Online! EP21 The Digital Marketing, SEO & Website Optimization Special

Note: This transcript was auto-generated

Announcer: 0:00
Online with Amr the internet guy stream it today on your favorite podcast platforms. This podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology, getting a headache, pulling their hairs out or buying expensive software.

Amr The Internet Guy: 0:18
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode number 21 of online. First of all, I would like to apologize for taking so long with this episode, it’s been almost a month since the last one, and I’m supposed to be doing one every two weeks. So I really apologize for the two extra weeks of delay. It has been very crazy around here with work and many other things in the business. And I wanted to have the time to do a proper video editing so that this episode is awesome for you. Hopefully that won’t happen again. And I’m getting a little bit more help with my business now. So I have more time to do my podcast and focus on marketing, which is exactly what we are going to be talking about today. If you remember in Episode 20, with Eric dangler, we were discussing marketing in general. And I told you that part two is going to be digital marketing or online marketing. So here is your online marketing special. Today we’re going to go over SEO, we’re going to go over website optimization and website speed optimization. And why Google is tying your SEO ranking with the speed of loading or the page loading speed of your website. And what you can do in order to make your website go faster. The system of this episode has been flipped. So I’m not the interviewer anymore. Eric is going to be the interviewer. And I’m going to be the one answering the questions. So let’s get in with this digital marketing special. Hey, guys, welcome to part two of marketing today. And we’re going to be focusing on the online part of marketing. And we’re gonna, this is gonna be a little bit technical, but we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for the non techies out there. But we’re mostly going to be looking at things like SEO, website optimization, speed optimization, maybe even talk a little bit about ads and stuff like that. So anything that has to do with marketing online, and specifically anything that has to do with your website, and for this specific part. I want Mr. Eric dangler to be the interviewer. And I’ll be answering questions and I’ll get them all wrong. There you go.

Unknown: 2:59
There you go.

Eric Dingler: 3:00
I won’t know, just just to be I won’t know that your answers are wrong. I’ll just go Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.

Amr The Internet Guy: 3:08
So yeah, let me just get gt metrics on. Since you mentioned it, I just want to be looking at a page or a test on gt metrics. So okay, well, let

Eric Dingler: 3:19
me let me start out with this. For those that don’t know, what is some of you might be just heard.

Amr The Internet Guy: 3:24
Yeah. What the hell is gt metrics? So let’s not Okay, forget, forget that. I mentioned it now. We’ll come back to it later. Okay. Let’s, we need to reverse. Yeah,

Eric Dingler: 3:34
yeah. I think maybe we should assume that people are listening. And they know nothing.

Amr The Internet Guy: 3:40
Yeah, about that specific, like, the technical part of it. Yeah.

Eric Dingler: 3:45
Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. Okay, cool. So Well, let me let me ask you this, just to add it out of the gate we started out with you know, you hear a lot of a lot of people when talking about their website and as it comes to SEO and you know, pleasing the the mister missus, Dr. google.com. Dr. Google? Yes. So let me ask you from your on your opinion, when we go to attack, online marketing from the perspective of the website, and optimizing the website and all that, what is the What’s our end goal? Let’s start with the end in mind, and then we can talk about getting there. So what’s kind of your end goal with website? So

Amr The Internet Guy: 4:32
every business owner, including myself, wants more clients that does, that’s the reality. So the end goal is that you want more clients. The part that we are different in thinking about is how to get those clients. And in our previous episode, or part one of this conversation, when we mentioned marketing, there was something you said that clicked with me and I hope that people are gonna take notice I’m going to repeat it again, is who’s your ideal client? Because people when they go online, they suddenly want to market to the whole world, they want to market to this globe. And this means unless you’re willing to spend millions, it’s not going to work. So first, you need to decide, who are you marketing to? Who are you sending your messages to? Who do you want to come to your website? As simple as that? Think about it. So, and it’s sometimes it’s hard. Let me tell you like for us, web designers, we can build a website for everybody. Right? So it’s not necessarily lawyers, or carpenters, or doctors or dentists or what does the sky’s the limit? flooring companies? Right. So who do I target is like, except they’re very hard?

Eric Dingler: 5:48
Well, there is one criteria I’ve learned. Because I was I was, I used to think the exact same thing. But honestly, for me now, I, I’m not going to build a website for somebody that’s not going to pay for it.

Amr The Internet Guy: 6:01
Yeah. So that, yeah. So exclude this from your idea.

Eric Dingler: 6:04
Right? Exactly. Like you need to be willing to spend, you know, at minimum $3,000 to start working with get

Amr The Internet Guy: 6:11
a proper website is not yet working with us to have a proper website. Yeah,

Eric Dingler: 6:16
yeah, and get to get to do it right. To invest in your business. That’s just what we found. It takes at the minimum. So So

Amr The Internet Guy: 6:25
since we’re discussing websites, let’s let’s dissect it and put it out in the open. Okay, guys, there’s so much, you know, hype about things that go on a website or things that are related to the website. But there’s also so much that goes behind the scenes that people don’t know about. The reason for this is that you have platform based page builders, and I’m an old school have been building websites from 2000, or even 1999. And let’s go with 1999. It just sounds Yeah. Older. Yeah. 1999. From the last century of

Eric Dingler: 7:04
the 1900s, you were building websites in the 1900s.

Amr The Internet Guy: 7:09
Yes. And it started with HTML coding. I mean, at the time, there was JavaScript, there was HTML. And I think CSS wasn’t even there. I can’t remember, when I heard the word CSS for the first time, it must have been 2001, or 2002. I can’t really remember. But anyway, what happened back then, Microsoft had its own office, you know, Microsoft Office suite with Word and Excel and PowerPoint, and whatever. And at some point, they’ve decided they want to include a web builder. So they had something called front page. Oh, man, this was dooms for our industry, because now, every Joe they can, Harry can build a website, using front page. And it was as easy as actually typing in Microsoft Word document. The problem is, none of them studied anything about web or web design, or hosting, or where the website will live, or how to fix it when it breaks, or how not to make your image so heavy, so that it loads instead of, you know, the site itself, not loading and all the technicalities around building a website, but people over simplified it into a page that looks good. And then, over the years, Microsoft has actually removed this. I don’t know why they did. But they were no longer doing front page. It was no longer supported. And I mean, it wasn’t bad. If you’re starting out if you just wanted like an HTML page without having to learn HTML. It was for you. It was good, because it’s easy. And the problem was that it had to add, like when you do a page or a site in in front page, Microsoft front page with ADD its own coding in it. And at the time, Chrome wasn’t the browser of choice or wasn’t the strongest browser. Internet Explorer was mostly dominant. And then we had Netscape. And they were kind of like 5050. But there were some, some browser wars. So the code that comes from Microsoft, Netscape would not interpret it, your site would look different. And you got to go back in time, we’re talking about 2002 2003. There’s no mobile. So there’s no smartphone at the time, right. So there was no responsive and no mobile. It was just websites had to be browser compatible. And we had an edge, like when you knew what you’re doing and how to build it, right? You had an edge, because whatever you build will work regardless of what screen size the user have, and what browser or operating system. It would work on all websites. Were By the cheapy ones who would normally be using front page would not work with only work with Internet Explorer. Fast forward to 2021 now, and we’re in a similar situation with Wix, Squarespace weebly. All those like platform based page builders. They’re exactly they work exactly in the same way. You build things on it, they have their own coding, they have their own system of getting things done. And you cannot move outside their system. They’re way better, of course, then front page that they’re easier to use. They’re so versatile. So generally speaking, I’m not against them. I’m just about educating the people about what to expect. So because for many entrepreneurs, they get there. And they oversimplify it. Because they’re only thinking about what meets the eye. It’s a page that looks good. I can put my image up or I can build my

Eric Dingler: 11:01
Yeah, it’s a page they think looks good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s and I’ve ran into a lot of clients with

Amr The Internet Guy: 11:08
and their family or their close friends. Have you ever had anyone tell you that your website looks like somebody close to you? Not not in the industry, I’m not talking about us being web designers. I’m talking about the average business owner. Once they get their website, whether they did it themselves, or they hire someone to do it doesn’t matter. If you go to your wife, and ask her, Hey, honey, I’ve got my website for my business launch when she wants to support you. She’s not gonna tell you it looks bad. So everyone is gonna tell you Yeah. And not

Eric Dingler: 11:42
only that they know your abilities. And for your abilities. They’re gonna go wow.

