Google’s Core Web Vitals Are Becoming Ranking Signals – What Does This Mean for SEO? – Pam Aungst | DMR #233

Full transcript:

Bot 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 233. Google’s core web vitals are becoming ranking signals in May 2021. But what exactly does this mean for SEO,

Digital Marketing Radio

with David Bain

Hi, I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio. The show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of that is is tools, tactics and trends shared on this very show by today’s modern marketing masters. Back in November 2020, Google announced that page experience ranking signals will become part of its organic search ranking algorithm from May 2021. Meaning that if users don’t like your page, Google won’t like it either. But what exactly does this mean for SEO? Joining me to discuss this is a lady who has been creating websites since 1997. Just for fun, she points out though, she’s the adjunct analyst, adjunct analytics analyst

David Bain 0:59
that 10 times fast.

Bot 1:00
So I used to, I used to work for a company that was called analytics as the first word. And that was a struggle, and I got there after about six months. I mean, it’s been a while since I said the word maybe. I’m gonna say it again. She’s the adjunct analytics professor at County College of Morris, the founder of stealth search and analytics, and the President and Founder of apama, and marketing. Welcome to DMR. Pam Aungst,

Pam Aungst 1:24
thank you. So happy to be here.

Bot 1:26
Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you again. You can find Pam over at Pam and marketing.com. So first question is I’m gonna throw you over here Pam, laser Ray to 100k What’s that all about?

Pam Aungst 1:42
That is about cheering on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general, to reach a certain milestone, which would be Bitcoin being one bitcoin being worth 100k, which really just represents wider adoption of it. And I do kind of believe in the whole background and intention behind it. So

Bot 1:59
okay, yeah, thanks for checking out your Twitter handle beforehand. So that’s a hashtag, obviously, your updated profile pic as well. Yes,

Pam Aungst 2:09
you put the laser eyes in, that’s like the thing it just, you know, weird things just happen?

David Bain 2:14
How long are you gonna have that profile pic for how long until it reaches? 100k?

Pam Aungst 2:18
I don’t know, I’m gonna have to. I’m watching it closely and are around 50 trying to break back into 50. Now. So

Bot 2:24
we’ll say it’s incredible. It’s incredible. You look back in it just two years ago, when it was maybe for less than $5,000. And nobody’s nearly 50,000

Pam Aungst 2:34
Yes, yes, it’s been a wild ride, it was up and then nobody believed in it at all. And then it flew. And then you know, people lost belief in in and then fell down. And now it’s, this is kind of a really, really important inflection point. Like as to you know, some institutions are starting to adopt it, some Corporation starting to invest in it, some higher net worth individuals starting to invest in added to the retirement portfolios. And it’s, it’s kind of an inflection point as to whether you know, that dabbling is just going to kind of go away, or it’s going to become now I think, fully adopted. And that’s what I hope for.

Bot 3:07
So that was one of today’s site ranks. But the core conversation that we’re gonna have today is about Google’s core web vitals. So what are they all about?

Pam Aungst 3:16
Well, they love to put confusing names to things. Basically, they are metrics that measure user experience. For a long time, Google’s talked about how your page should be optimised not only for keywords and the text content, but for user experience, making sure that it loads fast. And it’s really good on mobile, and that users have a good experience on your website. But they didn’t really have other than speed and mobile friendliness. They didn’t really have any metric any metrics or benchmarks to kind of let yourself to, to judge you by and let yourself measure yourself by as far as how you’re doing with that. So these new core vitals are metrics that measure page experience. So it’s not the experience of the whole website, but it’s single page. It gives it three main benchmarks to hit in order to kind of prove I guess that it’s a good at least has the foundation of a good user experience.

Bot 4:15
So I’m and john saying in the chat dallied, Danny Sullivan said, Don’t expect to see large changes in the SERPs from core web vitals and get your opinion of that just later on, I guess. But the three core parts of it that you mentioned, there are first of all, largest contentful paint, and they love these, these tough phrases to memorise what was that one?

