Convert Like A Pro: Mastering Conversion Design with Greg Merrilees

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to another episode of the SEO Show. I'm Michael Costin. I'm not joined by Arthur this week. I'm joined by a very interesting guest named Greg Merrilees from Studio One Design. Now, Greg is an Australian-based designer. Well, he owns an agency that's Australian-based that designs websites for people around the world. But more than just design, he focuses on designing really, really good-looking sites that actually convert visitors into action takers. This is something that a lot of people fall over on with their website. They might get a WordPress theme, throw it up, put a bit of copy on that talks all about them and just hope that the leads come flooding through the door. And that's not necessarily always the case. It's probably rarely the case that that works. So in today's chat with Greg, we spoke about conversion design principles and what goes into an offer and things that you need to have on your website and the common mistakes that people make with their website that are hurting them from a conversion point of view. And if we think about this show, we're all about SEO. And at the end of the day, SEO, it's just a means to an end. People don't necessarily care about robots files and optimizing code and links. What they really care about is getting traffic to their site. But then what happens once that traffic's on your site? What happens after the click, so to speak? That's super important. You know, you want to send traffic to a site that actually generates an outcome for you. And that's what we spoke about today with Greg. So I'm going to throw over now to the chat with Greg Merrilees from Studio One Design, talking all things conversion. Hi, Greg, welcome to the SEO show. For people who may not have heard about you, if you could let us know a bit about yourself and what you get up to and we'll get going from there.

GREG: Yeah, sure. Hey, Michael, thanks so much for having me on this awesome podcast. Yeah, look, I'm founder of studio1design.com. We design websites for a lot of market leaders out there, for a lot of small businesses, podcasters, course creators, SEO businesses, service businesses, agencies, things like that. We currently have 26 people on our team, a distributed team based in Australia mainly and the Philippines. And yeah, we've designed and transformed over 2000 websites for small businesses and a few sort of high profile. marketers out there as well, including Sylvester Stallone, Frank Oz, who's the voice of Yoda, Gary Goldstein, the producer of Pretty Woman, Grit Boxing based in New York, which has two investors, Pitbull and Tony Robbins, Jordan Harbinger, a whole bunch of other podcasters, James Schramko, Ezra Firestone, Chris Ducker, and the list goes on.

MICHAEL: That's a very impressive list you've got there. Thank you. So look, I've been sort of aware of you probably through those podcasters. You know, I listened to a whole bunch of different podcasts and I've noticed down in the footer of websites, it says, who built this site? Something like that. I've clicked through, seen your site and I can see you guys are very much focused on conversion first design. So, you know, thinking about how is this site going to get people to do what we want them to do, which I find in, from my personal experience working with clients, A lot of people will throw up a website and just hope that it converts and not really give thought to the copywriting or the offer, the messaging, the design, all of that stuff that's so important. So I thought it'd be great to have you come on the show and chat about conversion focused design, the key elements of that, and then maybe how it intersects with SEO. You know, we are an SEO show after all. So maybe if we could get into the fundamentals of conversion design, like when I'm saying that, what is it and why is it so important?

GREG: Yeah, absolutely. So conversion focused design is not about how your website looks. It's not about how it loads or the technical side of it. It's about how it converts your website visitors into action takers, right? Which could be any one of the following goals. Like it might be to buy a product. It might be to opt into a, you know, like a free offer, for instance. It might be just to fill out a contact form. It might be to book a call or even just call you, you know, like click to call, especially on mobile. That could be a class as a conversion. It might even be to click through to another page. That could be classed as a conversion. Especially from an SEO perspective, that's a really good thing, right? The longer they stay on the website and click through to multiple pages, the more Google's going to favor it. So that's kind of what conversion-focused design is. And then to me, the reason why it's so critical for businesses these days is really that there's so many competitors in every niche, right? It doesn't matter which niche you're in. There's like, you know, 1.4 million websites or billion web, whatever it is, it's ridiculous, right? Billion websites online today. So you can guarantee there's going to be competitors in your niche, the listener, right? So you want to stand out from your competitors, and you really don't get a second chance at a first impression. So To me, a bad website design is like having bad breath. Nobody's going to tell you your breath stinks. They're just going to run away and you'll never know why they left. Imagine if that visitor did convert into one of those things we just mentioned, and then they became a client, and then they referred others to you, and so on. That's essentially what you could be missing out on if you don't have a website that's designed to convert. Gone are the days of having a website brochure. you know, copying a competitor or having a template. To me, that's what you do when you're sort of starting out. But if you're a serious business, you really need to invest in your website and needs to be designed as a 24-7, you know, sales and marketing machine on autopilot, essentially.