Amr The Internet Guy: 11:46
Yeah.

Eric Dingler: 11:48
Wow. That’s really that’s really

Amr The Internet Guy: 11:50
good. But since you’ve mentioned a number, you said, What did you say? $3,000? Right. That’s for us. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So let me tell people, what’s there because number one, nobody knows. Like, if the average business owner doesn’t know much about domains and hosting, they don’t know how to configure the hosting. So those thing is where your site lives. And the server, that server where your site is living, has to be configured in a certain way in order for your site to perform properly. Right, it could be slow, you could have problems it could stop working. There’s there’s so much that goes into that configuration. And what I’m not saying it takes a zillion hours, but it needs to be configured. Number two, which is very important, when you work with a business owner building their website, they’re just going to give you a folder full of images, right? These images are not optimized for web, these images, most of them are taken on a mobile phone or a digital camera. And their size is huge. It’s humongous. If you just take the image as it is put it on a website, it will simply load in about 30 seconds or more, which means no one will see anything. Like it will still look great as per as per the business owners perception, right. But people won’t be able to see that greatness. Because the site is too slow, they get bored, they go somewhere else. So the web developer or the web designer, the person you’re working with the professional you’re working with, will have to resize every image to optimize it for a web so that the image loads fast and doesn’t make your website slow. This is something that goes behind the scene. It’s not something you see, what you see is the image on the website, what you didn’t see is, what’s the size of the image, how fast it loads that you don’t know about and you didn’t see. Okay? Furthermore, mobile phones, screen sizes are too small. Every Joe, Dick and Harry, we just put one image for every device, whatever the device is. And then what happens when the page is loading. And this you see this is my segue into the website optimization as well, when the page is loading the browser size. So I as a user, I’m a visitor to your website. So I go to www in transit studios.com. Okay, if I do it from my computer, PC, Mac, whatever, what happens, your web server, your website as well how it’s built, is going to detect what is my browser was the version of my browser, what’s my screen size, and it knows what it is and then it will, it will have to serve me the images and the contents and the components of your website in a way that actually suits the screen and the browser that I’m using. Okay, that’s also providing that the website is built responsive because the older If your website has been built 10 years ago, and you haven’t changed it changed, chances are that you don’t have this automatic resize. Now, if I access it from my mobile phone, my screen size is six, six inches. Right. So it has to resize the images and every component on your page to my six inch screen. Now Guess what, in order for all this to happen, the detection and the resizing, it will take some time. Right, it could be a couple of seconds, it could be a second, it could be less than a second, depending on how fast is your server and lots of other, you know, things. But at the end of the day, you’re actually telling the browser, hey, you see the picture as is and you resize it, to give it to the user in a size that fits the screen. Now, a professional web guy or girl would know that, and they would have two separate images. I mean, it looks the same is the same image but two separate sizes of the same image, one for PCs, or one for screen sizes that are higher than six inch and go all the way up, and 146 inches or lower. So this way, we’re removing one step from the process to make it faster. So we’re saving some time. by loading mobile images into our site, already mobile optimized, we’re not going to rely on the browser to do that thing for us. So this is another thing that happens behind the scene. Now dealing with themes and plugins, and and stuff like that. Right. So what’s the best theme? And why do we think is the best theme, right? There’s no, to be honest, there’s no best or worst, it always depends on what the goals are, what we’re doing, and how easy we wanted to be for the business owner when they take the keys to the new website, to be able to manage their excuse me, their content. And optimizing plugins, some people for every little thing, they go and load up a new plugin. And of course, the more plugins you have, the more code that these plugins will add to your website, the slower it will be, because you’re giving it so much more code to deal with. So every time I want to go to your page, it has to load all the components, including that code. So this is the thing. So that’s the difference between a $3,000 website, and a $500. website and a $10,000. website. It depends. What’s the structure. And I always tell people my analogy is like this building a website is like building a house. First, you got to deal with the foundation, these being your hosting. Second thing you got to deal with your framework, these being WordPress, or whatever technology you want to use if you want to use Wix or Squarespace or, or whatever you want to use. So that’s your framework. And then at the end, is your interior decoration. So foundation first framework decoration. Now with the framework, for example, we say WordPress is our framework. Anything that works with WordPress is part of the framework. So your theme, your plugins, how they work, your code, your JavaScript, your CSS code, all this is part of your framework. And then at the end, you have text and images, and colors and font sizes and fonts and different fonts and, and the, you know, the Full Monty. And that’s the idea. So a $3,000 website and a $10,000 website. And you know, I’m not going to put a number or a label, but like a website that’s done by a professional who knows what they’re doing. They’re dealing with all the three parts of it. They’re dealing with your foundation, they’re dealing with your framework, they’re dealing with your interior decoration. The $500 website is interior decoration only, and your house will be leaking underneath and you won’t see it.

Eric Dingler: 18:58
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And how I how I say explain it to people is, um, so sometimes a cookie cutter is all you need, you know, for my kids birthday parties. We just need a cookie cutter because all we need is some simple cookies. For our wedding. My wife wasn’t about to settle for something that came from a cookie cutter. You know, she wanted the cake. She wanted a baker like, you know, sometimes you need the baker, sometimes you need a cookie cutter and grandmas, you know, and that that’s okay, because I’ll say this, we don’t publicize this on our website. But we do have a product we call websites Made Simple. And it It starts at $500 goes up to 2000. But you pick a template. We have, we have over 200 templates, you pick a template, we will change the words, the pictures and the colors. But that’s it you There are three blurbs,

Amr The Internet Guy: 20:01
you know, three by three blurbs?

Eric Dingler: 20:03
Yeah, you have to have three boxes, right? You can’t say, Well, can I get a fourth? Now? That’s a custom website. Can I get to now this is a cutter. Now we don’t publicize that. What we do is if somebody comes to us, we’ll price them a custom website, because we feel that’s going to be what’s best for you. Because not only are we doing all those things you’ve mentioned, we’re also helping you crack the words 90% of the time when somebody comes to us that with a redesign their website, they have way too many words on their website. Nobody’s reading that much junk. Like and nobody cares about how old your businesses and when it was found. And yeah, nobody cares about your dog. I did that. Yeah. And you know what people care about themselves. And they’re looking for, you know, like, nobody has gone to the hardware store to buy a drill. Because they needed drill.

Amr The Internet Guy: 20:58
Yeah, they did the hole in the wall. Exactly. They

Eric Dingler: 21:01
needed a hole. They’re buying a hole that that drill, create. Exactly. So it’s the same thing with with websites, nobody’s coming to your website. At first, to learn your whole backstory. Now there’s a place for that, but not on your homepage. So you need somebody that can come and say, for every one time you mentioned yourself on your homepage, you need to talk about your customer five times. Because they’re looking for their ratio. Yeah, they’re looking for a solution to their problem. They’re not looking at you because you’re great. You know, they want to know, can you solve their problem first. And so you need to express that a lot of people use really clever, like, they’ll come up with some clever tagline. And I’ll and I’ll just tell them, I can’t tell by the tagline what you’re, you know, making lives better.

Amr The Internet Guy: 21:55
Are you at Howard? Well,

Eric Dingler: 21:57
yeah. Are you a church? Are you a chiropractor? You could be are you an investment person? like,

Amr The Internet Guy: 22:03
Okay, give me an idea, but I’m not gonna say it on air. So

Eric Dingler: 22:08
you need to you need somebody that come can come alongside and help you craft the words, and all the technical stuff, because nobody’s ever bought from a website because it looked good. Or loaded fast. The words on the website sold them. But people have left your website, because it looked bad or it loaded slow.