Pam Aungst 4:37
Yeah, largest contentful paint or LCP is basically the biggest thing that needs to be painted or loaded by the browser above the fold. So it’s really about actually the perception of how fast the page loads not necessarily how fast it actually load it but the perception so like a lot of sites have a big like hero image Or slider or banner or something right at the top, if everything have loads around it, and then the bottom of the page that the user can’t even see is loading. And then the last thing that loads is that big hero image that’s going to feel slow to the user. So they want you to take that biggest piece and the largest piece of content and paint or load that I’m very early on in the page loading press yes

Bot 5:24
to 2.5 seconds. So that’s, that’s fairly fast. But are we talking about a standard connection speed? to base that 2.5 seconds off?

Pam Aungst 5:35
Unfortunately, yes. Well, the unfortunate part is what that connection speed is, it is 1.6 megabits per second, which is it’s supposed to represent a large majority of mobile internet users. But it came from back when like, hardly anyone had 3g, they started using that. And now they say that they recognise that most cellular internet users are using Wi Fi or 4g, some 5g now, they still just for whatever reason are sticking by the 1.6 megabits per second connection. So on that super slow internet connection, you’re LCP element needs to load in 2.5 seconds, or less.

Bot 6:17
Okay, so this essentially means that if you’re checking out your website, on your computer in your office, and you’ve got a decent internet connection, your website loads in half a second, then that’s not the stuff that you should be concerned about, you should be concerned about how Google sees your site. And obviously, if they’re using those sorts of speeds, then you have to use a third party testing kit in order to determine how Google sees your site.

Pam Aungst 6:44
Yes, or maybe not third party per se, but first party Google’s own testing tool, which is called PageSpeed Insights. And so an important thing to note about that is that the 1.6 megabit per second thing is how they simulate a mobile phone and a mobile internet connection when evaluating your site with what they call lab data, like basically just they run a test when you run a test. And it tells you what it emulated, while while it was pretending to be a 1.6 megabit per second cellular connection, but the actual algorithm uses field data, which is from the Chrome web browser cookie data that Google can collect a creepy amount of data about people and what they browse for and how long it took them to load a page. So you’ll see on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, a blend of lab data, which is where they pretend to be on a 1.6 megabit per second connection, and field data, which is what users actually experienced. And so it is a bit difficult than agonising to try to hit the lab data benchmarks. It’s a good practice to try to do but ultimately what actually matters. Supposedly, they never give out full details on anything. But supposedly what actually matters is that is that field data, what users actually experience in a Chrome browser on your site.

Bot 8:05
Okay, so obviously, we’re talking about visually what the users see themselves. So I guess that means it’s important to try and limit the number of scripts or non visual code that is included in the initial loading elements of a web page. And are you therefore a fan of knots incorporating tracking scripts and elements like that in the header section of our website?

Pam Aungst 8:36
So that is actually a very good practice. But I agree with the good just went away with the comment that was on the screen a moment ago about how the, although the core web vitals are about Page Speed, there it is, yeah, well, all of this, the core of vitals matters about Page Speed, the focus of those three specific metrics are more on the rendering or display or painting of the page, like really like perception of speed and usability, not just speed, but perception of speed usability, so the third party tracking script, keeping them under control, you can’t avoid them completely in most cases, but keeping them under control, loading them with Google Tag Manager only when needed. Yes, those are all great PageSpeed best practices. But for core web vitals, specifically, we’re talking about the interactivity of the page, like how quickly a user can start interacting with it, which is the second one we didn’t mention yet fid first input delay. So you know, it is annoying. You’re on your phone, you’re trying to use a website, it’s in the process of loading and you’re like power, and the largest contentful paint waiting for stuff to appear. And then the last, the third one is CLS cumulative cube. This is the word that I can never say, cube. You learn to layout shift, which is a fancy way of saying when you’re loading something on your phone and like you go to hit something and then it jumps somewhere. Because something else just loaded above it, that’s what that is referring to. So it’s more about the perception.

