Brian Lawrence – Getting your website ready for engagement season
As the holidays approach it’s always a good time to take a look at our websites to see what we can do to help them convert better. For this, I’ve invited my good friend and go-to for websites and SEO, Brian Lawrence of Local Traffic Builder. Whether your site is current, starting to get dated or needs to be scrapped, this episode will give you some ideas on how to improve with the traffic you’re already getting.
About Brian
Brian Lawrence, my recommended resource for web design and SEO for the last 10 years, has been in the industry owning one-stop-wedding stores, VP of a leading wholesale wedding brand, and an accomplished industry writer and speaker.
Visit brianlawrence.com, text him at 201-446-1038, or e-mail [email protected]
I mentioned having better website hosting, here’s who I recommend:
Check out Overhaulics for website hosting, they’re who I use: https://billing.overhaulics.com/aff.php?aff=18
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– Is your website ready for engagement season? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so excited to have my good friend Brian Lawrence, joining me today to talk about websites. Brian, how you doing today?
– Doing well, always well, when I’m talking with you.
– Well, I’m always great when I’m talking with you as well, because we go back, we shouldn’t say how long we go back a long time. Let’s not mention a number here we go back a long time. You were my client, I was your client and we’ve been friends for over 20 years. Let’s just say, let’s go there, over 20 years. And you were VP in one of the top invitation companies. I was VP of sales at The Knot. So, we have a big history of running through a lot of things that we’ve been through together in the industry. And what brought us together about 10 years ago or so, almost actually 11 years ago, was you made my first website when I left The Knot and I became independent. You made my first website and that was the beginning of this journey of 11 years and going on, where a lot of my clients need websites. I refer them to you and then you have me do what?
– “Alanize” them.
– I love that, I get to “Alanize” the sites. So, the reason that I ask you to come on today is because we are at that time of the year where engagements are happening. This is launching, where would it be? November 14th is when this is launching. We’re right before Thanksgiving, and we know that that’s when things start. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day. That’s the time where a large percentage engagements are happening. So, what I wanted to talk about today is what are some of the things that people can do? because we know our listeners are in different buckets. They’re in the, “I have a website that’s pretty good, but everything can need a little tweaking.” Every website needs tweaking. It’s never done it, it’s always a work in progress. We have some people that are, “My website’s getting a little older, but I can probably work with it.” And then we have people that are like, “I know what needs to be done over.” So let’s start with the people that you have a website. It’s relatively recent, but what are some of the things people could look for that no matter how recent your website is that you could look to improve it?
– I believe that businesses should think about their niches, and are they targeting different ethnicities? Are they looking to add events? And one of the easiest ways to build on your website is to add pages. So, this way you’re not thinking about, well, you’re critically thinking about what I should do to improve my existing content, but just start from scratch. It gives you a lot of openings, first of all to market differently. So, for example, if you have a corporate opportunity to market, instead of sending them to your homepage, you can send them to the corporate landing page.
– Right, and and that would also help with SEO, right?
– Correct, absolutely.
– And how is that, why does that help with SEO rather than sending them to a page that talks about everything?
– A lot of people are under the misconception that if they could just add more and more words to their current page, that Google is going to pick it up and rank that same page for all of the keywords. That’s not the case. Essentially, Google is looking for clarity. They’re looking to look, take your favorite keyword that you’ve decided that you want to rank for that page and rank that. And a lot of the best ways to rank on Google has nothing to do with what’s written on the actual website. It’s all behind the scenes. There are what’s called metadata. There’s different tags that you could populate on your website. And a lot of times a lot of businesses that do their own websites aren’t even aware of that and-
– So that’s the behind the Green curtain stuff. Now I’ve heard that Google does care what’s on the page because that’s what the person reads. But it is reading those tags. It is reading the title tags, it’s reading all these things. If you do your own website, it’s all those fields you didn’t fill in in the back of the page.
– Google cares a lot about what you say. And believe it or not, Google cares most about the user experience. So, it’s foremost you want to write for your potential client, if there’s an opportunity to incorporate certain keywords into your content, that’s fine, as long as it reads well to the user.