Amr The Internet Guy: 22:30
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So let’s say that again, it is see that one more time. Okay, I’ll

Eric Dingler: 22:36
try. Nobody’s ever bought. I don’t even remember people go

Amr The Internet Guy: 22:41
by. Okay, so people buy from your website because of words on it. Right? Not because the website looked great. Or it loaded fast. But people who didn’t buy from, or people who left your website, is because it didn’t load on time, or it didn’t look great. Or,

Eric Dingler: 23:00
yeah, they audit and they’re like, these people know what they’re doing. I’m not even gonna read their words. So it’s, it’s, uh, I struggle with this, because some people like, you know, content is king, and stuff like that, you know? And the design is second. And I’m like, I don’t know, I think, why do we have to choose one or the design? Yeah,

Amr The Internet Guy: 23:18
the designing both be? Exactly the design makes the content shine like it’s up. Okay, it’s almost every single project that I get, the amount of text that the client gives me is too much to fit on a page. And sometimes when I read it does make sense because they’re explaining what they do in a good way. But it’s just doesn’t belong all in one page, or on one page, or on or in one section or whatever like it. So I have to play around with a lot of mix and match and try different sorts of modules. Do I put it in a blurb? Do I put it in the box? Do I frame it? Do I have a little bit of a background to make some text shine? Do? Do I have any? Do I add an image here, even if the client didn’t have an image here or whatever? It’s almost like, you know, like, we always say, I’m not a copywriter. I’m not gonna touch your content. But that’s a lie. I always thought Sure. Okay, I’m not gonna write it for you. But I’m gonna kind of like, but I’ll coach you on, repurpose it. Yeah, to a way that I think will work better for you on and be after launch. Also, you know, if you’re on a maintenance plan, and we still have this relationship, and we’re working together, we were gonna keep making those tweaks.

Eric Dingler: 24:39
Right, right. I’m just looking for an example here. I’m working with a client and they sent me something their website. Oh, their website, they kept talking three PL three PL three and I went, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And it’s third party logistics. Okay, well, that’s what we got to say. Yeah. You know, how many times people use acronyms on their website? We they talk about? Yeah. Anyway,

Amr The Internet Guy: 25:07
web designers do this to web designers and digital marketers. Yeah. I mean, we always assume that our client knows what SEO PPC. Exactly. And I know that everybody should know what SEO is, but you shouldn’t assume that they know. Right? And it’s not just the acronym like, okay, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, what the hell is search engine optimization, if, if I’m having a website for the first time, or if I like COVID, for example, COVID has pushed many business owners online. Some of them are coming online for the first time. Some of them may not have had a website may not have been on social media before, or may have been on social media only for personal reasons, but they’ve never done anything business related on social media. So if you hammer them with all those details on the facebook pixel, and whatever, they’re just you lose them. Like they don’t know what you’re talking about.

Eric Dingler: 26:02
Yeah, no, it’s it’s and that and a good a good web designer will help you navigate all that. And then on top of all that, you’ve got, you know, privacy policy, you know, privacy laws, the legality side, which is important privacy, important. And, and accessibility. And here’s the thing. I am, I’m a big proponent of accessibility, but most people think that everybody’s first question is, well, do I have to make my website accessible? You know, I’m not going after clients that are blind.

Amr The Internet Guy: 26:33
How do you know?

Eric Dingler: 26:34
Well, not only that, but accessibility goes beyond and

Amr The Internet Guy: 26:37
it’s legal as well. Right? This there are lows against?

Eric Dingler: 26:40
Yes. Any but here’s the thing. It’s just a social justice issue. Like, why will you just because you may not have to make it accessible for someone. You’re, you’re saying they don’t deserve access? Well, that’s not right. But it goes beyond a lot of people think that, well, accessibility just means for people with disabilities. But what about people with slow internet? Yeah, that’s an accessibility. Oh, God, yeah. What about people that want to access your content in public, and the only way is audio and you’re not providing a transcript or text, where they can’t listen to your thing in the coffee shop, or in a meeting when they should be paying attention? Or in school or whatever? Like, you know, but accessibility goes way beyond the course, people that are blind. Well, your website should be built in a way that’s accessible to to all people. And there’s ways that web does you just remind

Amr The Internet Guy: 27:36
me of something that people often neglect. Just having an alternative, like the alt attribute of an image, like describing? What is the image? Because if I’m, if I’m using audio,

Eric Dingler: 27:49
yeah, and if you’re using a screen reader,

Amr The Internet Guy: 27:51
yeah, so most people have like a really beautiful image, the first thing on their website, maybe as a banner, or as a background of a section, or whatever. But almost every good, nice looking website these days has a big image. First thing, like the first thing that you hear, oh, that hero section, the hero section. Yeah. I don’t know who came up with this name, but it is the hero of the website. Someone who’s lazy. And genius. Okay, so if somebody is not actually in the past, for different reasons, we could switch image loading off in our browser. Yeah, we have a, we have a guest, I think you saw. And so in the past, on slow internet connections, when when we didn’t have broadband, or when we have fast broadband and fiber connections, and whatever, like these days, and we were on dial ups, we would switch the image loading off, so that we can actually read the text on the website and get the information that we want. Right. So everything there had to be descriptive. So instead of the image, you would see the image description, which is what we call the alt or the alternative, the alt attribute. And for accessibility, that’s exactly the same thing. If somebody is using a screen reader, to listen to the content of your website, even if you have no audio, their screen reader will turn the text into audio for them. And then it has to tell them about the images. So it will have to tell them, there’s a logo of company XYZ here. There’s an image of and it has to be descriptive to your business don’t because sometimes, the default setting is woman holding a bell. It’s like okay, what is that like woman holding a bell? You know, but let’s say I don’t know your selling. I don’t know. Anything? Yeah, pizza pizza. Yeah. So you could say Mario Rita or woman holding a margarita pizza box from and then your restaurant name. Absolutely, it’s your website, it can describe

Eric Dingler: 30:10
everything on it. Most most people try to either make it just SEO, or just descriptive for accessibility. The magic is when you do the two together

Amr The Internet Guy: 30:21
exactly is when it has to make sense to the human being to Google, but to someone who’s using a screen reader or, you know, to accessibility in general. And that’s another thing that happens when you use a professional web person, right? In most cases, if you if you go and do it yourself, I’m not going to say nine times out of 1010 times out of 10, you’d have never seen anything called the alt attribute. If you’re a business owner building your own website, and you didn’t study or read about building websites.

Eric Dingler: 30:57
here’s here’s the thing I tell people like, honestly, I’ll just be flat out honest, I’m just always honest, transparent. Pretty much all of my clients, in fact, I would take all of my clients could learn how to do what I do as a web designer. With because with YouTube, I you can learn to do my job. on YouTube, no question about 16 hours. Yeah, you know, you can, you can totally, totally do it. However, what you’re not going to get is the 1000 plus websites, my team and I have built that that cumulative experience. All of the data, you know, we send emails every week for clients, and we see what works and what doesn’t. We do SEO, you know, reports every week for clients and send report, we’re seeing what’s working, what’s not, that is extremely valuable, that you’re not getting, and you’re going to have to spend hours and hours and hours watching videos to get caught up. Do you have the time to invest learning? And then turn around and do what we do?

Amr The Internet Guy: 32:05
I just do it once because you’re not gonna switch and become a web designer yourself? Are you? Yeah.

Eric Dingler: 32:10
Now take take how many hours? And and I’m talking, you know, first realistically, you know, 100 hours and multiply your hourly rate, how much do you need to make per hour as a business owner to survive?