Bot 10:05
And that commonly comes, in my experience with adverts being suddenly appearing in the middle of content, you’re starting to read content, and then content shifts down because an ad actually is incorporated. So does that mean that sites with ads in them are actually perhaps going to do worse because of this update

Pam Aungst 10:23
remains to be seen at large? We have a couple new sites that we work with that are struggling to meet these benchmarks at the moment, and we’re working on it and iterative process. In other words, I can never say on the first try. So yes, I mean, it just by nature, the loading of ads in the way the order in which they load and the speed in which they load and the number of different servers they have to reach out to for their not only their content, but their click fraud measures. And, you know, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s challenging, for sure,

Bot 10:55
okay, um, time. So apparently, an ideal measurement is 100 milliseconds of your ideal initial interaction, your ability to interact. So that’s very, very quick.

Pam Aungst 11:07
Yes. But you know, Google’s defence, they are kind of establishing these to represent the modern day mobile web user who does really expect things to be instantaneous, you know, our attention span as humans, and our expectation of instant gratification only grows and grows and grows with each day. And each advance in technology. So it’s tough, but it’s valid. But the good news is another comment came up on the screen before that, this isn’t likely to be like a cut you off at the knees kind of a thing. And that’s what what Danny Sullivan was, was tweeting about, like, just like the mobile update and the speed update, these are, they’re setting the bar high, so that everyone tries to start to you know, climb as high up as they can to get as close to that bar as they can. And at that point, when most people are up there, when most people, I should say sites, when most sites are up at the bar near the bar beyond the bar that that Google setting here, then they might start to incorporate it as a stronger ranking signal. Because at that point, you’re falling behind, then you’re substandard. So so what they did with the mobile in the speed updates is what they’re doing now they’re saying, setting the bar really high. Yes, it’s going to start to count, not as much at first. But as it flips, like it did like with the mobile getting thing in 2015, it kind of flipped from like a small percentage of sites had a mobile version, to eventually I’m not sure how long it took. But at some point, it was like, Okay, now if you don’t have one, now you’re in the minority, and now you’re doing users a disservice. So So I think what Danny was trying to say is the same thing with this, we’re setting the bar high, we’re starting to set the expectation that you’re gonna need to work on this and get there eventually. But it will increase in impact on your rankings over time, it won’t be like, may whatever date they roll it out, you know, then like, boom, you’re not good enough anymore. And you’re going to drop, it’s not going to be like that.

Bot 13:00
So what will this mean, then for landing page strategy, and also, in general strategy to publish content on the web? So I’m thinking for landing pages, that video has been very successful over the last few years. Does this mean that potentially publishers are getting moving towards using static static imagery, with a view to attempting to tune down that, that time it takes to actually load a page?

Pam Aungst 13:29
I hope not. I mean, that would be one way of achieving these benchmarks. Some not necessarily these in particular, but PageSpeed. benchmarks, that would be one way. But I hope. And I think the general intention here is to kind of force designers and developers to design experiences that can be rich, but still load fast. Like right now, it seems to be kind of an either or either you have a rich media experience on your site, and your PageSpeed suffers, or you have a fast site, and you don’t have any rich media experience. I think the goal here is like the idea of kind of forcing the design and development industry to figure out ways to provide rich experiences without a suffrage of page load or, you know, perception of page load.

Bot 14:14
How does a marketer get started with this? I guess the the initial steps are to to look at their current stats to see what kind of metrics that they’re getting for their current site. So where does a marketer See that?

Pam Aungst 14:25
Yes, so that would be Google PageSpeed Insights. So the easiest way to find it is to Google for PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed being one word, insights, the second word, and it’ll be the first thing that comes up, just run your site through that make sure to copy paste your site’s URL into the tool, because you will actually get slightly inaccurate results if you if you type and you like, include the dub dub dub when your site doesn’t actually include that or you type HTTP when it’s actually HBS. Copy paste your URL into PageSpeed Insights and see where you’re at it. Thanks for Even though a lot of this is very complex terminology and metrics and whatnot, but thankfully, they give you a simple, red, yellow, green kind of gauge, like, are you bad, okay, or good. So look at the colours, just start there to get a feel for how you’re doing.