– Yeah, the algorithms have gotten a lot smarter. They’re reading it for not the, what I call the Rainman approach to writing, which is where you stuff the keyword again and again and again. And I always say read your website out loud. Whenever I review a website, I read it out loud. And does it have your voice? because businesses have voices, whether you’re the only person in your business or whether you’re a big business. I mean, if you think about it, Target has a different voice than Macy’s. Taco Bell has a different voice than Burger King, right? Businesses have voices as well. What Brian’s saying here is if you’re going after more than one niche in the market, so if you’re going after weddings and corporate events and let’s say schools or Mitzvahs or Quinces or whatever, having separate pages for those allows that page to rank higher because it’s only about that as opposed to it’s about everything which dilutes it, right? Is that what you’re basically saying?
– Yes, yes, and it also elevates the experience. Someone comes to your homepage, Your homepage is like your front lobby. So, essentially it would be great if everybody loved what they saw in your homepage and thus contacted you because all things considered better to have a two-way conversation where you’re in control, how people understand your brand, but doesn’t always happen that way. So, what’s the next place you want to drive them to, the event, the type of event, if it’s a wedding, you want to bring them into a wedding page and you want that wedding page to be so robust, it’s like a homepage for wedding. Each event should be like its own homepage for that particular event. So, much so that if you’re advertising, say on WeddingWire or The Knot, or any other platform that you could link directly to that wedding page instead of linking to the homepage, why not bring them to the exact environment that they want to be on.
– The least amount of clicks to get to what you want to, reducing their friction, which people have heard me talk about all the time. I’m personally, I’m not a fan of dropdowns, right? So if you go to a website and you click on something, I want something to happen. This is me talking it is based in science, right? If you look at web usability, people who talk about UX, and so UX, the user experience design the least number of clicks to get to what you want. You’re going to keep people on your site. The more clicks they have to make, the more they’re going to go. Every page on your site does not have to be in your top navigation menu. It has to be able to get to it from some page, but it doesn’t have to be in the top. So, what’s the quickest way to get there? Now the other thing could be you don’t need more pages to make your site better. I’ve seen people that will dilute their SEO by having five pages about something because I click on something and then it sends me another page and another and another. And now none of those pages are going to rank strongly because each of them only has a little bit of information where you might have been able to put a lot of that on one page.
– Correct, I mean, if you’re on staying within that particular event, absolutely.
– Or that service that you do. But let’s go back to something that you said, because you and I are on the same page with this. When designing a website from scratch, I’ve had people that, well, I’ll look at their site and it’ll have each of their different services for the same type of event, but they’ll be on different pages. So, let’s just say a DJ. So, you’ll have DJ and then another page will be lighting and another page will be photo booth and another page will be special effects that they have, when all of those things could be used on a wedding or it could be used on a different event. And what I’ve recommended is well have the wedding page and talk about all those things and then have a Mitzvah page and talk about the things that apply to that because the customer knows what type of event they’re having, knows that they want a certain kind of experience, but they don’t know how to get there. And by having those things on separate pages, I think you miss an opportunity because if they’re reading your wedding page, or sorry, they’re reading the DJ page and they don’t see the photo booth, well they’re not thinking, “Hey, I might want to photo booth for my wedding.” But if they see it on the wedding page, now it becomes a choice.
– Totally agree. You could format all of your event pages almost like a template where you have all of those add-on services on every page, and if you want to go deeper, like Alan said, it’s not like you don’t want this drop down menu. You want the user experience where you’re bringing them into deeper layers of the site. So, there’s nothing wrong with having pages for those particular services, but they should not be foremost. There should be a sequence. Let them get it interested in the core of what they’re there for. And then look at, look at the add-ons.
– And there’s ways that you can put more stuff on a page. There are things called toggles and tabs where you can compress information on a page. So, a toggle would be, you’ve seen it on a site where you see a line and then there’s a little plus sign and you click or a down arrow and it opens that up to more information on demand. Which means if the customer cares or the visitor cares to see more, they can see more. So, that’s what I’ve done on my site. I have a speaking page and there’s a dropdown that says, “What is my certified speaking professional and global speaking fellow mean to you?” I know most people don’t care and they’re not going to want to read it, but if I had all that text open, that’s a big roadblock to get to what they might want to read. But if they want to read it, they click, they open it, they read it, and then tabs. Just imagine in your filing cabinet you have those file folders with the tabs that kind of overlap, you know, left, middle and right. You can do that on your website so the content that’s behind can get pulled forward. And I helped someone design a site like this years ago where he used to have all of the different service. So, DJ, lighting, photo booth, team building, all these things for separate pages. And now it seems redundant because he mentions DJ on every one of the pages for weddings, Quinces, Mitzvahs, corporate schools. He mentions photo booth on all those pages. But then there are differences. There are things he doesn’t say on some of them that he says on others because they don’t apply. So, you know that it says photo booth on five pages, the customer only sees the one that they’re interested in.
