But just remember why you're doing the ad in the first place and use the right channel. So digital is gonna get you digital traffic. And physical is typically going to get you physical traffic. You can also drive digital through mailers and that kind of thing, but you're gonna get more digital traffic by doing digital ad spend. Welcome to the natural products Marketer Podcast. I'm Tina.

And I'm Amanda. And we're here to make marketing easier for natural products, businesses so you can reach more people and change more lives. So today, we are talking about what to do if your website isn't working, or maybe it is working, but you don't know that it's working. And you just assume that it isn't. Maybe there are certain things that you think should be functioning a certain way and have these expectations. And that's just not the case. So Tina is going to kind of just walk us through some different things about what to look for, to actually assess if your website is working or not. So I mean, Tina, what's typically like the first thing that you look for when it comes to when you know, a client comes up to you and they're like, my website's not working. Let's start over, what do you typically tell them?

Yes. So I think people come to this decision, probably one of three ways. Number one, they feel like they're not getting any in store traffic, or increased purchases from having a website at all. Or they had a website before they change something things went down. Or number three, they hear about this good new messaging framework or something else that sounds like oh, that could probably really work for us. Maybe we should try to do it. And then people make investments in a new website and new message, new branding, and they never fixed the problem, because they have not figured out what the problem is. So when people come to me, and they say, We need a new website, I'm like, do you really let's talk about this. So one of the first things that we look for is whether or not you're getting enough traffic to your website. And one of the ways that we talk about whether or not that's happening is we look into Google Analytics, just to see how much volume you've got coming. We marry that against what you think you should be getting, like, what is your goal for traffic that you're getting. And then we talk a little bit about conversion. So on a normal website, conversion rates are anywhere from one to 3%, that's average across the board. So if you have a specific sales goal, we can back into the math of how many people you need coming to that website in order to get that rate of conversion, that level of sales. So we are nerds, we want you to get an ROI. And we like to back into the math to figure out if something's working or not. So the first place that we always look is how many users are coming to your website per month, and how many you need in order to get to your sales goal. So

remind those who are listening that maybe didn't listen to the other episode where we talked about conversions. What is a conversion? Because I think there's a misconception that conversion means to means online sale, right? Yeah, that is a little bit of a misconception. It can be anything from someone signing up for an email list,

signing up for a webinar or coming to an event coming into your store, all the way to making a purchase. So obviously, the purchase is what you're hoping will happen in the end, but a website conversion, and when we talk about that one to 3% rate is just converting them to take the action that you're asking them to take when they come to the website that might be shopping, it might also be a newsletter, email, list, or event. And in those cases, you have to understand that you're gonna have some split focus, if you're asking for more than one call to action, you're gonna have people that one to 3% conversion is gonna go kind of across the board, and it will be heavier on the things that cost less. So think about enrolling in an email list or even coming to an A virtual event, versus visiting your store versus making a purchase. Those cost them more in time, effort and money. And so the conversions are going to skew less in that direction and more into the easier ways to convert. So what are some ways that people can just improve their overall site traffic? First, again, I want to focus on how many people you've got coming to the website and I mean, unique users, and I want to think of it in the ways of whether or not they meet your ideal audience. So if we're gonna get you to a one to 3% conversion rate or even better We need to know that you've got enough traffic in your pool of people. That makes sense. So when I'm looking at traffic analytics, I do go into demographics because you know who you serve, they're typically in a certain age bracket, they might be male versus female, or the other way around, there are some locations that make more sense for your store, especially if you have a physical store. So I'm here in Chattanooga, if I'm looking at website traffic, and I don't do any online sales, I'm going to be looking right in the Tennessee Georgia area, right for people to be able to come to my store. And typically, people will travel 10 to 15 miles. And I know some of you are doing such a wonderful job with your customer experience in your store that you're getting people from hours away. So look at that radius, if those are the kinds of people you're attracting into your store, but the typical store is gonna get 10 to 15 miles from their location, people coming to see them. So I would concentrate specifically on that demographic, going into the age brackets going into the gender that you know, comes into your store most often and say, Okay, now how many of those Am I getting in traffic to my website, and then after that, you want to make sure that you've got at least 100 people per month in that user bracket coming in website traffic to visit your online store. And the reason is, because statistical data won't make any sense unless you at least have that kind of a sample size. So if you have less than 100, and we just looked at a website where this was happening the other day, they're in North Carolina, they thought they had a lot of traffic in their area, based on their website data. And it turned out that they only had about 20 to 30 website, visitors a month, and then a conversion rate, that's one to 3%, you're just not going to get many sales out of that. So you're not going to get a good ROI, even if you do change your math message. So I like to look at the traffic and the data to tell me the right story first. And then if I know and in that case, we do we need to boost traffic. And we've got some options that we can put into place. And there are some quick options, you can have some quick wins, and there are some slower options. So one of the things that we focus a lot on is SEO. And that's just search engine optimization, where if someone puts a keyword into Google or another search engine, they're gonna find you. That is a long term solution. So I don't recommend that if you need good use right away. I don't recommend heading right to SEO as your solution. What I would recommend though, ads, ads will jump you up right in front of all that search traffic for keyword terms that you know people are looking for when they come to your store. And seeing things like health foods, supplements, those are key word terms that we hear a lot. And you're gonna want to buy geo geographic locations if you're in that store situation where you've got 15 to 20 miles that people might be covering to come to your store. So ads are a surefire way to jump up to the top of the list and grab some more traffic quickly. I would invest heavily there initially start tapering off as you do some more organic things to your website to bring traffic to your store. And when I talk about some more organic things, here's another way to get organic traffic in the long run while you're having a quick win Google My Business. So everyone should make sure that their Google My Business Profile is up to date. And other registries like it. So things like Yelp, white pages, even there's a list of like hundreds of registries that you can get on and it's usually fairly cheap for you to get out there and get on the registry. And you want to lead people to your website and to your store. And from those registry listings, but most of all, you want customer reviews. That's how those businesses get served up on maps and in local registries faster. So it is playing the search engine game but you're doing it like in Maps or in Yelp or whatever the registry is that people are going to to look for products like yours, right