Bot 15:18
And I read his stance, saying something like 15% of websites are good, but most are bad at the moment. So that’s an incredible sense. Yeah, I

Pam Aungst 15:26
mean, in a way, like as difficult as it’s going to be to get our clients to reach these benchmarks. And we’ve been working on this for quite some time already. And we’re still we still have some that are that are struggling, particularly those with ads. I think it’s a good thing in the long run, because I can’t tell you like how many times a day I’m annoyed by looking something up on my phone. And while it’s loading, I go to click on something, but then it jumps in it disappears. And I click on something else by accident because of that cumulative shift.

Bot 15:52
Definitely. annoying, annoying. So if well, first of all, in terms of the URL that you’re talking about there, can this be done to every page individually on a website? Or is it just domain focused? The report?

Pam Aungst 16:05
Yeah, great question. So core web vitals are referred to or actually this update, where core web vitals are going to be incorporated in the algorithm is being referred to as the page experience update. So it is, you know, as the name implies, a page by page thing, not necessarily a site wide thing. But I do encourage everyone to start with your homepage, because with most sites, not all, but most sites, the homepage gets the lion’s share of the traffic and the rankings in search engines. So it’s important to measure each, maybe not each page, each type of page on your site to make sure that it’s designed well for core web vitals, you know, homepage, a static page, a blog, post, etc. but start with the home page, because that’s probably going to be the most impactful four

Bot 16:50
out of a marketer runs their site, their page, through through this and everything’s terrible. Everything’s red, where tends to be the the top few places to actually prioritise what needs to be fixed.

Pam Aungst 17:01
That’s not an easy question to answer. It’s very case by case basis, because that’s cool. It takes into account all of the PageSpeed benchmarks, which are kind of similar, but separate, you can kind of envision it like a Venn diagram, there’s all the PageSpeed stuff. And then there’s the core web vital stuff, which is the perception and user perception of how fast it’s loading and the user experience of it. And then there’s some crossover between that. But this tool is going to show you all everything that’s wrong with all of it. But thankfully, too, it does tell you the level of impact that it believes it’s having. So each piece, you know, like you mentioned, external scripts, although that’s not part of the core, read vitals that will be on the report, if you run a PageSpeed Insights report, and it will tell you how many milliseconds or seconds, it believes that issue for you is, you know, adding to your page load time. And then if you click on that, and expand it, it will even tell you exactly which scripts it believes are problematic. And a lot of times you can’t do anything about it. But it’s really just a process of starting from the top down with the most impactful things, digging into the detail of them and finding ones you can do something about

Bot 18:09
okay. And I’m sure I’m sure that Danny Sullivan said don’t expect to see large changes in the syrup. So I mentioned that at the beginning. Is this something that you’ve concerns about that? Come me some of your clients or some websites out there are going to see significant drops in organic traffic because of this?

Pam Aungst 18:26
No, I don’t think so. Like I was saying I think that they’re just starting by setting the bar high, and starting to kind of nudge you into having to pay attention to it by making it count a little bit. And I but I do believe it will grow in importance, like he said, more and more over time. So as as it like right now, like you said before, you know, large percentage of websites have a very poor user experience when when stacked up to these core web vital benchmarks. But at some point, when people are going to start working on them, be aware of them now and aim to hit them or exceed them. Then when it gets to the point where those that haven’t worked on it or left behind and those are, you know, the minority compared to the others, then I think it’ll grow in importance. So short answer, no, I don’t think it’s something you have to worry about just like your traffic just May or June, if you don’t do it. But it is important to start working on it especially because it’s so complex, it’s going to take a while to figure it out on each and every site because every site is different.

Bot 19:22
And Ashraf is saying in the chat image optimization is usually the biggest issue. But thankfully the easiest fix in terms of images, what I tend to do is have most images being JPEGs saved at roughly 80 quality and interlace so that the load gradually is is that a great way to do it? Are there better ways to do it than that

