This is Episode 12 of the Mini Series The '90-Day Website Mastery Podcast'

Introduction:

• Welcome to the '90-Day Website Mastery Podcast'!
• Hosted by Jonny Ross and Pascal Fintoni.
• Celebrating the launch of the new program and the completion of the Website Best Practice Webinar Series.
• Rediscover pride in your website with expert insights and advice.

Segments:

1. You Ask, We Answer:

• Addressing community questions and online queries.
• Question for this episode: "What are websites wireframes and do they really help?"
• Pascal and Jonny explore the significance of wireframes in website design.
• Highlighting wireframes as crucial tools for planning website layout and structure.

2. Website Stories:

• Reviewing an informative article/podcast/video.
• Discussing Neil Patel's video on "SEO Techniques to Boost Organic Traffic."
• Actions highlighted: Quarterly content updates, creative link building, partnerships, and hyperlocal targeting.

3. The Website Engine Room:

• Recommended apps and tools for website management and content creation.
• Pascal's recommendation: Perplexity AI - Structuring long-form content effectively.
• Jonny's recommendation: Framer - Interactive UI/UX design with AI integration.

4. The Website Call To Action:

• Practical action points for immediate website improvement.
• Jonny's advice: Thoroughly test website forms, validation, and user experience.
• Pascal's tip: Audit inbound links and collaborate for content amplification.

Reflection and Roundup:

• A recap of the episode's key takeaways.
• Emphasis on teamwork, investment, and continuous improvement for website success.
• Invite listeners to share their experiences and implement insights.

Outro:

• Thank you for tuning in to Episode 11 of the '90-Day Website Mastery Podcast.'
• Visit 90daymarketingmastery.com for more information and book your discovery call.
• Stay connected by sending questions and updates.
• Join us for the next episode, and remember, your website's transformation journey starts here!

Hosts:

• Jonny Ross
• LinkedIn: Jonny Ross
• Website: jonnyross.com
• 
  
• Pascal Fintoni
• LinkedIn: Pascal Fintoni
• Website: pascalfintoni.com
• 
  

Explore our 90-Day Website Mastery Programme:

• 90daymarketingmastery.com

TimeStamps:

Wireframes: The Importance of Planning [00:02:44]

Explains the significance of wireframes in website design and how they help in visualizing the layout and user journey.

Content Recency and Link Building [00:09:58]

Neil Patel discusses the importance of updating content regularly for both user engagement and search engine optimization, as well as creative ways to build links to drive traffic.

Timestamp 1 [00:11:02]

SEO tactics to boost organic traffic, including releasing a free version as a PR stunt and targeting international audiences.

Timestamp 2 [00:12:27]

The importance of updating content regularly and the role of partnerships in branding and cross-selling.

Timestamp 3 [00:15:54]

The significance of links, up-to-date content, and hyperlocal targeting in improving organic traffic.

The assistant's role in content creation [00:22:42]

The assistant helps accelerate content creation by providing guidelines and structure, allowing the creator to focus on their own tone of voice.

The importance of reflection and learning in content creation [00:24:08]

Creating content oneself allows for reflection, learning, and thinking, which are crucial elements that would be lost if relying solely on an AI tool.

Website call to action: Testing forms [00:25:11]

The call to action is to regularly test website forms to ensure they are functioning correctly, including spam captchas, email notifications, and validation.

Hello and welcome. It's episode 12, Episode 12 of the 90 Day Website Mastery Podcast. How are you? We're glad you're here. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. This is we are celebrating the launch of our new program and the completion of the website Best Practice Webinar series. We wanted to find a way to continue to share more advice and insights about making your website work harder and for you to feel proud again of your website. I've got the great Pascal Finn, Tony with me. How are you, Pascal? I'm very well. You know, this is like something I look forward to. Not just spending time in your company, of course, but talking about websites, looking at projects we're working on and sharing practical advice. It's becoming ever more so important to manage that online reputation. It certainly is, and to help people navigate and to ultimately get them to feel proud of their website. We have each episode has four segments, so we take you through the you ask, we answer where we take a subject that's been potentially submitted by the community or we've researched online and we dissect it.