and especially if you're in a you know, a more competitive market, like you have to like Google My Business, it's free and takes like five minutes to set it up. Like that's like you know, we talk about low hanging fruit all the time. It's like that is one of the easiest things you can do with very little time very I mean, no money and it can have a huge impact.

Yeah, and Google all the time does tutorials for how to make this happen. So you can literally just get on YouTube and find power I set up my Google My Business account, and you probably already have one, if you're a store location, you just want to make sure it's up to date, for sure. And then the second thing that you do in conjunction with that is, almost every store we talk to you has an email list. And they have a healthy one, because usually they're doing some sort of discount promotion events or rewards program. So you're capturing a lot of emails, when people are coming to shop at the store, to an email campaign to encourage some of the Google reviews to happen. And again, you're you're wanting hundreds of Google My Business reviews so that you can show up in maps, and that you're getting a good result. There's always I'm not saying like bribe people, but offering an incentive for just doing the review and making sure you're saying things like, your honest review is what we're looking for, but offering some kind of incentive some, like get a free gift at the store, the next time you come in, or some sort of discount. And I don't know if you could speak to this, Amanda, if you guys have done any campaigns like that, like what, what incentives do you offer to get people to do the reviews?

Yeah, I mean, it could be something as simple as you know, get, I use this example a lot. Some of these small bio bottles of vitamin D, like your cost on those is like three or five bucks, that review is going to be worth more than three to $5. So just something like that, where it's just a very fair exchange, you could do just show us your phone, you know, we'll give you this free bottle of vitamin D. You can even get that product comped from the company where it's like, hey, like, we want to give away tons of free vitamin D to people can we get that? Or you could do a protein bar or you know, a glass of kombucha or depending on, you know, yeah, just come up with different partnership type things where it's no money out of your own pocket. And it's like, oh, yeah, like we partner with this local kombucha company. And every time we do a Google review, we're giving them a free bottle of kombucha it's support, like you're getting their product into someone's hands. Like, there's so many ways that you can do that, where it's going to cost you zero money out of your own pocket. Like, and people like free stuff where it's like, Okay, that'll take, it takes two minutes to write an honest review, it doesn't have to be anything super lengthy. Because that's the thing is, I feel like with Google reviews, unless you are asked, you're only I feel like at least for me, personally, I'm only going to do a Google review. If I had a fantastic experience or a really bad one. There's not a whole lot of like, middle of the road, even though even if you're a regular, like if you go to this one, you know, coffee shop regularly, I can think of one I literally am a regular I have never left them a Google review. And like, it's like, I almost feel like I owe them one. Because they like they're just a great coffee shop. But I'm just like, you just don't think about it as as a customer. So if you ask, it's like, well, yeah, I love you guys. Of course I will. So I think it's just as simple as asking. And I think an email campaign is a great way to do that. Or, you know, you could do something at the bottom of your your receipt, you know, just a reminder, it doesn't even have to be like an exchange of goods, it could just be a reminder that you put at the bottom of your receipts. Mm hmm.