– Right, the event that they’re going for. And your point about the toggles, it’s a great use for frequent FAQs.
– Perfect.
– Because somebody, sees all of the questions and sees all of the answers, it’s overwhelming. But if they just see the questions and then they click on the ones they want the answers to. It’s much better. It’s also great to use for pricing as well. Sometimes it’s just, if you have a number of different packages, to be overwhelmed by seeing all those line items and prices all at once, rather than being able to to focus in on a different package. It’s definitely a good use there as well.
– And you can have a little bit of the information and then click to read more. So, you can tease them with, here’s a little bit, if you want all the details, click and see this because not everybody needs it. That’s the important part, is not everybody needs it, but Google can read all of it, whether it’s in the toggle or not, whether it’s in the tab or not. FAQs is absolutely perfect for it. I’ve seen too many FAQ pages that go on and on and on, and something we haven’t mentioned yet. But we sh definitely should. If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, which is totally free, you need to have it. I did a podcast about this if you want to go back and listen to it. There’s only about three or four things that I care about with Google Analytics. There’s a hundred points of data. But what do I care about? I want to know which pages people are visiting because they may not be the pages you think, like your testimonials page, nobody goes there, okay, I want to know how much of your traffic is mobile. I ask people and they always guess. I was like, no, no, don’t guess. Know, I know that my website is three quarters desktop, 25% mobile, I know that and it’s been trending and it has never gotten more than 30% mobile. That is opposite of most of you listening. If you’re in the wedding and event industry, you’re probably 50/50 at least mobile to desktop if not higher on mobile. Funny thing happened during Covid with more people working from home. The mobile went down a little bit and the desktop went up because the boss couldn’t see you sneaking on a website to look at a wedding website. But I care about that. I want to know where people are coming from, right? Where’s their traffic coming from? Again, don’t guess. Let’s see that. And importantly, your number one source of traffic may not be your number one source of business. Just because you’re getting more traffic doesn’t mean it’s converting. So, you’d like to know conversion as well, but if you don’t know how much is mobile, this is where a lot of people get tripped up. You make your website or look at your website on your laptop or your desktop, your customers are looking on mobile, you’re not seeing the same thing, right Brian? It’s a different experience.
– Totally different experience. And you have to really think about both differently.
– Right, so when I’m reviewing a website, actually let’s go through that. So, whether Brian sends me a site that he’s made for someone and has me “Alanizing” or whether I’m looking at it, just someone has me review a site, the first thing I look for is, have you said who you are? And I don’t mean in your logo because your logo is a picture and yes, you could put the file name and the title tag and all that stuff behind it. But if I read down the page, did you actually say your company name in writing? Because if someone’s searching for you, not someone like you, SEO is searching for someone like you. But if they’re looking for you, you actually have to have your name on your site. And a lot of people complain, you know, somebody Googles me and The Knot comes up with my listing higher. Well, yeah, their site ranks a lot better. And you didn’t say your name, they said your name. Okay, the second is, and this is a pet peeve of you and I, I know this, where are you or where do you do business? And when I say where are you, you don’t have to have your physical street address if you work from a home office. But if I go to your site, do I know where in the world, right? Is Carmen San Diego, right? Where in the world are you? And give me an idea in the words that your customers would use. So, if they would say like, I’m in Central Jersey, Brian, you’re in North Jersey, right? If somebody said, “I’m looking for something in North Jersey,” does it say North Jersey or does it say in the Rutherford area, like where your store was originally when I met you? Or does it say in the tri-state area or four corners or right? How do people refer to that area? Does it say that? And please, if you’re a venue, if you’re a bridal shop, if you’re a physical location, could you have your address on your homepage, right? If guests are trying to come to your venue for an event, they shouldn’t have to look further than your homepage. Yes, you can put it in the footer. We know to look there, we’ll scroll down to look for the footer, but tell us where you are. Because if someone’s doing a search for someone like you on Google and your site doesn’t say Cincinnati or it doesn’t say Phoenix or it doesn’t say whatever they call your area, Southern California, you’re not going to show up because Google doesn’t know where you are, right? That’s