The Transcript

Google Is Going Mobile First with Mobile Results & Load Speed

Loren Baker: Hi, this is Loren Baker, and welcome to the inaugural episode of my first podcast ever, Search & Deploy.

Basically the format is that there’s a lot of search news going on in the world and there’s a lot of blogs writing about Search, but I want to talk about how to actually utilize what’s being written and what’s being set out there in the market and deploy it into your marketing strategies.

So with each episode, we’re going to start off with the monologue done by yours truly, and then I’m going to bring in a special guest. So that’s it for the monologue today, and my first guest ever to Search & Deploy is none other than , the founder of Raven Tools. So, Jon, welcome to Search & Deploy.

Jon Henshaw: Thank you. Just because I’m from Nashville doesn’t mean you have to say it so slowly.

Loren Baker: Well, it’s supposed to be a radio show, right?

Jon Henshaw: I feel like in your monologue that you should’ve then said Loren Baker.

Loren Baker: Oh, being that you’re from Kentucky. I was trying to do my Johnny Cash thing there.

Jon Henshaw: No, not Tennessee. It s all the same to you.

Loren Baker: So welcome to the show, Jon. It’s great to have you.

Jon Henshaw: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Loren Baker: When I’ve been getting ready for the show, I was going to listen to a bunch of other business podcasts, but I thought to myself, Hey, when I started Search Engine Journal back in the day, I didn’t go look at a bunch of other search blogs because they just didn’t exist. And it worked, right? So I didn’t listen to any business podcasts getting ready for this. What I did was watch a bunch of old episodes of Letterman and Carson and stuff like that because I think that format is just what people use anyway. And if it worked for them, it should work for us, right?

Jon Henshaw: Yeah, I think you have the exact same approach I have towards everything. The same way I approached Raven and everything else. I’m the type of person where somebody comes up and goes, “Have you read this book and that book and that book on how to do such as such ? And I’m like, “No,” and they say, “Man, really, it’s helped me with my business. And then they re like, What do you do?” And I say, “I just make a lot of mistakes”

Loren Baker: Exactly, right? And then one day write a book about that, or maybe we can together.

Jon Henshaw: Fail quickly. And then eventually, you’re going to get something right I swear.

Loren Baker: When I was done with college, I swore that I was never going to read a non-fiction book again just because I’d loaded up on them. And what I typically find is that most of the good stuff from the business books is published on Inc. and Forbes and stuff like that anyway as an attempt to market the books. I just digest things. My attention span is so short, mostly because of watching funny clips on YouTube all day.

Jon Henshaw: Of course, well it’s funny, too, because I would say that the two of us probably read the equivalent of many, many books a year, simply from all things that we read online because really where I’m getting the most inspiration, where I’m learning things that are really fairly new and things that people want to talk about, come from people I know and people I follow. So the amount of things I read every day on blogs and in different places, the people I really respect — like AJ Kohn, those type of people.

Loren Baker:. Yep.

Jon Henshaw: Those kind of replace the need for what people are doing that’s working.

Loren Baker: Yep. Also, by the time a book is published, usually a lot of that information isn’t as relevant as it could be. And a lot of the folks that I do read online that have published very good books in their own right, typically utilize their blog and social media to kind of test that content before publishing it anyway, so I already feel like I ve read it. Let s get right into it.

Jon Henshaw: I was going to say one other thing which is, neither of us can read. We’re talking about blogs that mostly are made of pictures. So Tumblr basically makes up my entire daily reading.

Loren Baker: That’s why we’re doing a podcast.

Jon Henshaw: Exactly. Because we can’t read.

Loren Baker: I can t write either. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t want to write anymore, like two emails a day is my limit.

Jon Henshaw: It hurts my hand.

Loren Baker: God bless Siri.

Jon Henshaw: You were saying about starting the podcast, what was that?

Loren Baker: I’m off track now.

Jon Henshaw: I’ve done my job.