MICHAEL: Love that analogy of the bad breath. Maybe we can sort of continue with that theme and, you know, tell me some of the common mistakes, the things that cause a bad breath. And then also what are the key, just the very top line key things that a business owner should be aware of with their website where they might be hurting themselves or opportunities to improve things.

GREG: Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, happy to go through the mistakes. And there are a lot of mistakes. But I guess the most common things would be the messaging on their website, right? Like it's probably the one of the most important things on your website is having clear messaging. A lot of people try to get too clever, they might have a tagline that sounds fancy, but it doesn't make much sense. And they're too close to the website to realize that A, they might be using like tech jargon. And B, they're not thinking about what's in it for their customer. So They generally write the copy themselves. Everybody can write. They don't really value investing in a professional pro level conversion focused copywriter. And so they write it all about their own business. Like we are good at this and that and blah, blah, blah. But people are bored. People don't care about your business initially. They only care about what's in it for them. So you want to talk about, you know, how you can benefit them, like what benefits will they get out of hiring you or, you know, purchasing your product or service, etc. And then you want to let them know, like, clearly, here's the benefit, but here's how we help you. And that needs to be on the homepage above the fold, because no matter how people find your website, you can guarantee they're going to check out your homepage at some point. So that'll be an overview of what it is, how they'll benefit and how you can help. Then you want to back it up with social proof as well. And we feel like a lot of people just, you know, the mistakes is having poor messaging, not enough social proof. When we have, when we use social proof and messaging, what we do is combine it all into one and we use like these principles from Robert Cialdini's book Influence, which we can get into and unpack a little bit later. But essentially, yeah, people are just making big mistakes with their messaging and not having enough social proof. And then another thing they do wrong is they don't have a marketing strategy. So they might just, like I said before, essentially try to sell on hello, they're just talking about how good their business is and buy from us and book a call. But you really haven't led with value, which is to us the golden principle of a website is to lead with value. And that's essentially why you guys do this podcast, right? It's leading with value, you're sharing your knowledge. And then from that, hopefully, people realize that you're the trusted authority in your niche. And from there, at some point, whether they're ready to buy now or down the track, the more you provide free value, the more likely they will purchase from you at some point in time, right? And so, I guess the other thing is they don't think about the intent of the visitor. So there's obviously cold leads on your website, there's warm and there's hot. So you need to have a strategy that tailors to their needs, essentially. And obviously, if they're on a blog post page or a podcast post page, you probably don't want to offer a free call at this point, because they might be really cold. And so that's why we would suggest having things like a lead magnet, like a pop up for a like an exit intent pop-up, not one when you first land on the page, but for something of value in return for an email address, a PDF, a checklist, a free this or free that, whatever. But yeah, and then crappy design as well. They have crappy design, they do it themselves and I get it if you're starting out in business, but if you are a serious business, you really should be investing in your design because that's going to help differentiate you from your competitors. And yeah, I would say if you look at any industry leader out there, they're going to have a professional design. They're not going to have done it themselves. They're not going to have used a template or theme forest or one of those things. They're not going to have AI design in their website or write in their content. They're going to invest in professionals that they can trust. And yeah, you know, I don't want to be seen as a business that's not taken too seriously because they haven't invested in those, those things. But yeah, another mistake I see is like, navigation, sometimes they get too complicated, they have way too many things in the top nav. And, you know, top nav should be relatively simple, but still be really clear. And the items in the top navigation need to clearly say what's going to happen if they click on that thing. Some people just get too fancy with trying to be clever with, you know, the top navigation, it doesn't really have much clarity. So be careful with that. No call to actions above the fold. I see that on a lot of websites. They just, you know, on all of their services pages, they might have a call to action at the bottom of the page. But what we like to do is have one at the top of the page, even if it's a form at the bottom of the page, just have an anchor link down to the bottom of the page. And at least then You see what they've missed out on reading from the time they press the call to action to the time the page scrolls and stops at the form. They're more likely to go back and read the important things that they may have missed. And then, I guess, not putting themselves on the website. People like to hide behind their websites and people do business with people. I highly recommend putting yourselves out there and put yourself on video and get a professional photo shoot and just, you know, present yourself as, if you think about Robert Chaldean's book, one of the principles is liking. You want people to, you know, like you and you want to be consistent with your messaging and all that sort of good stuff as well. But yeah, definitely put yourself on your website. And then they use, you know, too many stock images and I don't know there's all sorts of issues but yeah social media icons as well they put them at the top of their web page I would recommend if anything just put them in the footer of you know the home page maybe the blog pages but not the sales page not any of the other pages and yeah there's lots of things but do you want me to go on?