Amr The Internet Guy: 32:26
And that’s actually I’ve had somebody very nice girl, Erin, HeyErin!, who has a great website, a great looking website that she did on Wix that she did herself, right. But when I asked her, she laughed, and she said about 120 hours. And I said, Okay, are you sure? said oh, maybe a little bit more? And I said, Okay, and what’s your hourly rate? And she said, Well, I don’t have an hourly rate. I said, wrong. You do. But yes, if you spend this time, looking after your clients or communicating with them, or networking, or, or doing your accounting or, or having fun with your husband and your son and your dog, whatever, there is a cost involved here, so it’s not free. And she said, Okay, let’s say 50. And I said, Okay, do the math. 150 hours or 120 hours times 50. How much did your website cost you? And it’s still on Wix, you can’t move it, you can, but it’s going to cost you to move it. And you’re going to have to rebuild it again. And every single blog post that you have there on Wix will have to be done in a copy and paste because Wix doesn’t allow you to export anything. And every image is going to have to be like, you know, it’s not easy. You built your business on somebody else’s network. It’s like, it’s like operating a business out of an Airbnb. Yeah, yeah,

Eric Dingler: 33:58
no, I can’t believe it. And here’s my thing. And I and I help clients try to see this like $50 an hour. That’s not a long term survival plan. And if it needs to be your sole income, that’s about $96,000 a year. All right. Now, let’s take out 1520 25% for taxes. How about health insurance have like, honestly, as a business owner, you can’t survive on $96,000 in total income for a year for the long haul. If you’re going to also support a family $50 an hour is not I mean, you need to be making at minimum, I think depending on where you live in the United States and Canada, though, I’m going to say you probably need to be making close to $150 an hour. So take what take your ideal salary divided by, you know, 52 divided by 40. There you go. And that’s if you want to work 40 hours every single week, which I personally don’t

Amr The Internet Guy: 34:59
and do you want to spend 100 hours of those hours. Yeah, now you’re trying to build websites for something that you’re going to do for your business for yourself.

Eric Dingler: 35:07
So what’s the opportunity cost $15,000 or 3000. Like, you got to do the math out that way for it for it to make sense. And then the the other thing is, I don’t know how this works in Canada, but in the United States, if we have a client that comes on, and we build them a website, and let’s say we quote them, $5,000, I’m then able to tell them, Hey, tell you what, if you spend $10,000, on this website, and we take 5000, like I quoted you five, if you spend 10,000, and you get a website, that’s x that meets w three c standards for ADA compliant, you know, we help you become excessively compliant on your website, including transcripts for video, you know, all of this, you know, stuff if we do all these things, and put the code in there, right? If your business meets certain criterias, you know, a million dollars a year under 30, employees, things like that, like we send them this thing, you can get a $5,000 tax credit, if you submit this form with your taxes. So you’ve spent $10,000, but you’re gonna get 5000 of that back on your taxes as a tax credit, you get a $10,000 website for $5,000. That’s cool. Now, you’re not going to get that if you don’t use a professional. I feel like we’ve drifted away from it.

Amr The Internet Guy: 36:28
Yeah, but it’s it’s See, but all these little things that we’re talking about, are actually components of a website. Yes. So let’s bring that to what do you want to talk about first optimization, I want to talk or optimization as an SEO, we’ve touched over the two I

Eric Dingler: 36:47
think we can talk about both with this idea, because this way, I don’t want I don’t know how long you want your things last year. But here’s the thing. I let me ask you true false, and then you can you can go off on this, because I think I know what your answer is going to be. Oh, god, I’m going to get it done. And I don’t think so. So would you say true or false? There are plenty of people out there that from a marketing perspective, try really hard to make SEO and optimization of a website. sound very complex. Okay, true. Yeah. I thought so. So, in our experience, you know, if you’d put the foundation in for SEO, your website’s going to do really good over three to six months. It takes it takes time. Yeah. But what I don’t know about and what I want to hear from you about is, I believe I’ve been falling into a myth that optimization on a website is really hard and complex. And I’m learning from you that it’s not as hard as it really yeah.

Amr The Internet Guy: 38:05
It’s Well, I mean, it’s common sense. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a techie but or something else. But let’s just like go back a little bit. We’ve we we’ve been discussing this today. What’s the goal of a website, the ultimate goal is to have customers or clients. You want to be communicating with your ideal customers. And this is what we’ve been saying. Now, the next part is, where would you find this ideal customer. And in part one of our conversation, you’ve given us so many ideas about how to communicate with your ideal customers in a unique and and in a good way that actually will make them remember you or remember your communication. Now, if you take this and try to apply it online, as well, so most people, they get over invested in SEO. And I personally, I would have to say and that’s just my opinion, I could be the worst person in the world that has this opinion. But SEO is way way over rated. Let me say that again. SEO is over rated. Your life does not depend on Google, your life does not depend on social media. Your business does not depend on SEO. Like completely. It’s not like if you do SEO bad you’ll have zero business. One of the examples like the latest episode that’s already published of this podcast, a very nice lady from New Jersey, she’s a personal trainer. And when COVID hit, they had to close the place where she was training. She went online and she became very successful, and she has way more business than she ever had. She is way more successful. She’s making double or triple what she used to make and till date. She has no website. No zero, no website, no social media, nothing. What I meant by going online was on zoom, she stopped To train on zoom, and she’s using her email to connect with people and SMS messages. So there’s some use of technology there. But it’s not SEO and pleasing Google, and her business is doing fine. Okay, if she does the other stuff, if she does SEO, she may be able to grow even more. If that’s the goal, if that’s the target, maybe she needs more time to spend with the family, maybe she’s okay. With the amount of business she has. Now. Maybe she wants to do the rest of it as a contingency. But it’s not urgent. That’s fine. It depends what your goal is. So thinking SEO only, for your business or for your marketing is not the right way. The other thing is search engine optimization. Okay, why are we trying to please, Dr. Google, because it’s the dominant search engine is the dominant everything loyal, Google owns YouTube. And and this also makes your job a little easier because Google loves its own properties. So if you produce content, and put it on YouTube, it helps your SEO. Right? See, I didn’t say anything about ads, I didn’t say anything about keywords, just produce content, produce authentic, real, good content that people will enjoy, real people will enjoy. Google will reward you work to please Google, you will not get the reward because they’ll change their algorithm. And when you’ve been ranking that high, you’re gonna get down low, only because you’re trying to work with the bot, not with the real person. Now, what else? What else does Google own Google Maps. So if you get customers leaving your reviews on your location, and Google Maps, which is called Google My Business now, okay, Google loves that. And then your ranking will improve. If you write and this is some people don’t know about it. You can write blog posts, on Google My Business, you can share your, whatever blog posts you have on your website, you can share this on Google My Business, you know, copy, paste, whatever, and then have a link that goes back to the actual post on your website. And Google sees that you’ll be rewarding. So it’s not as complex and it’s not as hard and you don’t have to spend on advertising. Right. The next one is, should I go and hire somebody to spend? And if you remember, we’ve had this example already, in the in the first segment or the first episode of our congress conversation, should I spend 15 $100 a month on SEO and paid ads? Well, it depends. What’s your cost of acquisition? And what do you think is fair or reasonable? If you’re going to do like the the example of the lady that I told you about, we’re spending 1600 to get 300 in sales, by all means, don’t do it. If you’re trying to launder money, it’s another thing but

Eric Dingler: 43:04
but there are times it’s I have a I have a client. There are a large realtor in three states last year, they did a billion dollars in service, they pay more than 15 $100 a month in SEO. But they did a billion dollars in trade over a billion dollars in trade.