a big one. The third thing is tell us what you do. And I know that sounds funny, but I go to a lot of websites and you imply what you do because you have the curse of knowledge. And what I mean when I say is you might say entertainment, okay, well entertainment is a very, very broad term because entertainment is jugglers and entertainment is unicyclists and entertainment is Cirque du Soleil performers, and it’s bands and it’s DJs and bagpipers and steel drummers, right? That’s entertainment. So, you have to get more specific on what you do. Because again, if someone’s looking for you, they’re probably not looking for entertainment. If they’re looking for a bagpiper, they’re looking for a bagpiper, right? Or a saxophonist or whatever. The fourth is, tell us what you want us to do. But don’t just do that. Tell us why, people are going to take action if it’s in their best interest, not yours. If it feels like click here to talk to a salesperson, they’re not going to do it. If it says book us now on the button, they’re not going to do it. Because as Brian shake his head for you who are listening, but they’re not going to do it because they’re not ready to book you, they’re ready to find out more. It’s a high commitment to click book us now. And if you’re only thing says make an appointment and they don’t want to make an appointment yet, you’re excluding people who might just want to ask a question. So, say, if you’d like to ask a question, get a price quote or arrange an appointment with one of our wedding specialists, Mitzvah specialist, corporate, whatever it is, call, email, contact us today. Give them all the ways they can possibly do it and give them all the ways that you’re going to pay attention to. So, if you have live chat, you have to be available. If you’re saying texting, you want to be able to text to them whenever they’re texting to you. And then the fifth one is just an aesthetic. People don’t compare your website to the other people in your category. They compare your website to every website they ever visit. Because the web is, the web is the web. So, if I come from The Knot to your website or from Facebook to your website or Instagram to your website or from Target to your website or from Reddit to your website or from TikTok to your website, I’m comparing the experience of what every other website I’ve ever been to to this. So, it just has to look current, that’s all, it doesn’t have to be the best website out there, but it has to look current. Do look at your competitors because they are going to compare, you do want to know what they’re coming from. You’ll find that the bar is pretty low, which is good for you because you can set the bar higher and we’ll talk about some of the elements that’ll make your site better. But those are the five things I look for. So, who are you, where are you? Or where do you do business? What do you do? What do you want me to do? And then does it just look current, fresh and modern? So get rid of the wallpaper backgrounds, get rid of the dark boxes around things. All these things that were hip at some point that are no longer hip. But let’s talk now Brian, about people that have a site that they’re not sure. Can I still work with this or not work with this? I know you work with WordPress websites. I love WordPress websites and the templates, the one that I have, I thought I would’ve gotten rid of it by now, but it keeps getting updated by the developers. So, I don’t have to, and that’s the thing you look for is, are people still servicing that template? because the template is the cheap part, it’s the development. That’s the hard part. What are some of the things that people could do with their current site to make it fresher?
– Well, one of the things if you’re not a venue, is that so many websites have to improve their credibility. That they may have some testimonials, they may have badges from WeddingWire and The Knot, but every vendor that I’ve ever spoken to appreciates being recommended by a venue. And you know, venues are often very proficient about recommending their vendors. Sometimes it’s very passive, sometimes they have it listed on their website, sometimes they send a list. But usually after a couple books a venue, they’re often running to other platforms like WeddingWire and The Knot or other local go to bridal shows. But if they arrive at your website and you are a preferred vendor at a number of different venues, listing those venues front and center on your homepage and on some of your other landing pages is really great credibility. They still trust the venue. And if you’re associated with that venue, it could mean a lot. That could be an express train for them to contact you. And then a second addition to that would be to create either blog posts or a separate venue pages that talk about the venue from your perspective and showcase your work at that venue. That could really not only create that much more credibility and an incentive to contact you, but also it’s really good for ranking on Google for that particular venue by name.
– Now and I’ve seen people do that where they will have pages for the venues that they work at, a lot individual pages. And like Brian said, you can just do it with a blog. It’s nice and easy to do that.