MICHAEL: One's just popped into my head that I've had a lot over the years from clients is make the logo bigger. No, make it bigger, make it bigger. I don't know if you've come across that yourself.

GREG: Yeah, your logo is not important.

MICHAEL: There seems to be a fascination with, yeah, big logos.

GREG: Yeah, I don't get it. There's, yeah, so many things like that. The client thinks it is important because they just had a new logo designed, but realistically, think about your customer and they don't really care. So I would just make sure it's legible. But yeah, people don't care about your logo. So don't have it large and don't have it as a main banner image, which I've seen a lot lately as well. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you need to detach yourself from your own connection to your business and what you think and just try and put yourself in their shoes. And how do you suggest going through this process? Let's put out a hypothetical here. Yeah. You're a local service business. You've been around a couple of years. You got some runs on the board and you wanted to do marketing. Now you want to crank up your Google ads and you You hire an agency, you send traffic to your website. It doesn't work. And you blame the Google ads because you didn't get leads. But maybe it's your website that isn't up to scratch. And there's a lot we spoke there about building trust through the form of podcasting and the rest, which is strategic and needs to be thought out and planned out. But is there a process someone can go through where maybe they don't need to do all of that straight off the bat, and that's something that can be rolled out later, but still go ahead and address concerns with their site? And what's the first step for people?

GREG: Absolutely. I mean, what you touched on is really conversion rate optimization. We don't offer that as a service, but we do follow, you know, conversion rate optimization experts like cxl.com, which have really good training. And Peplier, the founder of that has been around for years. And, excuse me, they do, um, you know, high level conversion rate optimization, and there's Tim Ash from site tuners, and there's various other books that we've read. So we, we understand it. And what it means is, uh, what the user, sorry, what the listener can do right now, if they're not ready for a new website design, that's fine. They can review some things on their existing website. And so you might want to think about like, um, you know, obviously look at your Google analytics and, and dive deeper into that and just see, you know, What is the average session duration? What's the bounce rate? What's the behavior flow? How are they getting from this page to that page, et cetera? And has anything changed over time? That's one thing. The other thing you can do is put tools like Hotjar on your website to review user videos, people using your website. And it takes a lot of time, but you can hypothesize once you've worked out things like your analytics, your user behavior, and there's heat maps with Hotjar as well. And then you can put polls on your website, again with Hotjar, to ask people, you know, why didn't you buy? It depends on what kind of website it is. If it's e-commerce, you might ask that. And there's various polls you can put on various pages. Even if they did buy, ask, why did they buy? Things like that. And so what you're trying to do overall is hypothesize what you think could work, right? And then you want to split test things, but you want to use one thing at a time, split test one thing at a time. And there's tools out there like Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely, et cetera, for split testing, which are really good. But you want to make sure your traffic is high enough to warrant investing in those tools, right? Because they're not cheap. So you want to have at least a thousand visitors. to go through one A-B split test. And what an A-B split test is, is essentially just changing one element that you think, based on hypothesizing all those things, what you think should change. It might be the messaging, it might be the call to action. It's not usually the button color, so don't worry about that.