Amr The Internet Guy: 43:23
Yeah. So it’s the cost of acquisition and the life, the life cycle of the customer, right with you how long that will stay with you. And how long does it stay as a customer as a paying customer, if you have any upsells if you have any upgrades of you know, if your services change, and you make new services, and they subscribe to your new services and the whole lot. So it really you have to do it. First starting with your goal. So don’t start with your budget. Start with your goals. Don’t say, hey, I want to spend $300 a month on SEO, let me go and find somebody who’s going to take this money and help me is not going to work, you’re going to end up working with somebody 5000 miles away who doesn’t know anything about your business is going to take your money by some ads. And that’s it, call it a day. Yeah,

Eric Dingler: 44:07
if your goal is traffic next month, you’re always going to be frustrated. Yeah, with SEO, it’s you. It’s a long term game. So

Amr The Internet Guy: 44:16
you have to grow your SEO organically. But in the meantime, in the meantime, do not neglect the humans. So spend time to connect with people spend time to speak with people spend time to meet network, even if you’re shy or an introvert or whatever. Just like find a comfort zone, find a place in your local community where you feel comfortable. Hopefully, you know, we’re all going to get vaccinated and COVID is going to disappear or not be as as as scary as it is. And then it just becomes like a regular flu. And we can all meet again, and we still can be like reasonable like sits a little bit far away and whatever. But anyway in my opinion to time and money spent speaking with people, real people is way better than time and money spent trying to beat SEO, there’s always like beat your competition by just using SEO. And again, unless you have a big budget, and you’re making so much money out of it, so that it makes your cost of acquisition quite low, because like, Look, as you said, somebody is making a billion dollar spending 30,000 not a big deal. You know, it’s what percentage wise is very low, right? But somebody’s spending $10,000 to make five, they’re losing somebody spending 10 to make 10, you’re breaking even you haven’t done much, right? You know, maybe, maybe just maybe, if you’re just breaking even is good, because some day awareness is growing. So that’s the only good thing about it. But if you’re not making money out of, you know, and you have to have a good, clear way to measure, and I shouldn’t be the one telling you how to, it should be the person you’re hiring, to do your SEO for you. So and that’s why I say I don’t do SEO, I do SEO coaching. I’ll teach you, you do it, you take care of your business and your marketing because no one can speak about your business better than you, Mr. And Mrs. Business owners. Right? Yeah,

Eric Dingler: 46:19
no, I I completely agree. I completely 100% agree. And and here’s, here’s I think the key to all of it, you have to understand Google’s business model, and what they want to accomplish. What Google wants to accomplish is getting eyes on ads, the more eyes they get on ads, the better. Well, how do they do that? Well, you got to take a step back and wrestle with the principle behind the practice. There are a lot of ways to get eyes on ads. But the way you get people to come and look at them over and over and over and over all on their own and not forcing them to do it is answering the questions they ask the first time they ask it. So if the reason people like using Google is because when you go and look, how much does the average elephant weigh? You get the answer right away. Right? So every time you ask a question, you get the answer. The next time you have a question, you’re gonna go back to that source, Google stops delivering the answers, or somebody else starts to elaborate it better, because I’ll tell you something. I’m in some areas where we’ve moved away from Google and we ask Alexa, because yes, it’s easy to ask Alexa. I don’t I don’t even have to type anymore. All right. So Google is all about answering questions. And delivering content is long. I love

Amr The Internet Guy: 47:44
that. So when you

Eric Dingler: 47:46
deliver the answer to people’s questions, and Google sees that and sees that people like your content, that means people are likely to come back to Google, Google doesn’t care if people come back to you. Google could care less if somebody came back to my website a second time. Google cares if people come back to Google a second, or third or fourth or fifth time. So when I think of the humans behind the numbers, and I deliver content for them, and Google sees that, now Google goes, Well, I want to show his ants I want to show her answer

Amr The Internet Guy: 48:20
again. Exactly. So in the past, it was all a technical thing and algorithms and bots. Why? Because Google, we’re building this massive database. What’s the best way we

Eric Dingler: 48:33
knew how to measure it the time?

Amr The Internet Guy: 48:36
Yeah. But at the time, also, like when we started, you could soil your web page with the keyword all over the place that makes us make

Eric Dingler: 48:48
the same color as your background. And so human eyes can Exactly. So human

Amr The Internet Guy: 48:53
eyes can see it. But down there at the bottom of your page is full of like, web design, Virginia web design, Baltimore web design DC, like, everywhere, right? Or maybe it was just web design, Virginia, repeated 100 times, because that was the way it is they the algorithm used to just count how many times the keyword has appeared. Now Google is moving it no is moving has already moved. It’s moved like maybe two years ago, towards pleasing the human beings, not the bot. The bot doesn’t need pleasing anymore. The database has been built already. All what they’re doing, they’re just updating it with the latest stuff. So if you’re an expert in your industry, and you have content that’s very relevant that people actually like, and Google can see and feel that you know, people like your content, you will rank higher, even if you spent zero money on ads. Right. So this takes us to the change that’s coming. There’s a change That’s coming that Google are going to be implementing this May, this coming May. And this change is having a lot of people going round and round in circles. And I think majority of I think

Eric Dingler: 50:11
it’s an I think it’s important significant to say that this is the first time they’ve telegraphed a major change in the algorithm ahead.

Amr The Internet Guy: 50:18
They did before but people ignored them. This time when the telegraph they had they put it in a way as such, you’ll be losing if you don’t take action now. Because before they used to tell you something like, if you want to rank higher, do this one, I don’t want to rank higher, I’m not gonna do this. Now they’re saying, if you don’t do this, you lose. I was like, No, I don’t want to lose. So I think the wording was a little like, you know, and they didn’t say they didn’t say exactly, you lose, but they said like, it will negatively affect your ranking, and that they even didn’t say, what type of ranking? Is it SEO ranking? Is that another ranking? Is it you know, best website in the world ranking, I don’t know, that just said the word ranking. And and the majority of people who are now stressed out are web developers and designers, because their clients are now calling in and sending emails and saying, I don’t want to lose, do something for me, I need to fix my website. So the there are many changes that are happening. Basically, Google wants to focus more and more on the user experience, who is the user, the user is your website, visitor, the person who is going to come to your website. So what they did in the past few years was things like is your website secured with an SSL certificate, and then you get extra points for having an SSL, if you don’t have an SSL, you don’t get the extra points, your ranking is a little bit lower, then. So if you and your competitor equal, you have an SSL, your competitor does it, you rank higher. So both of you are pizza restaurants in the same locality, the one with the SSL wins at the time, and then take it a step further. If the both both pizza restaurants in the same locality, they both have SSL who wins the one with more content, relevant content wins. Okay, now take it a step further, what’s coming in May, they both have great content, the content is liked by their clientele. They both have SSL, they both have a good responsive website that works well on mobile, they both have good colors accessible. So like they’re kind of equal, who wins the one that loads faster than the other. So that’s, so they keep going one step further. And then if everything else is equal, who wins? Well, there’s the next. So when we talk about the user experience, you could have the best website in the world with the best content in your industry. And people love the content that you have, right, but your website takes 10 seconds to load. For a new user, who found you somehow, whether found you by Google or was referred by a friend or whatever, someone found your website somewhere. If they click, and it doesn’t load within like, kind of three seconds, they’re probably gonna leave. Like it depends how invested they are, like, you know how strong the referral was, if they’re coming from a friend, they someone they trust, and they like that, probably wait. But if they found you on Google, or social media, or just a referral that wasn’t from a friend, as a friend, like somebody said, Oh, why don’t you go check this company? Right? If your site will not load within three seconds, they get bored, and they leave, they just click away. If they find you using Google, they still have the page that has the results, they click on the next one, which is your competition. So that’s what we’re saying. There’s the change. Now, our good colleagues, friends, competition, they’re getting worried, and they’re over obsessing with the scores, the tests. So there are so many tests that you can do to test your website and see how long it takes to load. They’re virtually there’s like hundreds of them, right? If you’re a non techie, you’ll use a test that just gives you the loading time in seconds. So you know that your website takes four seconds to load or five seconds to load. So you know, now what you need to do, you need to, you know, cut down the time to load from five or four seconds to three or below. If you can do it in two seconds, that’s even better. Right? And that’s it like in my opinion, this is ABC speed optimization. Just make sure it loads within the time frame that is good for the human beings visiting your site. Now Should I obsess because different tests, there’s Google PageSpeed. There’s web dev test. There’s gt metrics, the name that we mentioned in the very beginning today, right? And then these tools, they give you a ranking abcdef. And it makes it look like oh, my God, I’m failing my college, you know, you get an F, or you get a D. And they take into consideration. So many things. It’s not only your, your web site loading time in seconds, it’s how much code is there? How much time does your code take to execute? How many things are linked to your website? And people sometimes think, oh, I’ve got nothing linked on my website. What do you don’t know that if you use Google fonts, your fonts are coming from Google, your fonts are not on your website, they’re actually on Google. And when a user comes to your website, there’s the request that goes to Google to bring the fonts to the page so that they display correctly, right, you don’t know that. If you have reviews on your website that come from Google Maps, or Google My Business, and you use a plug in to bring these reviews, the text and the stars of the reviews and the photo of the customer in the reviews come from Google and get this because I have this on my website, I just didn’t have time to do it yet. The image that comes, you can control the size of that image, like so I’m using a plug in that links to my Google, Google, my business brings all these reviews, I have zero control, I have control on the display size. So I can display it in a certain way, within my website, and it looks uniform with the design. But I can’t actually decide the size of the image that comes from there. And guess what? It comes as big and then the browser resize it, which is not optimized. Right. So what I want to do, I want to get rid of the plugin, and I’ll just copy them. The problem with this is that you get busy and you get new reviews, and you have no time to copy the new ones. So you only have so I mean, using the plugin is good because whenever a review hits Google, it appears on your website automatically. So it has its pros and cons.

