon in the journey.

Starting point is 00:22:53 And you got to kind of think in baby steps. And, you know, what's the next baby step that you can progress them to and then take them down that journey? Interesting. And that first baby step should be to go look below the fold, I would guess. Absolutely. Scroll. Exactly. Scroll. So it's fascinating when we think that because you're right. I mean, so much of business is about, we want the perfect customer to go from thought to purchase. And that's unrealistic to think that way. The customer wants a journey and an experience and they want it to be valuable for them. So

Starting point is 00:23:25 great perspective. Closing the door on website, but still very parallel to that. Let's talk about SEO. So what is SEO and why should we care? Well, sure. You know, SEO is kind of your brand value, you know, on the internet, if you think about it, and how valuable and how meaningful your brand is. You know, there's more search engines than Google, you know, Bing matters. Yeah. And, you know, having a brand that Google and Bing kind of want to promote when the right search terms come up. I mean, if you really kind of think about how search engines work, search engines are a business. And that business has to provide value to customers. And the value that it provides is providing good content, good relevant content to customers when they're searching for things.

Starting point is 00:24:27 And so your business to be in that cohort of search terms, of websites that pop up, need to provide value when they're searched for. So you're using the statement search terms. And I've heard keywords a lot also. You have long tail keywords. Tell us, what is a search term what is a keyword what's a long tail keyword and how do we insert those things into our web presence simply because ultimately that's what people search for right yeah absolutely absolutely so you know it kind of comes down to what time of type of business you have if you have a brick and mortar if it's an of business you have, if you have a brick and mortar, if it's an online business. But you know, if you have a business that, well, let's say sell

Starting point is 00:25:09 sandwiches, okay, you know, you might, you know, want to rank for best sandwiches near me. And so that would be technically a long tail keyword, because it's not just someone searching for sandwiches, you know, they're searching for the best sandwiches, and they're searching for sandwiches. You know, they're searching for the best sandwiches and they're searching for the best sandwiches that are close to where I'm currently located. And so, you know, having content around sandwiches, you know, around how maybe your sandwiches compare to other sandwiches, how they're the best sandwiches, what makes them the best sandwiches, where your sandwiches are currently being made. You know, all of these things, you know, kind of compound into that long tail keyword and ranking for it. Where do we put this on our website? Where should these things be placed? And how

Starting point is 00:25:55 do you ensure that you have all of these different keywords built into your web presence for SEO? Sure. You know, you can't just stuff things in there unnaturally. So I'll point that out because one, Google will identify that. But two, so will the person reading it. You know, if every other word in the paragraph is best sandwich, best sandwich, best sandwich, you know, it doesn't really sell people. Does that make a difference to pile things in over and over and over again? It hurts you. Yeah, it definitely hurts you. And so it's, you know, it's using, using search terms sporadically, you know, throughout your copy.

Starting point is 00:26:35 But just really just defining, you know, what it is. I mean, the internet, the internet and, you know, the search engines are smart enough to know what synonyms are and be able to define synonyms. So just as long as you're kind of, you know, defining and articulating what your content, what your product, what you're trying to sell, your value proposition, everything is about and doing it throughout your website. I mean, you should have multiple pages, you know, and if you have product, you should have a page for each product, you know, that is very well descriptive. And, you know, something that is easy to navigate and kind of that you can easily find more content, more description, more focus on that product about. So you mentioned sandwiches.

Starting point is 00:27:20 So you would have like, you know, you click on this chicken sandwich. We have chicken sandwich concept. You click on the Big Daddy. And then that should not just pop up a photo, but kind of a very nice. Yeah, description, what's in it, maybe how it tastes, who might like it, you know. Lots of things around that. What's in, you know, the ingredients. You know, but you also mentioned about local.

Starting point is 00:27:43 And so I'll bring up another thing that you can again find on the developers website at Google but it's called structured data so structured data is essentially like the cliff notes of your website put in the put in a format that Google can easily scan and understand and so structured data is a little more advanced when we talk about SEO, but it's extremely important because Google doesn't actually have to figure out like what this image means or what this page is about or, you know, how much this product or sandwich costs. You can outline it in a structure that Google can go in, scan, get all that information very quickly, and help Google to reproduce it online. So there's plug-ins.

Starting point is 00:28:31 You know, modern web builders have this. But it's an important facet of the business, and it definitely helps you to rank locally as well. So if you're kind of your own web developer, let's say you have a Squarespace or a Wix or something, you should just go on their website and search for structured data. Absolutely. Cool.

Starting point is 00:28:47 Okay. Now, two other aspects of search engine optimization that I want to cover are dynamic content or, you know, obviously current relevant information that continues to show up either video or written. As well as back linking. So what are those two things we hear about those? What are they and what should we do in order to ensure that we have those? Are they important? Yeah, I think, you know, they're very important. You know, again, another ranking, ranking metric that Google bases how well they're going to rank you off of is bounce rate. So bounce rate is defined by if someone stays on your website for 10 seconds or more. So you've got to capture someone's attention for 10 seconds on one page or they navigate to

Starting point is 00:29:42 a second page on your website. So, you know, they actually take the, take the leap and start investigating themselves. So as long as they're there 10 seconds or make it to another page on the site, you're not considered a bounce. And if they don't, you're considered a bounce. And so video is a great way to help not be a bounce because it, you know, it captures people's attention. And it, you know, is a very nice way to articulate your value prop or, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to describe or sell or, you know, just expound on. I mean, it's really a great medium to really capture visitors and capture attention. Awesome. Backlinks,. Uh, backlinks,

Starting point is 00:30:30 you know, backlinks are still relevant. You know, they're not, maybe not in the capacity that Google used them 15 years ago. You know, Google used to just, you know, kind of count up how many backlinks you had on the internet and go, well, you're very relevant or you're not. What's, what's a bank backlink by the way, a backlink is just a link to your website on someone else's website. So like if you wrote an article and you put your website address on that, sent the article off to Inc. Magazine or the local newspaper or whatever, and they posted that article with your website, that creates a backlink for you? Correct. Now it still does tell Google what your website is about, you know, a third party or outside articles that go to a page that's even more in depth on your website, you know, that kind of helps to kind of close that gap on subject matter. But, you know, at the end of the

Starting point is 00:31:19 day, you know, anything that can get people to your website is a good thing. And so having more entry points for your landing page, for your website out there on the internet, it's only going to do things like help you. And that's the end of part one of this two-part episode. Make sure you check out next week when we dig even deeper with Tony and answer some of those dying questions you might have about your online presence. Go back and listen to this again. Also, there's a lot of gold in here and it will help you immediately change your web presence. We'll see you next time on Start With A Win. you

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Start With A Win - How to Build a POWERFUL Online Presence for Your Business | Tony Adams

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