We've got website stories where there's an article or a podcast or a video that myself or Pascal has found and we give you our take on it. We have the website Engine Room where both my, myself and Pascal suggest an app that might make your life easier as a website manager and website content creator. And finally, of course, the website call to action one change or adjustment that you should be making to your website right now. So without further ado, we'll drop straight into you ask. We answer. So thank you very much again, Gianni, for this great introduction and overview about the podcast and the program. There's a 12 The question she came about during a recent website workshop I was kind of facilitating and a client of mine is going to move on to their fifth or sixth website during the the kind of the duration of the existence of the business. And they were just about to cut corners just because, you know, it's familiar eventually to be launching a website and so on. And I was kind of pushing the designers to start from the very beginning, get the overview, get the requirements and start with the website wireframes.

And now as I use those terms, Jonny, there was either eyes being rolled around the room thinking, Oh, here we go again. Website wireframes or people actually not sure about what they were. And I said, Well, actually they are. They're very important. So the question is a 12 journey is what are wireframes and do they really help? Well, I think the problem without having a website wireframe is that you don't know where to start in terms of what looks right and what and how things are laid out. In fact, I'll tell you, we're in the middle of doing a new kitchen, okay? And it's a bit like trying to build a kitchen without doing some kind of design first. Where where do we want the appliances? Where do we want the sink? Where do we want the hob? Where do we want the cooker? How's how are we going to have that magic triangle? And it's and for me, wireframes give you that ability to actually start thinking about how a website even going to work what the what what journey are you going to take people through? What's going to be the key sections of each page of each page? What's going to be the prominent thing on the home page? How are you going to lay the content out? Never mind what the content is, never mind the imagery, never mind the brand, never mind that the wording, it's all about the layout.

How are you going to ensure that something looks. In a in a that's going to guide people through the journey that you want to take them on. So wireframes are blank, blank pieces of paper or digitally, of course, but with sort of dummy content, dummy segments, dummy locations for different types of things. So maybe, maybe where you might have buttons, where you might have a menu, where you might have imagery, where you might have different services, different products across the the home page. As a starting point, I like the idea of the, the kitchen design because without the plan, what you're describing is, you know, the people turning up with kitchen units and more and you on the dish saying, oh, don't like it or discovering it's too big, too small or the wrong color and this is just costing you a fortune money wise, but also time wise. And the other analogy that we could use, of course I'm going to use that one, is storyboarding for films.

It's a lot cheaper and easier to rob off, you know, a bit of drawings in a little rectangle that you've done with your pencil than having to film yet, you know, a full scene for another day. So for me, what the why frames do they invite? Reflection, which is very, very important. They invite ideas, but they also invite the client to ask questions because of course within that things are little enigmatic or not clear and the designer can respond to those questions or be inspired by those questions to come up with solutions. There's also an evolution because one of the reason one of the individuals was knocking on wireframes is that their experience was a essentially sketches with just lines of different thickness. But I still could imagine the website so well, there's, there's iteration process. So first you start with the outline and then you can layer it on with some prototype content, you a dummy content prototype content. So eventually you're to a point to where you visualize you've reacted and that becomes a visual brief for the designer to transform essentially words on a static screen or print out.

You like to use print towns for it to become a series of code and exist for real or virtually on the internet so the wire frames can appreciate, perhaps don't feel like it's exciting work or probably work, but without it down the line. As you heard a moment with Jonze's analogy with a kitchen is going to cost you a lot of time wasted and potentially money. Yeah. And it also helps you get clarity of the vision. It helps you prioritize in terms of which elements should be where and what's the what's the key call to actions. And it's the working on the projects that we've worked on, so many projects that we've worked on over the past without having a wireframe at the beginning and going straight into a design phase, you really do end up weeks into it thinking, Hang on a minute, why have we got that? There and why shouldn't that have been there? And and it takes away that initial thought because the problem with going straight into design is that everyone's just looking at the colors and the style and the imagery and the wording.