Eric Dingler: 57:14
Yeah. But wouldn’t wouldn’t know potential workaround for that be to not have that because what what page is Google testing? is usually

Amr The Internet Guy: 57:26
they test all the pages, right? But usually we focus on the homepage, because this is when somebody sees your website on your business card. That’s where they’re going to go racism network or whatever. But Google being Google, of course, they see every page on your website, and some other pages could be mega, fast. Brilliant. And you’ll figure out if you’ve been in business for some time, that you’re probably ranking for keywords on inside pages, not on the homepage, right?

Eric Dingler: 57:56
Yeah, no, that makes sense. It makes sense. So a workaround would be why couldn’t you create a reviews page, use that plug in on that page, and then have a link to it? But then on the homepage, on the home page, have some strategically copied ones

Amr The Internet Guy: 58:10
there? Yeah,

Eric Dingler: 58:12
don’t need to change and then updated review. Because the best place for reviews from a conversion standpoint is besides ever a call to action? So yes, because if somebody goes to waver that call to action button, but then they see these five stars, or these four

Amr The Internet Guy: 58:29
voices, then because people like your surveys, so

Eric Dingler: 58:32
actually 4.7 would probably convert better than five, believe it or not, but you know, you have some stars there a person they Okay, yeah. And they they click it? Well, you don’t need a plug in. They’re showing every single one Exactly.

Amr The Internet Guy: 58:45
But that’s my point. There are components that come from outside your website. So no, that’s good. The more you eliminate them, the higher your optimization ranking will be. You can’t eliminate everything, okay. And then sometimes when you look at the the outcome of the test, you’re doing like Google PageSpeed. Well, I just said a little while ago, Google the love their own technology and their love their own properties. Google owned the browser, called Chrome. Chrome has specific type images that they love, which is very modern, very new is called web P. So if you go and convert all the images on your website, to web p format, Google will love you more, you will rank higher on the Google PageSpeed or the web dev test. But and this is something I learned the hard way when p is not yet supported in full by the Safari browser. So if anyone is using Apple on iPhone or or a Mac Book or whatever, which is a lot. Yeah, which is a lot. Either one of two things will happen. So if you switch all your images to or convert them to web be Just a score higher, and your in your page optimization was going to happen. For a user who comes in with a Safari browser, one of two things, either they will see no images at all, which will make your website look bad. Or your website will take longer to load for people with Safari, because it’s going to look for the alternative image, which is still as jpg, or GIF or another format, other than web P. And most of the plugins used to convert to web p, they still keep, of course, the older version of the jpg, and PNG or GIF, or whatever it is that you’re using, to use when somebody comes in with a browser with a browser who doesn’t support it. But this will take time because first the detection of the browser happened, then the detection of the size happen, then the detection that happens that says whether this browser can see and load what p or not, then you go and fetch the image and give it so here you’re going to be losing another, I don’t know, a few seconds. Right. So how is that?

Eric Dingler: 1:01:08
So at the end of all of this, you may use a tool. And you may get a bunch of terms like you know, render blocking, or

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:01:19
render blocking access portant. Let’s talk about this. Before you talk about

Eric Dingler: 1:01:25
it, Mike, my question is, if you get all of those things, and the GT metrics gives you an F, but your page load is 1.2 seconds.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:01:35
Yeah, yeah. Who cares?

Eric Dingler: 1:01:38
Like the experience that you’re delivering? Now? If you are, you were may, I guess, come into play? Is it would be good to check your number one. Number two, number three competitors. Yes,

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:01:52
indeed. So this is exactly you got it. Like I didn’t have to say, Have you got it? You got it on your own. I was guessing. If, okay. If you’re in a very, extremely competitive niche, or niche, if you’re in the UK, I am mixed. I can say niche and niche. lanisha sounds French. The Nisha Misha, I’m gonna