Who is Jon Henshaw?

Loren Baker: I ll let you introduce yourself.

Jon Henshaw: Okay.

Loren Baker: Tell the audience of Search & Deploy — which is a Rainmaker.FM production a little bit more about yourself.

Jon Henshaw: Okay. Well like you said, my name is Jon Henshaw.

Loren Baker: I just speak slow, Jon. Forgive me.

Jon Henshaw: I know. It’s okay. I have been doing web design, Internet marketing stuff for many, many years. I guess I got started around 96 or something like that. I am most well-known, if anybody does know me, from being one of the co-founders of Raven, which is an Internet marketing platform that’s mainly used by agencies and in-house marketing departments for their reporting.

So we have a really great reporting engine. That’s the main thrust, and the second biggest reason people use us is because of our automated site auditor, which we made a couple of years ago — we’re actually doing a whole lot of work right now and improving that. And then we have a bunch of other tools. We originally got started as just an SEO tool set, which was basically just an app for link builders, and we had one of the first automated web-based rank trackers, a whole link management system. But we pretty much have kind of diversified over several years, and now we’re really just focused on being and continuing to become the best reporting platform.

Loren Baker: Yeah. One thing I do like about your reporting set is that it’s browser based and mobile friendly, which I liked a lot when you rolled that out, which kind of bring us into a lot of what we’re going to talk about later. It seems that you guys have really been focusing not only on your feature set, but also on the user experience at the end of the day.

Jon Henshaw: Yeah. Actually this is probably the first time I ve said this publicly anywhere. Starting in this past January, we made a dramatic shift in how we were going to approach the product, develop the product, and interact with our customers. We have shifted over to something called The Lean Startup.

Lean Startup is a pretty amazing approach to how you do product development, and there s basically two direct phases that a company can be in. They can be a company that truly is just starting up and then the phase that we’re in, where we actually have our product with a lot of real customers and paying customers with a proven product. So there’s a methodology to how you improve upon that. And a lot of that has to do with UX. In fact, I would say that the core part of that and the part that we’re growing internally is our UX department and being in contact with our customers — and even non-customers — and finding out what works best for them, what they use, and what they don’t use.

And what that means is that, over time, you end up trimming out the things that people really don’t need and don t use and enhancing the things that they really do like and use so that it becomes the best product, and it’s not as overwhelming. One of the things that a lot of new users who come to the Raven today experience things like, Wow there’s so many things to do, I feel little overwhelmed.

The idea of what the product should become with this approach is that a year from now or maybe a little longer, Raven’s going to look a lot different. It’s going to be more refined. It’s going to be a lot simpler to use. It’s actually going to help people do the things they need to do. And it will most likely have less choices. It will have less things that people don’t need, and the things they do need will just be better. So that’s kind of where we’re taking it right now.

Loren Baker: Very cool. That’s fairly relevant to well, first of all, a couple of things I’m not a very productive or organized person by any means.

Jon Henshaw: We re like brothers, man. Brothers from another mother.

Loren Baker: Yeah. But I have been totally checking out stuff like productivity hacking and growth hacking recently. And the one common denominator — whatever you want to call it is that it’s very easy to take a project that you’re passionate about and try to be everything for everyone, when at the end of the day, you’re really doing too much for a small component of your market base and not really addressing the need on a grand scale.

Jon Henshaw: We’ve been here for eight years plus, and when we started, our main customers were advanced SEO agency types. That s who they were, and over the years, we’ve done a huge shift too — so has the industry itself.

There s been a huge shift towards marketing agencies in general now doing the things that they never did as far as SEO and social and so on. You have less experts who are in need of these particular resources. And so we ve had to make, and we re still in the process of making, a big shift toward providing more help and making things easier to do because the majority of our customers and potential customers are non-experts.

Loren Baker: Yeah.