– Right, exactly.
– Now, for those of you that are not on preferred vendor list, because I know some people aren’t. The venues that you work at, you can still get credibility by doing something else. So, the elements that I want to see on a site, I want to see aspirational images. So, people and venues please don’t show empty rooms, empty ceremony sites, empty, empty, empty, empty. Why do people stage model homes? Because people can’t picture them with empty. You show me a room that’s empty or a room that’s got tables in it, even if they’re set, it’s not an event, it’s just the setup there. You show me chairs for a ceremony, it’s chairs, show me people getting married, show me happy people. Show their guests, make sure it’s in your contract that you get a photo release. It can be line 87, paragraph two, clause 14. But put it in there that you have a photo release and you can use them. Most people are happy that you want to show their pictures. Most people are, so that’s not a problem. So, aspirational images, which means if I look at the picture, touch me emotionally that I look at it and go, “Wow, that looks beautiful, that looks fun. They look like they’re having a great time. I want to feel like them.” The second, and as we speak, I’m actually working on my presentation for WeddingMBA, which will have come out last week and Brian’s been sending me some sites that we’ve worked on together. So, I can use examples of this is text that talks about results. Too many people talk about services, they don’t want your services, they want the results of your services. We don’t buy things, we buy the results of those things. Anything that we buy. Like I just bought a new slide clicker and I bought because it can do things my other one couldn’t do. Not because I needed a clicker, I didn’t. I have seven, I don’t need another clicker. But if you’ve noticed now a lot of people are showing on TV screens instead of projectors. And the laser pointers don’t work on TV screens, they won’t show up. Well, I was at an event in Ireland and this guy is showing, and all of a sudden this circle shows up on the screen. I’m like, “How is he doing that?, it’s a TV.” Well, the Logitech spotlight remote, there you go. It’s in, and while I was sitting there, I bought it, right? I just went on my phone and I bought it. But I want to talk about results, talk about the results of hiring you because if you just talk about services, that’s what all your competitors do. And then the cheaper price wins. The third thing is the social proof. And I mentioned this just before. If you have testimonials on your website now on a page called testimonials, it is a very lightly viewed page because people know it’s your site, it’s your testimonials. What are the chances you put anything bad there?, zero. So, what we want to do is put those testimonials all throughout the site, on the pages that they are looking at, go back to your Google analytics, tells you which pages, but single sentences, think of them like speed bumps. So, when we get to that, we’ll read it and keep going. If there’s a paragraph, you don’t want to read it. And let’s go back to mobile again, one sentence on your desktop, that’s one line is four or five lines on a mobile device. But let’s get back to something we were just talking about. You’re not referred by a particular venue, but you’ve worked there. Put the attribution that this was Jenny and Chris’s wedding at this venue in this city and state. And now you’ve been able to say that, which can help your SEO and validate, oh, you work at the venues like those. It also helps show where you are. So, let’s say you are in, I don’t know you’re in Salt Lake City, but you also work in Provo and you also work in Ogden and you also work in other places, by showing that you work in those cities just by having those testimonials that say that you’re wonderful plus say that you’ve worked in that area that can help your SEO and show people where you work. And then the fourth piece I’m looking for is now tell me what to do. So, if you follow this pattern, the pictures shows the results, the text talks about the results, the testimonials, validate the results. And then you say, if this is the way you want to feel about your wedding photos and your wedding photographer, call, email, or contact me today. So, those would be the pieces there.
– There’s one thing I wanted to elaborate, which you’ve been talking about for years, and that is the use of reviews and finding elegant ways of expressing the results. Because if you study the reviews and you’ll see some of the phraseology that these satisfied clients are expressing with such passion and with such superlative adjectives that the best copywriter in the world couldn’t do better. So, if you-
– Because it’s true.
– Yeah, if you repurpose those into benefits on the website, which I kind of equate when you’re talking about the results, the benefits are of why you? Why should they seek your services?