Eric Dingler: 1:02:16
say it the right way and say niche, I’m not a qualified

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:02:19
I speak. I’m just kidding. So if you’re in a very competitive niche, let’s say for example, travel, or cuisine, or like I know, a very nice lady who came as a guest on my podcast as well. And she’s in a mega competitive niche. And this niche is cuisine and travel her site about is about cuisine and travel. So it’s about real experience, not online experience, the actual real, we all want to go somewhere now after COVID. And she’s overly obsessed with website optimization. But the reason for this is that her closest competitor is very close, really close. So she wants to get an edge. So if if my competitor scores a B on the GT metrics, I want to be an A, you know. And the problem is, in that niche, it’s all based on images and videos. And the more images and videos you have, the harder it is to get it to load fast, you know, because you got to optimize every image and every video, and then videos are hosted somewhere else. So you’re bringing component that’s external to your website. And if you put the video on your website is going to make it even slower. So it’s kind of like it’s a very delicate, so for her and only for her. It’s so canny justified to spend 20 hours a week, optimizing your website, right? For the average business owner, you don’t need all that. As long as your website loads in about two seconds, you’re good. It doesn’t really matter what your GT metrics is, it doesn’t really matter what your Google PageSpeed I mean, I’m not saying don’t see it or don’t look at it, you look at it, there are things that you can do that are easy to do. Like resizing your images for mobile, that’s fine. You or your web person, contact your web person, tell them hey, you know, I did a test on Google PageSpeed and I found that my mobile images are too big. Could you please make them smaller? Could you make them mobile optimized that they’ll happily do it for you, and then you will score higher, your your, your optimization, or score will improve? Right? But when it comes to things like eliminate render blocking, the average business owner would think like what? Avoid chaining? What chaining? What is that? Okay? I can’t tell you what’s chaining because every time I read about it, I even I get confused. From what I understood is that As we know, for every website, when you access a website, as a user, this is called in technical term is called the request. So you’re requesting resources from a server. That’s why the word URL means Uniform Resource Locator. It’s a uniform way to locate a resource somewhere online. And there’s the address. So that’s why we call it a URL. So when you do this, you’re requesting the components of a page from a certain URL or domain name. Now, these components, as we were just saying, there are components that come external to your website, like your videos that are hosted on Vimeo or a video hosting platform, like your Google reviews that come from Google My Business, like Google fonts, all these they come from different websites, and each website has a domain. So it could be fonts dot google IPS, dotnet, or.com, or whatever. And this is where your font is coming from. So now, in your design, sometimes you are changing this meaning you’re telling the browser, this resource is there, the browser goes there, only to find the redirection, Oh, I’m sorry, this resource is not here, go there, the browser gets there, oh, this resource has moved is there. And that’s like a chain, it keeps on redirecting. And sometimes people even go a step further, it redirects to itself, it becomes an infinite loop loop. Yeah. And then this, this is so bad for everything for your SEO, and for your loading speed, and whatever. So that That’s my understanding of the chaining part. It’s more complicated than that. And I don’t want to break my head over it. Now the render blocking, we use WordPress, now WordPress, in general, the reason number one for anyone to use WordPress, anyone not, not just web designers, like business owners, or website owners, is because it has content management. So basically, think of it this way. It’s a software. WordPress is a software, it’s not a website, we use it to build your website. But in reality, it is a software, the software was written and coded to give you easy content management, it wasn’t coded to please Google, it wasn’t coded not to have any JavaScript, zero JavaScript. On top of it, we use themes, or templates, you know, to make things look beautiful. We use themes to make life easier like Divi theme, because it has a front front page editor. So you can actually what you see is what you get, you can you can edit your website, live on the page, rather than do it from a back end without seeing what it looks like. And without seeing your changes live. Now, in order to do this interactivity, there is JavaScript code, when you put things to make them beautiful, and change the color and, and make sometimes simple animation on the page as it loads or when you scroll down, or when you hover your mouse over something and it changes color, it becomes bigger, smaller, whatever. All these animations are done using a script. It could be html5, it could be JavaScript, whatever. So when the page loads, all these scripts have to load first. And most of the time the script goes in the header of your page. I don’t mean the header that you see the hero section, I mean, the header that your you don’t see is behind the scenes in the head is the head tag. So most of the script goes in the head tag. The word render blocking means every single piece of script that’s in your head tag has to load first into the browser of the user, before the site renders before the part that the user eyes see comes in. So all these scripts will be loading in the background first, then the user will start to see the image and the colors and the text and the rest of it. So this is what it means by eliminate render blocking. Now, if you completely eliminate let render blocking your site look and feel will break because people will not see the animation. People will not see anything that had the script because the script didn’t load. If you eliminate it, it means you just removed all your script from the header. Your website will be blazing fast, but it will look broken. And I’ve done that or so many times when playing with all the optimization plugins and the caching plugins. You set everything to automatic. You go to your website, you do your speed test, and it’s 500 milliseconds, that is wow. Then you go and look in your website, and it looks bad. Because everything that was supposed to load did not load, the fonts didn’t load, your information didn’t load, nothing. So there’s a balance here. There’s a balance, like we spoke about what p, do I do? Where pm please Google and alienate everyone who’s using Safari? Or do I keep it as a JPEG, or PNG, and deal with a little bit of a penalty from Mr. Google it, but I’m not alienating 40% of my prospect customers who are using Safari. And if I wasn’t told by a friend, that my website wasn’t loading in Safari, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’ve optimized have done my homework. I’m good. I’m an angel at matrix my page has, I don’t know 80%. And Google PageSpeed. It loads in 500 milliseconds. Well, now my page loads for everyone. In about maybe 2.53 seconds, I’m, I’m happier. Even though if Google is unhappy, I think my my score on Google PageSpeed is really low. And some people even you know, they’re not competition, because we don’t cooperate the competition. And the first 220, the optimization guide doesn’t have a good score. Well, I don’t care about the score. Because for the human, my website loads fast, no one is alienated, except as accessible as possible, you know, have done the homework for the human beings. And I’m not over obsessing to actually Please, Mr. Google. And yeah, I mean, you could say, maybe you’re not in a competitive in niche. No, I am in a competitive niche. But what I’ve decided to do is to spend more of my time speaking with people, and getting referrals and having real connection with real people. And if because, again, okay, I’ve been in business since 2016. That’s what like five years, I wasn’t full time on business until COVID hit last year, you know, so the web design was always the web design business was always there. But I wasn’t focused, fully focused on it till last year, right. And when I go and analyze, where do my customers come from, I’ve never had one single customer that came from a web search, zero. Although I have lots of traffic coming my way from Google search engine, but none of them actually converted, they didn’t buy, they didn’t become a customer. Those who became customers came through somebody who knows me, a past client, the friend, sometimes even a competitor or a co co petition, and, or a social media post that I put there, or they read something or you know, but usually they didn’t come just by googling web design Vancouver and come to me never happened. Okay, so why should they care. And then when I go and do the search myself, web design, Vancouver, there are companies that have way more money than I do. And they’re paying so much in their advertising, kudos to them, that’s fine. But I don’t want to go and compete on that front. Because it will, you know, break my bank, small business, I’m a small business owner. So what I focus instead, I focus on the people that I serve. And I don’t care much that that’s why I don’t care much about the GT metrics and the Google PageSpeed score. Now just to sum up the render blocking part, because I only gave the example of removing everything, and the side brakes. So what you should do is you shouldn’t remove everything, and you shouldn’t leave them as they are either. So here’s a plug in as a caching plugin. Like, I always tell people use lightspeed because it’s free. And also because many of the modern hosting companies now use a lightspeed server. So a lightspeed server with the lightspeed plugin, in my opinion, is the cheapest and easiest way to go. There are other options. Of course there are there are more expensive hosting, you could use a Content Developer content delivery network CDN, you know, which is something else that you can use to make your website load faster. There are many things but the thing that’s easier to use, and cheaper and works with your current hosting would be to have a lightspeed server on your hosting. It’s regular shared hosting, which is about I don’t know 1015. Like less than $20 a month for good hosting. With lightspeed server and SSD, and good memory, and then you have the free lightspeed plug in, I do have an actual free video that shows people how to configure it. Not in depth, but like the the easier way to make it work. And then what it does when you’re configuring it, when it comes to your code, your your, your Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, as well as the JavaScript code, you’re trying to combine and minify there are some parts of this that you cannot combine, and minify. So whenever you see the word, or the term, jQuery, please leave it alone. Don’t touch it. Don’t minify don’t combine jQuery. And I think the newer version of the plugins now they detect it, and they leave it alone automatically, even if you just check that box. Okay. But some of the JavaScript that you have on the page can be combined and minify your plugin, if you configure it the right way, your plugin will handle this automatically, you don’t have to do much. It’s like there’s a, there’s a tick box. And then there are a few things that you put as an exception, one of them was jQuery, the same thing you do with CSS, and then you can test it. So okay, if you’re a web developer, or a web designer, if you’re one of our colleagues, hey, and if you’re on Joshua’s group, hey, again, what you do is get the staging site, take a copy of your website, put it a state staging on a subdomain or another domain, whatever you like, play around, break the hell out of it. Put the plug in, switch all the tick boxes on and see what it looks like and then test it, if it scores better than your actual website over right, like, you know, push your staging into production. And but play not on your live site, please. Right? I’ve done that. I know what it’s like when it breaks, play around, do all your things, what these plugins basically do, they take the big bulk of all this code that’s in your head tag, and they try to load it later, they delay it a little bit. So they get the page to render, or parts of the page to render, so that the human being who’s looking at the page sees something, instead of waiting for all this code to load, then they load the code a little bit later, in a delayed way. Some of this code can be even loaded in the footer, things like what you capture, you know, when you have a login form, and you want to anti spam it, and you have a CAPTCHA plugin that gives people like a puzzle to solve or something, you don’t need that to load in the header. This can be loaded after the page has loaded. Another thing, when you use a plugin, to do a job, like capture, like anti spam, kartra, CAPTCHA, anti spam, what the plugin usually does, by default, they load the JavaScript part on every single page, you don’t need that you want it on your login page, you don’t want it on your homepage, there’s no login there, right. But when you use a plugin, it’s really hard to actually make sure that it doesn’t put the code in your homepage or on another page, or whatever. And so there are plugins that actually clean up that code for you if you wanted to. So there are so many avenues like we could talk about it for hours, you could spend 100 hours optimizing your website. If you had the time, no one has this time, not us, not our clients. And and this takes me back to the first point is step number one, load time in seconds, like target this first, make the site load fast for human beings. And only go to step number two, if you need to, and when you need to, because it’s gonna cost you time and money.

Eric Dingler: 1:18:54
Yeah, no, that’s good. That’s all really good stuff. That’s fantastic. So I think so I know, people are freaking out over this. Not everybody. You know, a lot of people are really freaking out. And then there’s a lot of shysters out there that are trying to make this sound worse sound like a bigger deal, because they’re trying to take your money to do something that, you know, you may need to spend a couple $100 there’s, there’s no doubt about it. Because it does take

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:19:22
Yeah, if you’re not, you don’t like back and even if you’re a techie, even if you’re a web designer, right? Do you really want to spend your time fiddling with DNS and PHP configuration and back end stuff, right? And going to the lightspeed server and ensuring how it works on your hosting, if you have the time to do it, if you don’t find someone who can do it.