Well, I was thinking too, I mean, free samples, I can imagine you can get those from vendors all day long. And even if you had a sign at your register, that was just like, submit a Google review now show us and we'll give you this free sample. So you might not even have to do an email campaign, depending on how many people you have coming in your store. But just getting those reviews in Google, Yelp, and those other registries, it's going to help you get more traffic to your website, you're going to be served up in Maps more often, which is really important if you need foot traffic. Yep. And so those are just super important to get to boost your traffic quickly. So we were talking about other ways to boost traffic quickly. So ads, first of all, would be a great idea to these traffic quickly. Google My Business and other registries and getting those customer reviews in there. And then press releases. People often forget press releases, but I encourage people to do this once a month. They're a little pricey. They can get like five or $600 and you will need someone that's good at writing press releases. But you can announce almost anything in a press release and I local online Paper Magazine news broadcaster is going to pick it up because they need content all day long. So it can be an event. Hey, we just hired this new person. And here's their unique experience that will serve our audience. Well. Lots of you guys are doing like educational workshops and announce those and press releases all day long. Because that will get served up in your local area newspapers, it might even turn up in print. You never know that will drive people both to the event and also to your website, because you'll be linking back in this press releases. And I would just encourage people find someone on Fiverr or Upwork, who writes press releases for a living like that, sir concentration, tell them what your topic is and what you're trying to accomplish. You want more traffic, or you want more people to your event workshop store. And they will help you craft something and then you drop it on the wire, which they can also probably help you do for five or 600 bucks for you to buy one pair and you can buy packages of press releases for cheaper. So if you have some sort of six month content plan that you're going to roll out, then you can just buy a package for a little bit cheaper than that. But anniversaries. I mean, there are a million reasons that you can drop a press release. And if you just Google Online, what should a store with a storefront? Do a press release on you're gonna get a whole, like hundreds of ideas around what you could talk about latest promotions, new products, new people, workshops, education events. And that's a quick way to get more traffic to your website. And the reason is because it's backlinking from other very credible news resources, they're backlinking to your website, which boosts your credibility with Google, and they're going to serve you up in search more often for the key terms that you're talking about in the press release. So that's way three to do that pretty fast. Yeah.

So this is kind of a little bit. I mean, it's all related to increasing traffic. But going back to these paid ads, you know, what's your opinion on doing doing different types of ads, because there's, you know, you could just run a generic Google ad campaign where you know, people type in health food store near me, and you would be coming up in that. And that's going to be pulling from, you know, from Google maps from, you know, all of these things. And then there might be some different articles that might come up and things like that. But what about like display ads, where, because if, if anyone is in the marketing realm and has a physical location, I guarantee you, if you are in charge of that department, you are being bombarded by tons of people saying, oh, we'll do SEO for you, we'll do digital display ads for you. Let's do TV ads, like all of this stuff. What have you found to be most effective, maybe best bang for your buck.

So two things that we like to encourage our clients to do, and just remember what your goal is. So if you are trying to solve a website problem, a billboard might not get you there, because of someone's past that you might get foot traffic into your store. Maybe that's your goal. But just remember why you're doing the ad in the first place and use the right channel. So digital is gonna get you digital traffic. And physical is typically going to get you physical traffic. You can also drive digital through mailers, and that kind of thing, but you're gonna get more digital traffic by doing digital ad spend. So two things that we would encourage happening on ads are first remarketing. So any traffic that's already coming to your website, and your email list can be uploaded to Google and to Facebook and to other places where you can run ads. And that is the warmest traffic you'll get if you're trying to increase traffic and conversions at the same time. Do it warm all day long, low ad spend, maybe like six to eight different topics that you're covering, which can be pain points, credibility, ways that you've had success before, specific deals that you're running ways people can opt in to your email list. And also personality. Please talk about your store experience and the personality of the people that work there. Because that is typically what's going to differentiate you from your competitors and having those types of ads showing up especially to a warm audience is hugely important. And the reason is that only 7% of website visitors are typically used ready to make a Buy Now decision when they visit your website. So staying top of mind and being in front of them when they are ready to make a Buy Now decision is hugely important and that's why we believe in remarketing more than any other ads by the way we believe in remarketing. And then the second one is to have those same types of ads running in your geographic location. So geo targeted, and it can be text. And it can be display ads, Google, Facebook, meta, whatever they're calling themselves these days, like whatever platform your people are spending a lot of time on. And there are tons of ad services that can advise around this, and they'll charge you a fee to set things up. But if you want to go simple, you can probably do some of these ads yourself by boosting posts on Facebook, or and just making sure you're uploading your audience. So you're targeting the right people, whether it be through a lookalike audience or something else. But most of the time, you have to get an expert involved, because you don't know how to do this. So you're going to spend time learning it. So there is a fee associated with getting these things set up. But you can direct the person who's working with you on these are the kinds of things that we'd like to spend our ads on, and keywords, geographic location, specific demographics about your audience, and then remarketing off of your website, those are the top ones that we would suggest.