Jon Henshaw: They have been given this task — and they’re intelligent people — and they’re learning from reading books and going to conferences and through practice. Today the big shift has been that they need tools that are going to give them insights. They need tools that are going to hold their hands just a little bit and do things that are inefficient for them.

Loren Baker: Right.

Jon Henshaw: And basically help them do their job, help them do the job better, and that’s the big shift that I’ve seen. And then you had mentioned that you try to do all these things — that’s the other part where we’re counting on the Lean Startup approach to get us out of that hole we put ourselves into where we’re trying to be all things.

Loren Baker: Yeah.

John Henshaw We’re kind of pulling back from that and not being all things to everybody and instead approaching the things that people use the most, the real reasons why most of our customers pay us money, and making those things better and work better.

Loren Baker: And an analogy I used, well not really an analogy, but a comparison that I use a lot of the times, too. It used to be the SEO person who was sitting in the cubicle at the end of the office in the dark, doing their own magic stuff and running affiliate programs on the side or whatever– the person no one in marketing really talked to and no one in IT really had much respect for. But now that hidden cubicle person is becoming more of a center in the overall digital marketing fold.

Jon Henshaw: That person s becoming a director.

Loren Baker: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Henshaw: If you have somebody who, like what you were saying, is a growth hacker type of person and actually has done all the things, they may not be the best in all the things, but they know how to do all the things. They know what works.

Loren Baker: Yep.

Jon Henshaw: They’re on top of it. That ends up being somebody who ends up directing a team today.

Loren Baker: Exactly.

Jon Henshaw: As opposed to sitting in the dark running their affiliate sites.

Loren Baker: Yeah, exactly. The way a lot of things have worked too over the past couple of years, especially with the opportunities that social and everything else brings, is that’s important to SEO, and SEO’s important to social, and content supports everything. So it kind of brings it all together. Kudos for putting together a suite to be able to not only monitor all that but report efficiently on it.

Jon Henshaw Thanks.

Google’s Labeling of SERPS

Loren Baker: So let’s get into the news. One of the biggest trends, or some of the biggest signals that we’ve been seeing coming from camp Google really over the past couple of years is that mobile and things like mobile friendliness, site speed, and other obvious components of the user experience are really becoming more important in Search.

Jon Henshaw: SSL.

Loren Baker: Yeah. And then today, the Google Webmaster Tools team announced that the mobile friendliness will officially become a ranking factor on April 21st, which I’m going to coin Doomsday right now. Luckily this podcast will be published before then — but I work on some accounts right now where mobile traffic, it’s not only the majority of the traffic on some sites, but it’s an overwhelming majority. Like especially in the EDU space.

We’re working on an EDU site right now. We’re talking about 65-67% of all traffic to the property is mobile, and we’re seeing that same number with search referrals. You know Google has finally come out and said, Hey, this is going to be a component. It’s not just forecasting. It’s not just us doing SEO soothsaying, that they are going to adjust the algorithm to address mobile friendliness.

And then yesterday in the same fashion that Google introduced mobile-friendly labeling in the SERPS, they started testing the labeling of slow serving sites or sites with different page speed issues, which we’ve all known has been a component of rankings. But my theory there is that it s just going to become a bigger component, and it’s such an underlying component to overall mobile friendliness in the long run. So what are your thoughts on that? Have you really noticed anything previously before this announcement?

Jon Henshaw: You know what’s fascinating is that certainly there is the obvious trend of traffic going to mobile. It just is. It s a thing unrelated to anything else. More people are using mobile devices to access their data.

Loren Baker: Right.

Jon Henshaw: The thing that interests me the most is the influence that Google has on webmasters, and that’s why I threw in SSL when you were rattling off that list because basically Google has this sword or wand, or whatever you want to call it, that they can wave around at any moment and basically everybody has to jump to some extent.

So it’s one of the things where even though you knew it was coming, and if you were smart about it, you would already be doing a responsive design with your site and that type of thing. It s hard...