Eric Dingler: 1:19:44
Right. Right. Well, I mean, I own a web design agency, and I don’t do it for my websites. I hire you to do it. Because it’s not

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:19:55
Yeah, guys. We have a vested interest here. So I mean, yeah, no, I mean, It’s a guy, I enjoy the weird stuff that people don’t because of my it background, and I love it because I used to set up email servers, like we we used to host our website and our email, in house in most of the companies I worked for, between 2000 and like 2000, and maybe seven or six.

Eric Dingler: 1:20:21
See, I don’t and I don’t like it. I like the marketing, the messaging, the words, the conversion, the, you know, the data, the people not that you don’t like the people. That’s I’m saying, but I don’t like the technical side of it.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:20:37
I use it as an enabler. I love the people. And I think technology is there to help the people. And that’s why we’ve been like, in all what we talked about today, we’re saying, focus on the human focus on your customer, not on Google, don’t neglect Google, but don’t make it your main focus. That’s what I’m saying. None is I think, so what I do, there is technology. There’s so much technology, like I go to bed, I wake up, there’s a new technology, and I love getting my hands on technology playing around like, in the past year, I have tested every single hosting option, the risks in hosting everything, you know, the things with the strange names, like the droplets, or whatever. I’ve had digitalocean have had AWS hosting, Google Cloud Hosting Microsoft hosting everything. And even sorry, vulture hosting, hosting from companies I’ve never heard about hosting from companies that we all know, like siteground, and you know, oh, sorry, and Hostgator and whatever, only because I want to play with the technology. So I know which one will work for me, which one would work for my clients and which one would work for what I’m trying to do. And I spent hours and hours. But it also gives me the experience because when someone comes to me with a broken website, for me, it doesn’t matter what their hosting is. I’ve tried them all. So I can get in and login. And I know it’s a familiar, it’s suddenly familiar waters for me, because I’ve been there before.

Eric Dingler: 1:22:06
That’s cool. And I think the thing to keep in mind is, I think, because what I tried to always look for and then I realized it was a myth. And I think a lot of other people try to look for is you people will just want to know, well, what do I have to do? We know you’re all this stuff. But you still haven’t said, What do I have to do. And I think that comes down to the fact that because every website is different and unique. There’s a recipe that’s gone into that website, it depends upon your hosting, the functionality of your website, the design of your website, all of these different things that depending on that unique mix of stuff, your optimization that there’s some principles, but the actual optimization is going to be different website to website to website.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:22:57
Yes. If you go back to the web, to the house analogy. This is your foundation and your framework. Right. So everyone has, although we all use the same framework, which is WordPress, but we all have different themes and different plugins that write different code. And for the same thing that you’re trying to do, there must be a plugin that doesn’t better as well. I mean, every website has a contact form. Now, most of us Nowadays, most of the people I know personally use Divi as their theme of choice. Now when I use Divi, I don’t use a plugin for a contact form, I use the contact form that comes with Divi. It has its pros and cons. Many people like to use Gravity Forms or something else, by all means do it, that’s fine. But when I go and inspect websites that need to be optimized nine times out of 10, there’s more than one plugin for a contact form. So there’s an older plugin that they forgot about. It’s still there is still loading its code. Yeah. Right. So you may have some redundant plugins there. So every website is different. Some things work for all, as an example, when you use a caching plugin. Yeah, that’s step number one, put the caching plug in there, let it cache your images and, and some of your code let it minify your CSS. One thing that I have to mention here, and it’s very technical, but since so many technical people and many web designers are listening to us, if you see the word asynchronous load CSS asynchronously, and you use Divi do not load it asynchronously, it will remove all your Divi animations. So don’t do that. It’s a good thing if you’re not using Divi, but for Divi don’t do the asynchronous one. Okay, well,

Eric Dingler: 1:24:51
what about that? I mean, you know, cuz some people have in their Divi Theme builder option for those that use Divi and You know, there are plenty of people that don’t use Divi. But you know, in the theme settings, you could have checked on there to minify.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:25:07
Don’t do it. No,

Eric Dingler: 1:25:08
yeah, you see it. And that’s the thing, I see that a lot of people get it, and they’ve checked it. But then they’re using a caching plugin. And then they’ve got a server set up. And now it’s just now there’s more of a mess.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:25:18
Yeah, exactly. Because you have three types of cars, they’re all different, they don’t talk to each other. And when it comes to the browser, when the user visits your website, the browser doesn’t know which one to use. Right, so don’t do multiple caching as well. Like it doesn’t serve any purpose. It doesn’t make it

Eric Dingler: 1:25:35
now because it’s creating different files. And you know, it just starts to really become

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:25:40
in the Divi settings, uncheck the minify, JavaScript and, and CSS, and then go to the next screen, the builder options, the Divi Builder options. And then if it says, create, I can’t remember the wording now because I’m not looking at it. It says something about create unique CSS files or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, clear it. If it’s very if it was checked already, you’ll have a clear button, clear that and uncheck them and then save. And then let your caching plugins do all the caching and the minification. Not the theme itself.

Eric Dingler: 1:26:19
Yeah, static CSS file, exactly,

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:26:21
thank you generate static CSS files, you don’t want that. If you’re using a caching plugin, if you have zero caching, plugin, use that. But if you’re going to use any caching plugin whatsoever, and for for the non techies and the business owners who are listening to us now thinking like, what the hell is cash, I’m not talking about money, by the way, it’s nothing and I want, I want more of that, I want more of that, yeah, I want more cash. It’s a way to speed up your browser. So every time you visit a website, some files get downloaded in a temporary folder on your phone or your computer. That makes it way faster, the second time you visit the same website. So this is the technical term for it is called cache. So what happens is that you get, you know, like some of the images on a website, they are actually downloaded to your computer, they’re in a temporary folder, even though you don’t see this folder, or maybe you don’t know where it is, they’re there. So when you go back to the same website, your browser is not going to look for the images. Again, it will use the images that are already on your machine. So this saves a few seconds, makes the website appear to be way faster. That’s called a cache. So web designers, what we do is we use a plugin to create this cache. We created on our server, and then we give it to the user once the user comes to our website.

Eric Dingler: 1:27:56
Yeah, yeah. Cool. Good stuff. Man. I have learned a lot. There’s a lot of things I had never heard of before. So

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:28:07
we need more cash. You’ve heard that before. We need more guy.

Eric Dingler: 1:28:11
My wife. I hear it every day. Hey, mister small business owner, man, we need more cash. So yeah, now very cool. Well, thanks for sharing this with me. And for everybody else. I think it’s fantastic stuff. It, it can definitely seem very technical, and complex. But the key is find a partner you trust and find a partner that lets you know, this isn’t that hard. It’s not that big of a deal. We can make we’re gonna make this work.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:28:43
Yeah, take a phased approach. Don’t try to do it all at once.

Eric Dingler: 1:28:46
Yeah, that’s true, too. That’s a really good approach. Yeah. And just start with a speed test.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:28:50
Yes, test that figure out how, like, Okay, I’m going to put the link some of the links that are used some of the tests that I use, I’m actually just let me give you the easiest one, the quickest one, it’s called pingdom. While the company that owns owns it is solar winds, you’re probably aware of it now since they got act, but it’s a big software company. And it’s called pingdom. So the website is tools.pingdom.com. I’m gonna publish the link below the episode this episode. Cool. And of course, you’re going to find in transit studio link, human talents, language, the name of my company, and anything that we discussed in this episode. I’ll just give you the link there and how to contact Eric as well.

Eric Dingler: 1:29:38
Sounds great, sir. Well, thank you very much.

Amr The Internet Guy: 1:29:40
Thank you, sir. Have a great day.