MICHAEL: People always think it's a button. I'll turn it green and yeah, I'm going to get tons of leads.

GREG: Exactly. Look, button color just needs to be high contrast, right? That's the main thing and different to everything else on the website, essentially. A different color, I should say. You don't want it to blend in with your branding or your copy and things like that. contrast to everything else. But yeah, and then you want to test one of those things and see if it improve results or reduce results and then splits test something else. And just over time, you split test all these things until you've got a higher converting website. So you can do that from an existing website. However, there might be instances where it's just clearly dated, you know, it might not have the best mobile user experience that might does not represent your business anymore. A lot of businesses pivot over time and they add new offers and they end up with a Frankenstein where they've had different developers and designers build various pages on page builders and blah, blah, blah. That's what we see all the time. And then they come to us and we roll it all into one beautiful brand new design. But yeah, so there's many reasons that you might think, well, rather than doing all that time split testing, just invest in a new website design. But that's, yeah, something that each business owner needs to, you know, evaluate.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I sort of see it as you do your split testing to fine tune it, but if you're starting so far behind the eight ball, you just overhaul knowing or doing the things you know are most likely to lead to the outcome you want first. Yeah. That will have the biggest impact and then do the split testing.

GREG: Exactly. Yeah, spot on. Couldn't agree more.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So, with the website, you've touched on messaging offer, so that's copywriting and that's such a super important part. Are you an advocate of going ahead and writing before you ever even design a new site or should it be done at the same time? How does that work together?

GREG: Yeah, so with our process, what we do initially, before we start designing a website, we really need to understand a lot about the existing business, how their website's performing, who their target audience is, what their pain points are, their challenges, you know, all that sort of stuff before we design it. Because when we design, we need to design to their audience essentially and to enhance their offer and all that good stuff. So the way we work is as far as whether it's design or copy first is we generally get started on the design and we work in conjunction with a copywriting partner of ours and so we're either on the same call with the client initially or we just record that call and with the client's permission and then we share that with the copywriting partner and we share our design questionnaire which has like 40 questions in it which is a bit of a pain to fill out but it's super helpful and as a designer we need to know all those answers to the question before we start designing. Then it all comes down to understanding the audience. For instance, if we don't do it, the client should do it. Either way, we need to understand what makes them tick on a deeper level, what makes them buy from you. Remember, they only care about what's in it for them. When we write in the copy on the website, which we don't do, we do it through our copywriting partners, And when we're designing, anyway, we design to the same structure as the copywriting partners and we have to think about designing as your website or your business is the guide and your customer is the hero, which is from Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. It's another great book, right? And so all the sections need to reflect that. And then we think about spin selling, which is another book. This one's by Neil Rackham. And this is based on 35,000 sales calls on what works on these sales calls. And it comes down to this acronym SPIN. And so what it means is, If you let people know on your website, and even in videos on your website, that you understand their situation, that's the S piece, right? Their situation, their problems and challenges that they face because of the situation they're in, and then I, which is the implication, if they don't address the cause of that problem, then N is the need, which is essentially your solution on how you can help solve that problem. That's the acronym. And then when you talk about your solution as the need, You want to let them know what is unique about your solution. What can't they get anywhere else from your competitors? And that's what you need to address in your copywriting. And then the structure of the pages. We generally design the website pages before the copywriter only because we work so close with these conversion focused copywriters that We understand the structure they're going to use and they take a lot longer than us. So we offer unlimited design revisions. So we just get started on the design with rafting copywriting. We just use, you know, chat GPT to rough it in and then the copywriter will, you know, polish it up later or the client can have that choice as well and they can write it themselves. But we do guide them. Yeah, but that's generally how we, yeah, working with copywriters.

MICHAEL: And I would imagine these days it's all mobile first because I find a lot of business owners might not consider this. They get a theme off the shelf, look at it on their desktop and they make it and it doesn't really look that good on mobile. But with so much traffic being on mobile, are you sort of starting on mobile and then going to desktop or what's your flow? Not at all.