Pam Aungst 19:42
there’s a lot of different ways to make sure that your images are not too large, either in dimensions like like, you don’t want to put a 4000 by 4000 pixel image into a 40 by 40 pixel square or wait, you know, the the kilobytes or the megabytes of the image and that is a very common common issue. But I’m glad this came up because although the image optimization is usually on the pure PageSpeed side of things, as far as load time and not necessarily core web vitals, I am seeing it in some cases called, I am seeing the resolution, one of the resolutions to image optimization, which is lazy loading, cause Korba vitals issues. So there’s some plugins like if you have a WordPress site, you can get a lazy loading plugin. And what that means is it loads it, obviously, you should make your images as light weight as possible. But you also want to make sure you’re not the browser’s not waiting to load the images that are out of sight of the user prior to the ones you know, that are visible by the user above the fold. so lazy loading plugins are a great solution to help make sure that your image optimization scores are good. But I’ve seen it where like some of the plugins, they apply the lazy loading thing in a certain way where it’s actually like taking like the image, the logo at the top, for example, or any image at the, at the very top, and lazy loading it when it shouldn’t be and that’s causing the, you know, corporate vitals to be bad. So it’s, yeah, it’s it’s all very complicated. Image optimization is a huge part of it for a lot of sites. But it’s never easy.

Bot 21:13
Yeah, here we go. great tips there. But let’s segue into part two, part two of our discussion. So it’s no time for Pam’s thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so Pam share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tool is important for you.

Pam Aungst 21:30
Okay, so I think my favourite would be and I said this for a little while now, but it still remains my favourite kw finder.com. So it’s a keyword research tool. It’s just got everything really well, almost everything I’ve ever wanted in a keyword research tool. But I also being the, the nerd that I am that looks deep into how metrics are evaluated and calculated, I believe it to be one of the more accurate sources of keyword data, meaning like search volume and competition, they use numbers straight from the source from Google. But they also then layer on top of that third party cookie data. Because Google only gives out like Google keeps chunking their data into more broader chunks, making it less detailed, until I love the detail that that process gives out. And a lot of other tools do that too, as far as the accuracy of the data, but then I find that they lack user experience, things like being able to easily build lists and export them and import lists and so on. And so, kW finder comm would be my favourite of the moment,

Bot 22:31
great. Well, a lot of marketers just love to find something new and different. But sometimes the old software that’s worked for a long time is the best one just to stick to

Pam Aungst 22:40
Yeah, it

hasn’t been too too long, you know, maybe a year and a half for, I guess, maybe the I don’t know, it’s, it’s newer to most people as far as being aware that it exists.

Bot 22:52
Okay, well, moving on, from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use. So NEXT ON THE LIST, what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon?

Pam Aungst 23:02
I want to say like, more social that I don’t know if it counts as like a martec tool, but like more social advertising platforms that are obviously here to stay that I haven’t experimented with yet, like Snapchat, and Tiktok. You know, I’ve signed up for their ad platforms poked around a little bit, but I’ve never really given it an honest try, as of yet. So

Bot 23:24
so you’re talking about trying it from your do that from an ad perspective, rather than actually a social organic perspective? Well, so

Pam Aungst 23:30
in the class that I’m teaching about digital marketing, analytics, social media analytics is a strong focus in there. And so basically, we kind of in that sense that we’re looking at using the analytics interfaces in those as tools to evaluate how the advertising is going. So I guess that’s why it came to mind for me as a tool. Yes, it’s an advertising tactic. But I guess I want to get more familiar with how those analytics platforms that reporting in their how their reporting tools, work, and can give you insights on how to make ads on those platforms better.

Bot 24:07
I’ve been saying in the chat that I should usually get into the 70s with my JPEGs, anywhere from 72 to 78%. I’m not optimising my JPEGs enough. Okay. Oh, I have to give that a go.

Pam Aungst 24:16
Now, well, new. They have the new formats, too. They want you to deliver not in JPEG, but in web P. Yeah. dot web. p. But do you also need to have JPEG as a fallback if someone comes with a browser that doesn’t support web P and none of it is easy? That’s

Bot 24:31
That’s right. I’m still using Macromedia fireworks to create images as a piece of software. Long time ago. I didn’t No, no, that still doesn’t still exists. It still exists on my computer. It still works. So I know.

Pam Aungst 24:47
It exists only on your computer. Okay.

David Bain 24:50
You remember

Pam Aungst 24:53
Yes, I know. I’m dating myself.