Yeah, and I'll just hit on that, again, that it, it's almost just better to hire somebody to do it. Because to try to learn Google AdWords by yourself, or how to best use Facebook, you know, post boosting, and things like that, like it, it takes a lot of time. And from someone who's attempted to learn it on my own, just words of wisdom, just hire it out,

you have other things that you're trying to do. So if you're a business owner, or the manager of the store, you have so many other things you're focused on, right? Even if you're just the marketing person, there's so many avenues that you can pursue. And just, you know, full disclosure, we don't do ads. So I'm not recommending that people come to us for ads, but I still recommend going to an expert to get it.

Because I mean, even if you just think like, oh, it just say you make you know,$40 an hour or whatever it's like, Okay, how many hours is it going to take me to spend like to attempt to learn this back end of Google ads, and then to figure out, Okay, I'm going to target such and such demographic in this location, and all of that pretty soon, you're at, you know, five hours, and it's like, well, dang, I could have paid someone $300, who already knows how to do this, that's maybe their monthly fee, just to set it up. And it's almost like a set it and forget it type thing or modify as you go. When you see how you know, your initial setup works. And then you just have your spend after that. It's like it's unless you really, really want to learn how to do that. It's, there are much more economical ways that won't want won't make you want to pull your hair out. Because it Yeah, it's a

lot. Yeah, and you know, especially if you've got a long way to go. So like the company in North Carolina we were working with at 20 to 30 people a month, and we need to get them to get to the conversion rate that they want, we need to get them over 1000 in their particular demographic, that's a big leap to make to just try your hand up putting ads together. So that's why hugely encouraged, especially if you've got a big gap, because you're gonna make mistakes the first few times that you do it, and it's gonna be sort of, you're gonna feel like it's money down the drain, even though you're learning as you go. But if you've got a big gap, and you you have a short runway to get to results, then I would definitely invest with an expert.

Yeah, for sure. And one thing that I really just and this is something you said, like at the very beginning of this episode was that, you know, you almost don't even want to work with people until you address the root problem. And I love that where it's like, you don't have a met, maybe you maybe you do have a messaging problem. But at the end of the day, you have a traffic problem. And so it's like, I love just that honesty of, you know, let's address the problem before we you know, dive in and spend 1000s of dollars completely redoing your website, like what are some of these quick little things that you can do, so that you can start to address that root problem. And then once that has been addressed, and we're making steps in the right direction, then let's look at maybe some of these other problems. So what are I mean, what are some of these other things that you see as like major things that might be telltale signs that your website isn't working?