GREG: We start on desktop. Now, don't get me wrong. always thinking of how it's going to look on mobile. But we design on desktop because we want to make sure we can show our client the brand personality on a larger scale on a desktop. And you've got to think, it depends on the business as well. If it's e-commerce, sure, most traffic will come through mobile. And don't get me wrong, a lot of traffic comes through mobile. It's probably most on most websites cases. But you'll find there's generally the first place they'll check you out on mobile. And if they're serious, if you're a SaaS business, for instance, They're not going to go ahead and purchase on a mobile. They're going to go to the desktop and have a look at it properly. It might be a desktop SaaS solution. So they want to, you know, they might have a free demo and there's all sorts of reasons why they would go. They may start on mobile, but they'll also go to your full desktop website to check you out. But so what we do is we start on the desktop view. And then once the client approves that, we quickly show them what it'll look on mobile as well. because it is important. But there's a slightly different approach with mobile. Obviously, speed is one thing. We need it to load super fast. So we need to make sure when it gets to the coding phase that we resize images and re-upload them. We don't just scale down a large image because it'll take forever to load. Yeah, there's a lot of things we take into consideration that are slightly different with mobile. And we generally Not condense, but we reduce a little bit of the content if we think it's not going to hurt conversions, because you just don't want it to have too many scrolls of reams of copy and stuff. If it's just at this point, they're just trying to check you out and see what you offer. So we try to reduce that as much as possible on a mobile device.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. It makes total sense. I want to come back to the offer messaging because we've touched on it quite a bit already. It's super important and it's an area I feel people really get wrong a lot. Like in our business, when we're trying to drive traffic to a site, We might ask, as part of the ad account build, we want ideas for what we can include in copies. So we ask, what makes you different? What's your advantage over the competition? What's your value proposition? And they might say things like, family-owned business, or we've been around 30 years, or their website in the prime real estate might say, welcome to blah, blah, blah. It's the worst. That is examples of just not getting it. I know you're not a conversion copywriter, but from an offer point of view, what is an example of a good offer or stuff that people should be saying in lieu of those examples I just gave, which are obviously bad examples?

GREG: So you're talking about copywriting, essentially?

MICHAEL: Yeah, when it comes to an offer.

GREG: Yeah, well, the offer is the offer, as in we can't control that. But the way we present the offer comes down to the copywriting and all the elements on the page, essentially, right? But what I would suggest, though, some people don't even know if they've got a good offer. And it's probably because they're presenting it in a way that's terrible, right? Because they haven't hired a copywriter and things like that. or they've tried to do it themselves, or with ChatGPT, which is garbage in, garbage out, right? And look, ChatGPT can be good for certain things, but it's more idea generation at this point, in my opinion. I don't know what your opinion is, but yeah. I agree, 100%. It's tempting to

MICHAEL: copy-paste it all, but yeah.

GREG: Yeah, exactly. And if you're not a good copywriter, you might think it's great, you know, but there's a lot that goes into presenting an offer. And it really just starts with the benefits, you know, the best way I can explain it is at the top of the page. Think about what it is that they're going to like, what kind of results they're going to get out of this offer. And it depends on what the offer is, as well as to how long the page needs to be, right? Because if it's a low ticket offer, you probably don't need to do much on the page. You can just put a buy now if it's a product, for instance, right? But you obviously want to have essential things like social proof on there, you know, which is testimonials, reviews, whatever the case is, the more social proof you can have throughout your website on every page, the better. That's what I feel. I mean, sorry, you want, I feel like you need one dedicated page of reviews or results or, you know, case studies, testimonials, et cetera. But if you sprinkle them also throughout every page of your website, I think that's the best way to, you know, get the best results across the board. But yeah, so the offer. I don't know, let's say it's a high ticket item, a $10,000 offer, for instance. For one, you want to understand your audience because your offer is not for everybody, right? So you really need to point out who that offer is for. Like for instance, I don't know, if you do SEO, for a certain niche, like it might be for e-commerce or it might be for whatever. You want attention e-commerce owners, for instance, and then talk about the benefit they can get out of it. But then you want to also clearly articulate what it is that you do, but back it up with that social proof. But then that's just the top of the page. But then as you go down the page, that's because you're going to think like some people may have already heard of you, they might be quite warm. So you want to have a call to action by default, where they can just go ahead and purchase or take that next step, book a call, whatever it is, right. But then for the people that aren't convinced yet, that's why you need a longer form page for a high ticket offer. You'll find through heat maps, most people won't scroll, right? But it's the ones that do that are more likely to convert. And that's because they were slightly colder and they needed more convincing. So therefore, that's when a good copywriter will be talking, and there'll be social proof sprinkled throughout, but they'll be talking more about letting people know that they understand, spin selling, they understand the situation, the challenges, and you list out all the challenges. This comes from surveying your audience or understanding your audience in the first place, all the challenges that they face, you want them listed out. And then you want to sell the dream, like how could their life look after they purchase from you, like, and sell what that looks like, basically. So it's kind of all these sections that have a bridge from one section to the next that has a nice flow. And then all of the design elements as well need to enhance the copy and basically give it wings is what we say. But yeah, like I said, social proof sprinkled throughout. And then hopefully by the end of the page with another call to action, they're ready to take action. But if not, then what we do is it might be a time to pop up or an exit pop, exit intent, just to offer them something relevant to that offer. That's essentially a lead magnet to at least get an email address so you can keep them warm via an email nurture campaign.