David Bain 24:54
I’m sure you’re a Dreamweaver user as well. Not at the moment but in the past. Yes,

Pam Aungst 24:58
I was not anymore. No, no, no. I was just about that like that like word association thing. Like it just came into my head when you said fireworks. I was like Dreamweaver.

David Bain 25:06
Yeah. Just Dreamweaver ultra as well. That’s the fancy version of that. There we go.

Pam Aungst 25:11
Yeah, I never got there. Just Dreamweaver geo cities, you know?

David Bain 25:16
Yeah,

Pam Aungst 25:17
it was another like Microsoft one that I don’t remember

Bot 25:20
those front page. Is that what you’re talking about?

Pam Aungst 25:22
Oh, yes, yes. That’s what it was.

Bot 25:25
Okay. Moving away from this historical conversation on to this or that Raul. So this is the quick response. Right? And 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Pam Aungst 25:43
Oh, both. Okay. Both is an answer allowed once. Yes. That’s the one. Yeah. All right. All right. Now I’m ready.

David Bain 25:50
tik tok or Twitter.

Pam Aungst 25:55
Twitter,

David Bain 25:56
he always tried to use your both Facebook

Pam Aungst 26:02
depends on what it’s for. Personally, Facebook for business, LinkedIn, is that my both answer?

Bot 26:09
Will see YouTube or podcast.

Pam Aungst 26:14
Personally podcast,

Bot 26:16
this is a real struggle for us.

Pam Aungst 26:19
It is because I see the value in everything. Okay, keep traffic or

David Bain 26:22
leads?

Pam Aungst 26:24
leads, of course,

David Bain 26:25
paid search or SEO?

Pam Aungst 26:29
It depends.

Can I make that my official both answer?

Bot 26:34
If you want. Yeah. Because you didn’t use the word

Pam Aungst 26:37
gun to my head. If I have to choose SEO, ads or

David Bain 26:39
influencers?

Pam Aungst 26:42
ads,

David Bain 26:43
Google ads or Facebook ads?

Pam Aungst 26:46
Google ads,

David Bain 26:46
email or chat?

Pam Aungst 26:50
I’m sorry, email or chat? chat email. I don’t know that I understood the let’s say so like a messenger.

David Bain 26:58
Yes, exactly. Yeah, sorry.

Pam Aungst 27:00
I’m defeating the purpose of lightning round by asking for clarification.

David Bain 27:04
What was the answer, sorry. Email, email,

Pam Aungst 27:07
go with email,

Bot 27:09
Mar tech stack or all in one platform.

Pam Aungst 27:15
That’s also a tough one Mar tech stack

David Bain 27:18
one to one or scale.

Pam Aungst 27:23
Scale.

Bot 27:27
unfortunate that I make my ticking go round and round in circles. So it doesn’t matter that the track is only a minute longer. So it circles just in case anyone takes too long. So I think get certainly needed it then

Unknown Speaker 27:39
it certainly adds to the anxiety that tick, tick, tick, tick tick.

Bot 27:42
Well, it was it was a bit of fun that I’m not sure which answer to probe into more. I tell you, I expected paid search and SEO just to be specifically SEO, because I associate you as being primarily SEO, would you not describe yourself as that now? Or is it just that you see value in both?

Pam Aungst 28:01
I would that’s what I got into my head. I’ll say SEO cuz I would say that I primarily specialise in that work in that I promote that. But it there are use cases where paid search is the way to go. Or at least if not temporarily, like a brand new site. It’s gonna take forever, an annoyingly long time to get the SEO going. So paid search does definitely have value there. Or if the company doesn’t have the resources, or the time or patience to to spend on getting SEO, working paid search, depending upon the cost per click in their world can make a tonne of sense. So there was a tough one.

Bot 28:37
It was a tough one. But it was a good answer. So I’ll let you off.

Pam Aungst 28:41
Okay.

Bot 28:43
Moving on to the $10,000 question. If I was to give you $10,000 you had to spend over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business? What would you spend it on? And how would you measure success?