Yeah. So just to kind of track back to what you were talking about addressing the root cause. The reason that we want to do that is because there is a hierarchy of what needs to be fixed on our website in order to get it to work. So for conversions, there's almost always a way to tune it up so that it performs better. There are almost always ways that we can make that work better. And marketing is this living, breathing thing that needs to get tested and people change and algorithms change. So there are constant adjustments that need to happen on a website as far as messaging is concerned. So when people come and they say, I need a new message, they probably do. Or they probably need some tweaks on their website to make it work better for them. But the biggest thing for me is, if you have zero people coming to your website, you cannot convert means zero times anything is zero. And typically, people have more than zero, but you know, having a 1% percentage of 20 people, that's just not enough to make it worth investing these 1000s of dollars that it takes to redo your message and do a whole campaign when you still haven't fixed the initial problem, which is bringing people to your website. So that's one of the key performance indicators that we always look at is that the traffic and within the right demographic to make sure we're getting ideal audience people to you, because that's the other thing that people can get hung up on. They're, like, have 1000s of visitors to my website, then we go in and look at it. And it's like they're from India. So you're in North Carolina, like, it's just not gonna work out for you probably, unless you can do overseas shipping and that kind of thing. So especially for our storefront, people, we need them, we need the right people coming to the website. So traffic is a telltale sign and the right traffic. So getting into that ideal audience is a big sign. The other things that really go wrong is how long are people staying on your website. So this is horrifying, maybe. But typical average time spent on our website is about 20 seconds. So you do need a good message that captures people quickly. But and that's across the board on the OP heat all pages. And you can usually make that a longer period of time with some adjustments. But if, if you've got less than 20 seconds, and we do see this happening a lot, there could be some problems and related to your load speed, or whether or not something's displaying correctly. So customer experience is a big deal. And if people can't find what they're looking for, as soon as they get there, or they have no idea what they're looking at. So we were talking about display ads earlier, if they need to look like your website, they need to look like whatever you're landing them on. And if they don't, the people will just drop off. So 20 seconds or less, and you might have a speed problem, your website needs to load in under two and a half seconds. There are tools like pingdom.com pingdom.com, or GT metrics. I believe that two GT metrics at our ix.com that you can go to, to pop your website URL into their tool and see how fast your website's loading. One of the things to be aware of is that's typically showing you a desktop load speed. And most of the websites have gotten to a point where they have good desktop load speed. But trends are that 70% or more of people are coming through mobile devices. So you've got to switch to the mobile view of things, and see how quickly that's loading. And I hate to tell you, most of the results come up around 11 seconds, which is crazy. So if you think about it, if people are on average, staying on your website less than 20. And it takes 11 seconds for it to load. They're leaving, and they haven't seen anything. So you're wanting to change your message. And they haven't even seen it yet. So this is a problem. So display, like do you have a responsive display on your website? So that peep so it looks right when people pull it up? Because they'll drop off if they don't, doesn't load fast enough, especially on mobile? And if the answer to one of those two things is no, then that's the second piece you've got to fix so that people can actually get to you and see your message. And then we can talk about is the message the problem. So there are technical pieces that are going on that you should really work on first. But those are some key performance indicators that we would look at website traffic in the right demographics, and how long people are staying on your website overall.

Yeah. And, you know, if you have questions about you know, your load speed, if you find out that it's terrible. You know, we have resources available to help you speed up that performance and some things are just as simple as that. Making your photos smaller. Yeah, that's probably one of the biggest things, especially with, like, I feel like every single phone like picture that's taken on my iPhone now is at least four megabytes. Like they're very large photos, considering that they're taking on taken on a phone. Yeah, I can't even imagine if you're taking them on a, you know, a nice DSLR type camera, those get to be really large. And so if you have tons of photos that are on your website, that will slow them down very, very quickly if you haven't compressed those files.

Yeah. And I'll tell you that most web designers like web designers do not know that they're looking for things to be beautiful, they are not looking for performance. And so you know, when you're looking for a website provider, you want a marriage of two things that look beautiful and will perform well at the same time. Or you just need a consultant that can help you make sure that the performance is okay, while you're getting there. But you're right, a lot of times you have these beautifully designed websites, they have these high resolution photos that are meant for print, by the way, because screens can't. Most of them show the resolution that intricately so you can really compress those files, and it will still look gorgeous. So I don't want to hurt any designer hearts out there it will be okay, well look like the way you designed that once those files are compressed. But having those photos resized is a huge way to save on load speed. And then also just using the right hosting provider and making sure that server is serving things out correctly. So there's a lot going on, on that technical side of things, that things that it's really helpful to call in an expert. And you can do some of these things yourself for sure, like resizing the photos, but then when you start getting into the server things and the CSS and JavaScript not loading quickly. That's when you want to call an expert to be like, just help me compress all these files, make it look right and serve it up correctly. Make sure I'm on the right hosting provider so that this is working in my favor. Yeah, reach out to us, or just download our free stuff. And we'd be happy to hear from you that if you have a question.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Tina, for sharing your words of website wisdom. We appreciate it. And we'll see you guys next episode.

All right, see you later. Thanks.

Thanks so much for listening to the natural products Marketer Podcast. We hope you found this episode to be super helpful. Make sure you check out the show notes for any of those valuable resources that we mentioned on today's episode.

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