– Yeah, if you go back to podcast I did on branding versus your brand, branding is your color, is your logo. If you’re watching on YouTube, my logo’s always over my shoulder over here. My books are right behind me. That is branding, your brand is what people say about you when they talk to their friends, when they tell, when somebody asks a guest at a wedding or event, “How was it?” Whatever they said is your brand. So, those testimonials do that. So, what I always suggest that you do, and I was just had a sales training call yesterday with someone, the go into your reviews. I know you’ve read them, but read them again, right? And side note here, if you’ve had have not been re responding to reviews on WeddingWire, The Knot, Yelp, Google, Facebook, please respond to good reviews. It makes the bad review a little less likely to happen because they know you’re going to pay attention. Know you’re going to respond. So, read your reviews again and what I challenged this team to do, so it was four people at this wedding planning company and I said, don’t read your own review. The one that talks about you, you read the one that talks about your coworker because you’re not as emotionally invested in that and find the words and phrases that come up again and again that describe what it’s like to do business with you. Because each person has their own brand as well as the company has their brand. Find the words that come up about the company. Find the words that come out about you and pull out those sentences, those emotionally charged sentences that describe what it’s like to work with you. Because the person who’s reading your website wants to know what is it going to be like. So, if you are known to be very responsive and it keeps coming up, Steve is always so responsive to everyone of my messages. That’s an important sentence, right? Because responsiveness, a presentation, again, the WeddingMBA one from last week, No, I’m sorry, I’m preparing for St. Lucia this week. I said the things that people value is responsiveness, transparency, and experience. Responsiveness, hugely important. Brian, you know, I do a lot of secret shopping. You know, a lot of people don’t respond and don’t follow up transparency, the more transparent you are about what you do and what you charge, the more they’re going to trust you upfront. And then they’re buying experiences. They’re not buying services, they’re not buying products. So, reviews are hugely important because if somebody said to you, “What is your brand?” Most people start tripping over their words because they don’t know what to say. It’s like the elevator pitch. You know, it’s not 30 seconds folks. I did a podcast on this, it’s seven, it’s seven seconds. So, reviews on every page, you can still have the reviews page. It’ll help you with SEO because Google can still read that page. But understand, nobody’s going to go there, they’re just not going to go there. What about domain names, right? So I was looking at somebody’s site they sent me and it was a .net instead of a .com. How does that affect your ranking?
– Well, it used to be if you had like a keyword domain name like wedding photography Chicago that matched a term that one would search for, that would carry weight with Google, not so much anymore, but one of the good uses of domains sometimes deals with, if you’re trying to be event focused in your marketing. So, instead of having a link to your, say your domain name is just the name of your business and you want to target a particular event, you could have something that really brings in that event in the domain name. You don’t have to design a new website for it, but instead of just showing a longer domain name of your current site with that landing page, you reserve a shorter name that’s more relevant to that page and you point it to that landing page.
– So give us an example, give us an example. What would that be? So somebody’s business is Elegant Chicago Images.
– So it’s really funny cause I actually, we both know Walter from Eloquent Studios in New Jersey.
– Yeah, yeah,
– So he’s a client of ours and we we’re just tweak tweaking his existing website and he’s very into trying to find domain names to brand his business. And he does photography, video and DJs. So, he might have a domain name. His domain name is eloquentstudios.com, but he is looking for different domain names that he could brand his services. So, eloquent DJs or eloquent photography. Those don’t need to be separate sites. They would link the to the photography page on his website. It would link to the DJ page on his website. And if say he’s on an industry platform advertising for multiple services, it just gives him that much more credibility with a domain name with the DJ section eloquent DJs as opposed to eloquent studios.
– And he could have eloquent wedding DJs, right?
– Yes.
– If you wanted to really drill down to that. So, these are technically called redirects if you want to really know it’s a three-
– Oh yes, and I call them vanity domain names. It’s like having 800 number. The 800 number is in its own number. It points to your regular telephone number.
– Right, and I have many of these, you have many of these. When I want somebody to post a review for me, I don’t give them the Google thing. I say go to reviewalanberg.com, which then takes you to there, right? Or reviewmywebinar.com. I have all these different ones, which will take you to these different places. Or in my case, my website is alanberg.com. It’s nice and short, it’s eight letters, keep it nice. But Wedding Business Solutions is my company name. And if you go to weddingbusinesssolutions.com, it takes you to alanberg.com. And this is also important, a lot of people have things like hyphens in their URLs and things, which can be really confusing for people to type. So, coming up with this shorter URL and redirecting is very helpful. Another thing that you’ve helped me with is you introduced me to a new host for my website. I used to use GoDaddy for my website, and now we use Kyle from Overhaulics for the website. And my site is faster, he’s more responsive. It’s not some huge company, I found to be a lot better. What’s the importance of the hosting? Well tell people what hosting is and then let’s compare the hosting.