That's that's what happens if you start showing a design people latch on to. Yeah, but I don't like that picture. I think, I think we should be using a picture like this instead. But the, the point being missed, the first step is where should the picture be. Never mind what the picture is like that. And you're right because it's it's all about, you know, gathering of ideas and thoughts in a structured way to design that website experience so that your visitors are feel well looked after, which by extension, give them ideas of trust and veracity in your claims, whether you choosing words, pictures or videos. So for people who that met recently, you can roll your eyes all you want, but we will continue to use wireframes. Very good. Shall we move on to our next segment, which is website stories. Now Flip is number 12. We've chosen a video. Two things. This video gives you a bit of a lesson in content repurposing as you'll hear in the moment, but also they are some great advice.

So the video has a title of SEO techniques to Boost Organic Traffic. And this is a video featuring Neil Patel, the co-founder of NP Digital. But when you look at the video, Jonny, it's clearly an extract from an interview. So Neil Patel was a guest on someone else's platform and maybe months later we're given permission to take an extract and literally re-edit it to music and with great overlays and transitions and so on, just to make a very, very important point. So lesson in that, you know, if any of you have been a guest that could be in a written form, that could be in a podcast and a video, do talk to the organizers, you know, month later, once the original work has had a chance to have the impact and look at repurposing and give full credit. But on this video, this is all Neil Patel has asked a question. You know, if somebody is either newer to SEO or they feel like they've lost their way, what are the essential techniques that we should be concentrating on, particularly when time is against us? So the four that I've picked up from this video conversation, thanks for Neil Patel is number one.

There is definitely both for the humans if you will, visitors but also search engine and appeal for recency of the content. So go back to your stats, go back to your dashboard spot the high performing, high converting web pages and update the content a minimum. According to Neil Patel, this should be done quarterly to create a sense of recency. But I think for me as well for returning visitors, the idea that it feels like you care about the website and that you take pride about its content and so on. So action number one, action number two, it's about getting links, but do that more creatively and is number one tactic in addition to all the other ways in which you can get links pointing back to your website and driving traffic. It's a little bit of research research, online tools, online tools to ask cheaper and kind of efficient and impactful for for your customers and find a way to create a free of charge version doesn't have to be nearly directly complete. It could be a good solution.

But look at what people are using a and find interest in as an online tool that they're prepared to pay for. And can you release a free version as a PR stunt and try the interest of platform that review online tools and more and get those backlinks? Number three, look at partnership. And the other thing here, be careful. We all spend far too much time looking down at our keyboard to come up with content, but look around. Your services and products will complement someone else's services and products. Can you work in partnership and co-create content? Maybe packages of online experiences? And number four, which I thought was really quite interesting, would be to target international audiences where there would be less competition for your content in terms of its visibility using local network. And I think the logic would extend to necessarily international audiences. We could maybe find a different part of the different, you know, ecosystem on Facebook. So you could be looking at how do people kind of organize themselves and would you be better off in finding ways to get your content in those networks as opposed to trying to compete against the vast, vast network out there? So for tactics to which are under the label of SEO to boost your organic traffic with updating content on a regular basis, I love action one because it's content.

You know, if a user potential target audience gets to the website, they have to feel that it's relatable, it has to feel up to date. And and if you can tie it into, you know, even even local recent news stories or anything like that, especially on a conversion page, it gets across that your. In the moment that you're that it's relevant, that this is something that is right right now. And it's and this isn't dated. It's not out of date. Now, there is a downside to that that if you do update it a bit too much and make it too newsworthy, then you suddenly having to update it far too often. So there's a balance. But if you've got one particular conversion page that you might want to focus on, um, having something timely on there. Can make some big differences as long as you're updating it on a reasonably regular basis. So I really like that. Lynx Action two was all about Linux and ultimately whether we like it or not, you know, Google still says, Oh, it's not about Linux.