MICHAEL: Yep. Love it. Absolutely love it. And then you can follow up with remarketing if they do leave. Yep. Retarget them on Facebook, YouTube, that sort of stuff to try and get that opt-in. Exactly.

GREG: Yes. Spot on. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So we've spoken about design of the site and the offer and the content on the page from a conversion point of view, but there is SEO considerations. Super important, giving Google what it needs to see, which doesn't always dovetail nicely with what's going to work from a conversion point of view. So in your experience, how do you make SEO considerations play nicely with website design?

GREG: Yeah. Look, I'm certainly no SEO expert, but I mean, that's why we, when we do design websites, we often get leads from SEO businesses because they realize they're doing a great job with getting traffic, but the conversions suck. Right. And the end goal is to get your clients more. you know, leads in sales, right? So therefore, we work with SEO partners like yourselves that really understand SEO. And yeah, just did a little bit of research on you and just typed in like SEO parameter, you guys are number one, and things like that, right? So you clearly know what you're doing. That's amazing. And so basically, what we need to do is understand SEO on a level where not a technical level, but on a user experience level, right? So we need to make sure that when we're designing, that people have a good user experience, especially on mobile, that's things we touched on before to make sure it loads quicker, to make sure people are bored, and they have a better engagement. So we don't want the just to scroll forever, basically want to get to the point. make it easy for people to navigate and click around. The homepage essentially on mobile or desktop is essentially a gateway to get to your other offers, but it depends on their intent, might be a lead magnet, might be a paid offer, it could be to learn more about you guys, etc. that's the homepage. But generally speaking, it needs to load fast. So that's obviously going to affect positively their SEO results, right? We need to make sure they can like trust the website, like as in, hey, just having a pro level design can really help with that. Obviously, copywriting we've talked about, but Easy to understand as well. From a navigation perspective, how do they move around, especially on mobile device, but also the copy needs to be super clear that we touched on before. Really the goal is to boost SEO results, is to stay on the pages longer or stay on the website longer, to reduce the bounce rate and things like that. We're thinking about those things, but then there's a whole lot more that goes into it from a technical point of view in the backend. to really help boost, you know, SEO. But from a design perspective, we just need to make sure they have a good user experience. That's our main focus.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, user experience signals, Google have tried to say aren't a factor, you know, like doesn't play a role, but like from all the testing people have done, if someone goes onto a web page and then bounces straight back to Google, that's a very strong signal that they're not giving the right search result to their users. So they're going to put some other site there.

GREG: That's a great metric, bounce rate.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So when it comes to metrics and analytics and keeping on top of this and knowing whether your site's working and whether the design is good, bad or indifferent, because, you know, everyone has their own opinion, but data doesn't lie. So when it comes to analytics, do you do much in that space? And are you across like metrics and things people should be tracking?