– When a company is hosting your website, they are responsible for delivering the website to every person that clicks on it or types in. So, it could be a thousand people at once. They have to have the bandwidth to deliver it. It’s basically a large super computer server. But typically when there is a problem with a website after it’s designed, usually it does have to do with the hosting issue. Sometimes the forms don’t work correctly, photos don’t load. There are sometimes updates on different platforms that don’t get done properly. And often, we’re in a business that like every client counts. So, if you have a problem that would be a five minute fix and you contact a company like GoDaddy, it could still take a day, even though it takes five minutes between their getting a claim ticket, auto response, waiting on hold. So, with a smaller hosting company like Overhaulics, you can text the guy, you can call him and a five minute fit problem is solved in an hour. A lot of money at stake and it’s also someone that is intimate with the WordPress environment. That’s not like dealing with a large generic company.
– I’ve also found, yes, he’s very responsive. It actually is costing me less, My site was responding faster and he is also answering questions from me that really don’t fall under his purview. But he’s very, very, very helpful.
– That’s why, I mean, when somebody, as someone that’s doing many, many websites and after the website could be up for six months and they still associate me with the website and they contact me with a challenge. I don’t want to say, “Well, you’re going to have to call your hosting company.” I want to take ownership of it and that’s why I could text him and tell him, “Take care of it,” but it creates that seamless experience for my clients.
– Right, and since we’ve mentioned it, I’ll put a link in the show notes to Overhaulics in case you, you wanted to reach out to him about that. So, we’re running out of time here. We’re getting ready for engagement season. The simple fixers to your website, read the words on your site. Are you talking about results? Are you talking about products and services? Just read it out loud. I call it the You Test Y O U, do you use the word you? If you’re using the word you, the person reading it feels like you’re talking to them. So, don’t talk about couples talk about you. It’s your wedding, it’s your guest, it’s your corporate event, it’s your Mitzvah, it’s your Quince, whatever that is. Photos, just update the photos. Get rid of all the weakest links. Remember that TV show, “You are the weakest link, goodbye.” No weak links, right? Less photos is better than more photos. If you don’t have all great photos and your galleries don’t have to have 200 pictures, it creates decision paralysis, enough pictures that they’re going to look and say, “Wow, these people are providing great results. These people in these pictures are so happy, I want to be like them.” Have the testimonials, pull those single sentences. It’s such an easy thing to do. It’s actually a great exercise because it makes you feel really good reading your reviews and having people say how much they love you and what they love about you. But find these single sentences and don’t have the ones that say the same things. Have different things, different things, different things, but those attribution. So, you’ll have where that person was, let me say this. If you’re a venue, you want to mention where the people were coming from. If you are not the venue, you want to mention the venue name in the attribution plus the city state, or if you’re listening internationally, the county, the province, whatever it is that you have there. And then the call to action look at your calls to action, are they very off putting because they say generic things like read more or listen more. Or do they say things like, “Contact us now for a price quote, to ask a question or to arrange a meeting with one of our specialists.” Very specific, tell them why they’re doing it. These are the easy things that you can do. If you know that you need a new website, I’m going to have Brian’s contact information in the show notes. You can contact Brian about that. If you’re not sure, Brian, I’m sure if they wanted to contact you, you would take a look at their site with them and say, “Hey, you can work with this, you can’t.”
– Oh, anybody that I speak to, I will always give them ideas that will help them so they leave the meeting the better for it.
– Terrific. And if you know you need a website review, you guys know that that’s something that I do. It’s on my website as well. So, Brian, I’m going to put in the contact notes there, but what’s the easiest way to get a hold of you?
– Email me, [email protected] .
– Or visit your website, brianlawrence.com . Again, I’ll put that in the show notes. Fantastic. We have done this before and could go on forever. So, we’re going to cut this off here, but I’m going to have you back on, I want to have you back on because I want to talk about Google My Business and things like that, that you’ve helped me and a lot of people with, but we’ll have you on another episode for that. So, Brian, thank you so much for joining me and everybody happy holidays coming up.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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