And you know, it's, you know, it's about quality and everything else. It is about Linux mean the data shows that it's about Linux, it's about the relevancy and it's about the trustworthiness of those links. And so it is about trying to find more creative ways of of getting those links and resources has been proven to be one of the ways that always works. I think working with in partnership with people is always a great idea, especially from a branding point of view. If you can find a similar type of brand where you've got similar types of of audience, similar customers and you can then cross sell collabs are a brilliant way and you see that, you see that with the luxury high end retailers, how they use A-listers and all of those collabs on Instagram, for example. So I think partnerships is really important. And then the target audience, I mean local SEO, yeah, that's there's some easy quick wins with local SEO. And if you can be if you can dominate in your local area or if you can name local areas that you want to dominate in, it's so much easier dominating in local areas than it is worldwide, of course.

So really great tips on a sort of going back to basics on how you're going to boost organic traffic. But isn't that interesting that an authority like Neil Patel has been working in the world of SEO for as long as I can remember? It was asked, you know, you give us your best top advice and he came up with very practical, sensible actions that we could all do, no matter our level of expertise when it comes to content marketing. Because the bottom line is this is all about common sense, and it's all about if you were Google, who would you rank and why would you rank and you know, the power of links? Well, that says to Google that, you know, if you've got high authority, relevant links, it tells Google that there's a reason for that. If you've got up to date content, Google's way more interested if you're partnering with another brand that Google likes well that's going to be given to you as well. And hyperlocal. Google wants to serve relevant local information.

If I search for a pizza restaurant, there's no point Google telling me about a fantastic restaurant in France if I'm currently in Leeds. What I like about the actual number four is about targeting and knowing your audience and breaking down the audience perhaps more thoroughly that you've done to date. So you've got, you know, hyper local, but also you could be very precise about the sector or the industry or the subsector within that industry and be really the authority within that. And then, as you was mentioning, you might find that, you know, in in terms of content and reach and and visibility perhaps, indeed, you know, the English speaking language in the UK and in America, it's just done. You know, there's thousands or billions of pages, but you could be maybe a small number in Germany where, you know, of course it makes sense for the German audience to know that because there would be people seeking out information in English because they want oddly that recency. They don't want to wait for it to be translated into German and fed down the line.

So I think when we actually before, it's also about being a little more stricter with regard to audience profiling. And we still happen to have covered in episode number 11 about avatars and archetypes. So yeah, go back to that, people. Yeah, I like it. We should remind you if you're watching if you're listening, that you can contact us at any time. If you want to add a comment right now whilst we're live or perhaps you're listening afterwards, watching afterwards, please do contact us if you've got any thoughts on this, any questions, anything in particular that you want us to talk about in future episodes? We love talking to our community, do we not? Pascal? We do indeed. We also like to give him work to do. And with that in mind, we're going to move on to our next segment, the website Engine Room. In each episode look to recommend a new app, a new solution for you to try out that hopefully will make life easier as a website manager and content creator.

So Jonny, what is your selection for episode 12? Well, this is a bit weird because we always sort of bring these to the show without telling each other prior. And interestingly, our first topic was around wireframes, and the tool that is been on my radar recently is one called framer.com. And Framer is a prototyping tool for interactive and animated designs. It's a great way to start coming up with some wireframes. What the reason it's been on my radar recently is because I am on a huge AI journey, which, you know, Pascal's fully aware of, and there's pros and cons of that, but it has recently got AI built into it and it just absolutely makes designs come alive. So it's all about being able to literally go to the tool and be able to add real data, to be able to build responsive layouts, dynamically animate elements. And it gives you that bridge between static designs and the final production code and really makes it very easy to drag and drop and to move things around and to really bring something to life to help you see what it could look like.