GREG: Look, no, we're not across their analytics because we don't offer a conversion rate optimization service. However, when they engage or before they engage us, we need to know what their existing metrics are because our goal is to get them a good result. So we need a base point basically, right? So we need to ask them things like, how's their website been performing? What sort of traffic they're getting currently? what their goals are with the website. And so then we have a base to start with. And this all comes out in our questionnaire before we start designing. And so then based on that, when we redesign, we check in with them after their website's live for at least a month, because you need to give Google a chance to recrawl it and to see what their conversions are like and their traffic and all that. Now, I mean, most people get a boost in results and that could range from, it depends what their goals are. It might not just be to get more traffic or conversions. It might be to get more podcast listeners. You know, yeah, various things like that. So, for instance, I mean, to give you an example, like we've got a few case studies on our website, which you can go check out at studioondesign.com forward slash results. But for instance, like you touched on one before, which is a podcast, The Property Couch, right? The Property Couch.

MICHAEL: Great podcast, I can confirm.

GREG: Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it? Yeah, so they came to us, I don't know, probably six years ago now, with a really average, you know, website, which didn't have any clarity, you didn't even know it was a podcast website. It didn't have a lead magnet, didn't have all these things that, you know, we would encourage people to do these days. So when we designed that, which you can see it. thepropertycouch.com.au, we put all the trust elements back onto that. And at that point, they weren't getting very many podcast listeners. There wasn't much they were getting at all. They had a very small email list and their team size, for instance, because they're actually property advisors and they do you know, they have buyers agents and they do financial plans for property investors and things like that. So, they had 15 people on their team and then within a couple of years, I think it was like three years total after their new website design went live and don't get me wrong, it's not just from the website, it's from the strategy of leading with value. So, they've got this amazing podcast and this is their main way of getting new traffic into their finance business. So, They 6x their team size. They got 50,000 new email leads at that point. They probably got 100 now. They were getting less than 1 million downloads at that point, but a few years later, they're getting 10 million downloads of their podcast. It's metrics like that. may not be like a direct, you know, SEO boost. But yeah, you can tell that by doing all the right things with leading with value and sending people back to certain pages on their website, that that's, you know, a result that they get. But yeah, that's one. I mean, there was another podcaster as well. Like his goal is just to get more listeners so that he can charge more. This is jordanharbinger.com. So, he can charge more for his advertisers. That's his only income stream, the advertisers on his podcast. So, you know, we created like a sponsorship page which has infographics to really describe who his audience is, the demographics of them in a really detailed, you know, beautiful infographic style way which, you know, helped him get an incredible result as well. Yes, he had like 5x opt-in. He actually had 30% increase in traffic. This was like a year after we designed the website. And yeah, he doubled his podcast downloads, which increased his ad revenue ability as well. Because the more traffic you get, the more you can charge for ads.

MICHAEL: Love it. What I'm sort of hearing there is a bit of a theme. You've got to do the work in a way, like you can build a website and have all these nice conversion elements, but if you're not doing the work to lead with value, creating those assets, like opt-in magnets or a podcast and all that goes into that, it's going to be, that's the stuff that builds credibility and trust. And then your website just needs to amplify that. Right. And there's no, it's not like this is a silver bullet. You've got to actually do the work to differentiate yourself.

GREG: Couldn't agree more. And that's another thing, you know, if people come to us and say, Oh, you know, our website hasn't improved. It's like, well, have you been blogging? You know, have you been adding content pages? Have you been, have you created an email address, address, sorry, list? Are you sending people back to your website from your email list? What else are you doing on social media to drive traffic to your website? Like all these things need to keep happening and need to be increased if you want to increase your website results.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, this has been a great chat. Is there anything I haven't asked you so far on the topic of design conversion that you think is going to be beneficial to the people listening in?