Pam Aungst 28:54
That’s an easy one, I would redo my website. And I would measure success based upon how many leads not necessarily traffic, but how many good leads I got from the redesigned version.

Bot 29:06
Okay, and where would the majority of those leads come from what source of traffic?

Pam Aungst 29:12
Ideally, Seo? Yeah, that’s what we have the most of now and I’d like to retain that. But I don’t think that kind of similar to what we were talking about with core web vitals like you know, PageSpeed how fast it loads isn’t necessarily the only thing to focus on is how people perceive it. And so I think I have a similar issue with my website and that’s so old at this point. That you know, even though we get a lot of traffic, I don’t think it gives across the right perception of us and who we are what we do what we specialise in.

Bot 29:41
So is it primarily PageSpeed? Or are there issues with with mobile design as well?

Pam Aungst 29:47
I think it’s actually more of a messaging thing and also also a design thing and make it kind of look more modern. It’s It’s too many years old, and I want to admit how many years old at this point that designed it is mobile friendly. But it’s just like users expect to see a different type of design these days. And we look like behind in that sentence. And then I just don’t think it effectively gets the message across of I mean, maybe it does for what we do and what we specialise in, but not like the real true value and benefit that the clients get out. But

Bot 30:17
it’s amazing how quickly and easy it is actually to get a new, incredible website design up there nowadays. I would assume you’d use WordPress to do that.

Pam Aungst 30:26
Yes, absolutely. And I would use some of the new really streamlined methods of building sites in WordPress, which have to do with page builders. Yeah, so I really like Elementor page builder, and Astra has a theme. And Astra has pre built sites that you can import like a basically done already website and then just tweak it for your needs in a very short amount of time.

Bot 30:49
I’m glad you said Elementor it because I’m looking into doing that at the moment because I haven’t rebuilt the Digital Marketing Radio website yet. So at the moment, it’s a couple of years old, it doesn’t even have the podcast on there. So that’s what I’m gonna be doing. I was going to be using Elementor. So certainly look into Astra as a theme, is that something that’s made by Elementor as well? Or is it a third party company that doesn’t

Pam Aungst 31:10
know those are two different companies. Astra is a theme provider. And Elementor is a page builder provider. And I know this gets really confusing. So if you think of the theme, as kind of like the window frame, and element or being the glass, you know, the page builder being the glass in the middle, so Astra, basically on these these combo sites, it controls the header and the footer, maybe a sidebar, too. But then the the meat of the page inside of the page, the inside of the window frame is built with Elementor. Now Elementor is coming out of the scene builder has come out I guess I haven’t used it yet. So maybe you could add that to me.

Yeah, I think I try.

Bot 31:51
I think they’ve come up with a theme builder. I know the free version of Elementor. You can just amend the core elements of a web page and not the header and footer at all. But I think the pro version of Elementor you can edit the whole thing and they’ve got their own theme as well. So that’s what I was intending on using but I’m not sure if a third party team is better yet. So

Pam Aungst 32:09
the only thing keeping me from jumping ship over to that at this point is the the whole pre built sites thing like the Astra pre built sites that use Elementor that use the combination of Elementor and Astra are just so quick and easy that it’s like a bundle includes the theme, the page builder and all the plugins that you’ll need sample content, sample imagery, it’s just too quick and easy for me to try to learn something else right now.

Bot 32:34
Yeah, it’s a nice starting off with a design. You don’t have to use the whole design but at least you’ve got that template to begin with that piece of artists rates that you can adapt and make your own Right,

Pam Aungst 32:45
right. Right, exactly. It’s actually allowed us to start building WordPress websites for clients, let’s simple small templated ones. We never claimed to be specialists in graphic design. If you want a custom award winning graphic designer for your website that is not us I can recommend several great ones but that is not us. But for clients that have needed a quick like you know they’re launching a new product or whatever they need a quick and easy simple, inexpensive but really nice looking website we’ve we’ve been able to not being graphic designers, we’ve been able to build sites that look great for clients using that.

Bot 33:18
Absolutely. Well to finish off let’s focus on someone else who deserves it. So that is MAGICAL MARKETER who’s an up-and coming marketer that you would love to give a shout out to and what can we learn from them? Where can we find them?