What is interesting is we talked a lot about in the green room and on a regular basis, when I get a very excited email from John saying I've found something new to play with and I'm trying to be the voice of reason, so I'll just slow it down, you know? But no, you actually run because what I is doing very well, as you know, I like to call it the digital assistant is to vastly, vastly improve the richness and the usefulness of the research phase or the deliberation phase. And this is an example of that, which is you get to the point where you're going to make better decisions thanks to how accelerated the creation of mockups to engage people and get a reaction from people. Yeah, it's. It's. It's definitely on my list. What is your website? Engine room top app for today. What? It is an AI powered solution. Are things difficult to escape them at this moment in time? But this one is really once again inspired by the need for my customers to go back to long form content creation.

And there's almost a link with what we discussed a moment ago with SEO techniques. And what I've said to them is because you spend so much time going for short form content, sometimes it was social media because of microblogging or sometime because of the misunderstanding and misinformation about short is better, but not all of the time. You have to be doing deep dive article, interviews, podcast and more. So see what you need to relearn is to give yourself a good brief internally. In fact, if you're using third party copywriters and content creators, they need a good brief from. So the briefing stage is very, very important. It's almost like wireframe, isn't it? What are the sections, the header subheadings and more of that article, that interview, that video before you even get started. And this platform called Perplexity. Perplexity. I love the term. It allows you to ask the question. I'm about to add an article about this subject. Can you please suggest the structure, the headlines and sub headlines that I should consider to write a brief? So actually put it to the test.

I put together a bit of an instruction prompt. I prefer the term brief. As you know what I was asking for the advice on perplexity for a long article called What is SEO and How does It Help my website perform better? So I said, You know, I need to write this article. Can you suggest the headers and sub headers? And sure enough, I received a brief. What is lovely about perplexity is write it in a form of instruction. So you'll say to me you need to define SEO and explain its purpose. You literally says you have to explain the difference between on page and off page SEO. So he's using words like define discuss and all those things. There's sections like how does help the website perform better and the subject discuss how SEO increase visibility. Explain. And you've got all those action verbs that make it read and sound like an actual brief, and then you can either use it for inspiration for yourself or of course you can give it to others to complete each of those kind of action phrases like provide tips for optimizing content for SEO, discuss the best practices to avoid black hat and techniques, you know, summarize.

So all those kind of action sentences can then be copied and added back to perplexity or ChatGPT and ask them to give you some additional guidelines on what the content should be for that paragraph or that subsection. So the assistant is really helping accelerate the point where you could sit down and put your favorite music on, have a glass of wine if it's the right time of day, and start to create content with your own real tone of voice in a strategic, structured way that takes into account all the aspects of great content, which is which is the the bit that is missing in a lot of cases for unless you're, you know, unless you're a unless you write content for a living, then then there's often lots of gaps in terms of what that content needs to deliver. So yeah, very clever. Do you like it? Well, it's integrated with AI, so of course I like it. Let's let's be honest. No, absolutely. But for me, that's what it's all about. Because if I close on that saying, I could have said to perplexity, I write the article for me, but the amount of time I've spent re-editing the article because it didn't sound right or didn't sound like me, or there was lots of things missing, it's just not worth it.

You much better off asking the assistant to guide you and give you the structure, the framework, the wireframes, if you will, so that you can then really spend your time being creative and get get that just reward. And and ultimately, the thing here is, is that if you were just to get it to write it for you, there's a number of elements that are missing in terms of the process. So, for example, one of the things that I really enjoy doing, for example, podcasts like this, creating content right now, it gets me thinking, it gets me reflecting, it gets me learning. And if you were to ask the tool just to write it for you, if ask the tool to do this podcast for me, which you you can I could get an AI to be to be my avatar to, to, to fully do this. Um, and but but whereas. I'll lose the learning, I'll lose the reflecting. I'll and I'll lose that thinking. And those are really important.