GREG: Possibly, there's one thing, trends, like design trends that I like to kind of talk about, because obviously, you know, trends in design, I feel like over the last 10 years, perhaps, design trends have been really important because internet's gotten faster over that time, and you can do more things on your website, right? As far as have larger images, and you can put videos and things like that on there and have all these, you know, animation and parallax effects, right? I feel like we've got to the point now where all those things I just mentioned, large images, videos, like video, moving background videos and parallax effects, which essentially when you scroll down a web page, just for the listener, I know you know, but things slide in and things animate and there's all these movements and things like that. They're really distracting. And these are trends that I'm seeing more and more these days, especially if you Google, you know, 2024 design trends, you'll find all these interactive, moving design trends that look really fancy, they look great, but they're going to hurt your conversions because they're so distracting, they're taking away from your main messaging. And they're just annoying people, essentially, right? If you go to, you know, conversion, cxl.com and Google, you know, why do these things kill conversions? There's like 20 reasons. It's ridiculous. But anyway, So therefore, I feel like these design trends should be avoided. And I'm about to do a blog post on design trends and why people should avoid them. Because yeah, I think we've hit the point now, the internet's been so fast for years, there's not much more you can do from a design point of view. And I feel like designers get bored and just want to create new things, which is fair enough, right? They're creatives. But is it going to help conversions? I would say no, they're just trends. They're just things that look cool.

MICHAEL: Yep. People can often get sucked into, Apple's an example where their latest iPhone landing page, you scroll down and things come in and that's Apple with their big epic product. But for a local plumber, you don't need to have a theatrical website. It's do more harm than good. It comes back to removing your own goggles when looking at the site and putting on your potential customers and they just want quick, easy, I guess, access to, is this right for me?

GREG: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. Yeah. Spot on. Yeah. And I mean, who knows where the website's going in the next, you know, 10 years, uh, might be obsolete. We've got, you know, all these AI tools and we've got the metaverse coming and blockchain and all this web three stuff. But, you know, to me, it's funny how all of these blockchain businesses or, um, you know, AI tool businesses, they all use web two websites to get people to convert. Right. That's funny.

MICHAEL: And blockchain, that was like a couple of years ago, you put blockchain in the name of a business and it would 10x its value. And now no one's talking about that. And it's all AI at the moment. And who knows where it's really headed. But at the end of the day, people will always be people, probably even more so when AI is more prevalent. And so the principles we've spoken about will be probably even more important, I think.

GREG: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Business to business is really people to people. Sorry, I was just going to say, yeah, business to business is really people to people. And yeah, you can't replace people, in my opinion, with AI. It doesn't work in a lot of businesses.

MICHAEL: You touched on some books at the start that I'm a fan of, so Spin Selling and Persuasion, great books. I know personally I've read a ton of books in the copywriting conversion design space. Do you have a top three or top handful of books that you think must read for people interested in this world?

GREG: Well, I mean, for design, yeah, I mean, it's the three that I've just mentioned, not really design focus, but they're what makes people tick focus, right? It's what makes you know, what influences people to take action. And so that's why I guess our business has been successful, because we don't just focus on design. You know, there are a lot of designer style, I just, I don't know, there's designer podcasts, there's designer, you know, websites where they have awards for design and I find all that stuff doesn't produce results. So, therefore, I'm only interested in the books that get results and yeah, it is Robert Cialdini's influence, it is Building the Story Brand by Donna Miller and Spin Selling by Neil Rackham. They're the three books that we really focus on with every design that we produce for our clients. So, they're the big three.

MICHAEL: Well, it's been great chatting to you, Greg. For people that want to go connect with you after this, maybe chat a bit more about this and how you might be able to help them, where should they go?

GREG: Yeah, thanks. I mean, look, if you've got any questions, you can email me, greg at studio1design.com. Either myself or my general manager will be checking that email. But apart from that, there is a checklist that we have. It's like a quiz that you can do. You can go to studio1design.com. So that's a numeral one. Studio1design.com forward slash quiz and there's 50 things across six areas of your website that if you turn from a no to a yes, you just get a checklist. Yes, no, yes, no. At the end, you're given a score out of 50. Most people get around 20 if they're half decent website. So it's going to show you 30 things that you can improve to get better results from your website.

MICHAEL: Love it. Well, this chat has been value packed. I think people get a lot of benefit from it. So it's been great having you on the show. Thanks a lot.

GREG: Thank you very much, Michael. It's a real pleasure. Cheers.

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