Pam Aungst 33:31
So I want to give a shout out to Carrie Barrett ke r r YBA r r e TT I think it’s chores and duties. I’m sorry Carrie. She is has recently started her own consultancy where she consults on video presence and you know, video marketing but like from from us such more nuanced perspective. So her background is that she’s actually an Emmy Award winning TV news anchor in the past she was on you know, like the news morning shows and a variety of different news programmes she was an anchor on. And so she she really is an expert in like the little things like I’ve been trying to like, Look at the camera more. And when I’m listening to you while you’re talking like, like at least, like don’t have RBF like, at least attempt to look like I’m smiling a little bit. So RPF

David Bain 34:23
RPF is

Pam Aungst 34:26
an expletive in the middle

face. I bleeped my resting bleep face. But she’s great tips like that, like those little things make a big difference in this new world where we have to present ourselves primarily if not only, virtually, and I thought I was pretty good at the kind of stuff until I started listening to her tips and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I have a long way to go. refinements I can do here so I really valued her tips during this time

Bot 34:56
everyone does. You can improve all the time and I’ll certainly check rate as well because Some, it’s important to just keep on improving. Even if you’re just using a webcam, you’ve got the webcam on top top of your computer, do things like minimise the window of whatever video application you’re using. Have it just underneath the webcam. So even if you’re looking at someone, it looks as if you’re, you’re roughly looking at the webcam area, you’re not looking off to the side when you’re talking to someone.

Pam Aungst 35:18
Yep, yep. Yeah, yeah, I should have put you over here. And over here. Yeah, I keep looking down there. And also, like my little things that make you look like not totally professional, like, my background is actually, like, not straight right now. And that’s something Carrie and I are working on some course videos together. And her person pointed that out to me, I was like, oh, man, that’s right. And that’s

Bot 35:41
something that the podcast listener doesn’t really give two hoots about because they’re listening to an audio form only obviously. Well, so when you’re on a webinar recording for a podcast is it’s hard sometimes to use language that ensures it’s relevant for the audio listener as well as the viewer that this live at the time.

Pam Aungst 35:58
Yes, yes, definitely. So So her services focus on consulting, I guess entirely for video. But the all those small things on video really add up the eye contact, the facial expression, the posture, the lines in the background not being straight. You know, I just really value those those tips because I think it makes a huge difference. And she really knows what she’s doing.

Bot 36:22
I’m just I’m for the podcast listener, I’m just putting up messages on the screen written by people watching live that are intended to pan off, time off, that’s what I’m doing. Anyway, you have been listening to Pam onx, from Pam and marketing.com, who On today’s episode of Digital Marketing, Radio shared a whole lot of value. And the first part we’re obviously talking about Google’s updates and what they were doing and Pam was sharing a lot of wonderful advice, including lazy loading of images and, and some other 70 other page speed tips as part of that as well. Your SECRET SOFTWARE was kW Finder. And of course, your MAGICAL MARKETER was Carrie Barrett as well and I will make sure that we have links to all your software recommendations and your MAGICAL MARKETER in the show notes which will be on Digital Marketing Radio when the website actually relaunches, and of course in the show description on YouTube, as well, so that will be live within the next day or so on YouTube. Pam, what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi?

Pam Aungst 37:28
I’m really any of them. I’m going to be non committal my answer like in the lightning.

I can’t choose a single one on one.

David Bain 37:36
What social network you like?

Pam Aungst 37:38
It depends. That’s always my answer. Everyone loves that. Not that you are you I shouldn’t say that actually Twitter.

Tick Tock.

I’m not on as a business just yet. But as a person I am

Bot 37:53
just search for amongst your SEO, you appear in different places. So wherever it takes your fancy follower. Thanks so much for coming on again. today. I’ve been your host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at casting credit.com if you want to watch the next episode live subscribe on the Digital Marketing Radio YouTube channel. And if you’ve already listened to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, amazon music, wherever you’re you’re consuming the content, tell a friend. It’s good to share. Until we meet again stay hungry. Stay Foolish. stay subscribed, Aloha.

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