And if anything, it just helps you bring more strategy to all of those things. So yeah, I think it might be time for our next segment, which is the website call to action. The website call to action. This is the one change, the one adjustment that you should be making right now to make website work smarter for you, but also for you to feel prouder of your website. So Jonny, what is your call to action? When did you last test? The forms on your website forms fail all the time. They fail with regard to whether it be spam, captchas breaking, whether it be email, Smtp breaking, whether it be fields not being validated correctly, all sorts of different things. It could be that across different browsers perhaps, or different devices, Maybe suddenly WordPress has an update which suddenly stops a particular form, not no longer work on a mobile device. So when did you last test your forms? When did you last validate all the fields to make sure they're working correctly? When did you make sure that the content, the data is being sent to the right place? Did you test it against different browsers, different devices, and more importantly, check that the email notifications that perhaps tell you that someone's tried to speak to you or tells the user that you're going to be in touch, make sure that you've checked the email notifications are working as well.

So my quick tip for today website call to action is test your website forms. Thank you very much. So wise I've seen situation where customers even had auto responders giving contact details or people have moved on from the organization. So there was also false information. So yeah, very, very important to be done. I would say monthly give that someone to do for you. Mine is actually inspired by the website stories this SEO for. Kind of online traffic. And this is all about checking the source and origin of your inbound links and also citations. So where is your brand and the individuals working for you? When are they mentioned in an article potentially that doesn't have a link? So what I would do is check the source and origin different ways you can. You can just Google yourself, you can look in your dashboard, make a list, and then as a collective with your colleagues, look at the online brands and the platforms and decide whether or not two things should there be highlighted on your website. A bit of a PR kind of push saying, you know, we are featured in that could be an interesting one.

You can make it a press release. But I would also add, you know, the the reference to those brands and platforms in your sales communication or your pitch deck. But importantly, I would then get in touch back with them and say, well, thank you very much. And we have a backlink, we have a citation, we have a small reference. Shall we collaborate on content together? Because right now it's working for for us, we're getting traffic from you. We need to, you know, perhaps amplify and stimulate even more traffic. So we collaborate and create some interesting content together. So check the source of your inbound links and citation and then come up with a strategic move to get more value from them. What an episode. Lots of content. Yet again, we have been discussing website wireframes. Why do we need website wireframes? How helpful are they? We talked about how they really help you get the clarity of vision. They help you think about the customer journey. We talked about website stories and and we heard what the expert said around SEO techniques.

We realized that a lot of it was common sense. It was about updating your content on a regular basis. It was about creating backlinks to your website, doing partnerships and collabs and jumping on that hyperlocal. Search engine optimization. In the website engine room, we talked about two apps. There was perplexity AI. All of these apps will be in the show notes with clickable links. We talked about perplexity I to really strategically have a digital assistant to help you write content. We've talked about framer going back to the wireframe framer was a great prototyping tool that really brought your designs to life. And then lastly, of course, we talked about the website call to action. We just heard Pascal talking about finding the source and the origin of your inbound links and citations and how you can then use that data to collaborate or to produce more content or produce press releases. And I talked about when did you last check your forms on your website? Make sure that if someone wants to contact you that your form at least works.

That Pascal hearing, hearing all of the content that we've gone through today, any reflection or any thoughts on what we've discussed? Well, the thought is how do we manage to pack this in in half an hour? This is the first question because I'm more familiar with long form content as people know. So this is just great. And for me, it's just that constant reinforcement that therefore it's achievable. It is within everyone's reach to get the website to work harder for you and to feel proud of your website. Again, you need systems in place. You need obviously, I think generally a team effort. I don't think it's just one person really needs to get behind what is essentially the most important investment for your virtual representation online and your reputation. Guys. I'm afraid that is it for today. That was episode 12 of our new podcast series, The Audio Companion to the 90 Day Website Mastery Program. For more information, please visit 90 Day Marketing Mastery and you'll be able to book your discovery call with either myself and Pascal.

We'll be back with another episode. In the meantime, feel free to send your questions, share your preferred apps and links to your website once you've made those changes we spoke about because we'd love to give you a shout out, but for now, bye everyone, and we'll leave you with a fun video and audio montage whilst you go through your notes and actions. Take care.