In this weeks episode:
- Understanding where your website lives and how all the important pieces work together.
- What questions you should ask website companies or agencies about taking care of your website.
- Why Google Analytics and other tools are crucial for data storage of your website.
- Why it’s extremely important to have access to your website host.
Episode Transcript:
Devon Hayes:
You’ve heard of TED Talks and TikToks. This week we’re going to have a Tech Talk, where we break down some of the terms you’ve probably heard from your agency, or someone managing your website for you. You can bookmark this episode, save it. And I will have some great analogies, on understanding exactly what all these technical terms mean. I’m one of your hosts Devon Hayes.
Amanda Joyce:
And I’m Amanda Joyce.
Devon Hayes:
Let’s get into it.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s do it.
Devon Hayes:
Welcome to Trades Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Amanda Joyce:
This is for you, if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts, to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s Trades Secrets. All right. This topic might not be the most exciting one, that’s ever hopped out at you in your downloads. But this is a really good one to spend a little bit of time, and try to digest this a little bit. We hear from contractors all the time, whether they’re moving their website over onto our server, or whatever it may be. And we start asking them questions about their host or their DNS. And the look of fear or a deer in headlights on their face is comical at times, but also so relatable for all of us, because we’ve all been here.
We’re going to walk through some of this really common jargon, that you probably hear your agency using or your technical support team. And help you digest it a little bit. Without further ado, this is really Devon’s domain, so I’m going to really let you dive in and start talking about-
Devon Hayes:
I see what you did there, domain.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. Take it away.
Devon Hayes:
All right. We’re just going to go through some of these phrases. I’ll jump right in. Hosting or host, that’s one of them we hear every day. This is where your website lives. I wrote down some analogies here, that would make it easier to understand.
Imagine renting a space in a huge shopping mall, and you set up your store. Hosting is like that store for you. The server would be the big building that it lives in, and then your storefront would be your website specifically. That’s an easier way to picture what hosting is or what your host is.
You can almost get really granular here, and break out the difference between hosting and a host. Depending on who it is, they can be synonymous, but not all malls are created the same. You’ve got malls where they’ve got maybe a great janitorial service, that are going to clean up the halls to where you get into your mall. They’ve got great separation between storefronts or not too many, I don’t know, of the same store right next to each other maybe. I don’t know, maybe that’s a terrible example.
But in any case, hosting is a service as well. You can have your website sitting on a host, but if they’re not providing a service in addition to having your website sitting there, that doesn’t mean that your website is getting updated every month, it doesn’t mean your plugins are getting updated, that your theme is getting updated, that your security is being updated, so host and hosting should be thought of a bit differently.
And when you have your website hosted somewhere it’s great to ask the question, "What monthly services go along with this monthly fee or annual fee? Are you taking care of my site, or do I need to have a separate management fee?"
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
That’s the first piece of it. And then the second piece that we talk to our clients about that falls under hosting is the phrase server. And again, if you think of the mall is the server itself, or host. But then you can break that out a bit further. You can have private hosting, or shared hosting. That analogy is more like an apartment building would be shared hosting, where there’s lots of websites, or lots of rooms in one building, or on one server.
And then a private server is like a private residence, it’s just your house. Or if you know who owns that server, you know everyone else on your block. Private servers are really nice for websites that are a bit bigger. You get a better site performance, they’re faster, and you know who your neighbors are.
When you are on a shared host, the bandwidth that those other websites soak up, say if you’re on the same server as an e-commerce site and you’re a home services site, they have a lot more traffic through to their site. That usage is a lot different than a service-based company’s website, so it’s good to know who your neighbors are.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
But when you’re first starting up, and you don’t want to pay that heavy hosting fee for a private server, then there’s a space for shared servers. But all of us in the SEO world, we’re like, "If you’re investing in SEO and especially with our agency, we definitely want you on a private server." Because all of our efforts will be for naught, if your site performance is bad. And we’re going to blame your host, and they’re going to blame us, and blame the website optimization. And we’re just going to point the finger at each other. And you’re going to be stuck in the middle going, "I don’t care whose problem it is, but somebody fix it." Because as we’ve told you, performance on a website is massively important for your ranking on Google. So…
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And I would say too, we can all relate to that analogy as well. Think about the days of COVID, when all of us were suddenly at home working. And everyone in the neighborhood’s internet was going slower, because we were all there trying to work off of that same bandwidth. It’s the same thing with a shared server. We’ve all felt it in our day-to-day usage of the web.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
And if you don’t want to deliver a bad user experience, by a website that’s going to load so slow that a potential customer’s going to be so annoyed that your gallery’s loading so slow, they’re going to click out and go fill out a form for the next guy. This can’t be more critical.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. The next one on our list here is DNS or domain name server. A lot of times this is in the same place as where you purchase your domain. But we have been running into it more and more frequently where it is not, and your DNS lives somewhere separate from your domain and separate from your host, so that’s like a different login.
And that piece of the pie is important, it’s translator for, I don’t know, code. It takes an IP address, those numbers, and it turns it into the words. Like elevmarketing.com is our URL. The DNS takes 47.192.324.21, and tells web crawlers to point it to elevmarketing.com for example. But that’s just one piece of it. Your email records are in here, sometimes your site verification records for Google Search Console, things like that, live in your DNS.
And oftentimes this comes up or is important when you’re moving your host, you have to change your either A record or CNAME record, but it’s done through your DNS. And when you do a DNS shift with a host shift, then you also need to update your email records, or your email stops working. That’s a very simplified explanation of DNS, but it’s important to know where this is.
As we’re going through these, we’ve started to create a sheet that tells our clients where their hosting is, how to access it, where their DNS is, and how to access that. Because these are all things we don’t expect you to know and memorize, but it’s really good to know where they are and have them in one place, if you don’t already.
Okay, what else? Oh, my gosh. Okay, domain. We say domain, sometimes you interchange domain and URL, but they’re actually different. Domain is the root of any website. Ours is elevmarketing.com for our agency, that is the domain. But then a URL could be elevmarketing.com/seo-services, that would be a full URL to our SEO page. That’s the difference between a domain and a URL.
What else? Let’s see here. Oh, a CDN. A CDN is a content delivery network. And this is important for site performance, enhancing your speed. The analogy I love with this one, is thinking of it as a chain of convenience stores spread throughout the US, or anywhere. And each of those convenience stores makes a copy of your website, so that no matter where you’re accessing your website from, it will pick up a copy of your website from that closest convenience store, instead of where the actual server lives. So little tiny copies living at these convenience stores, helps your website pull up faster for the user, which is better UX. And also helps with your positioning, because again site performance is one of the number one ranking factors, or most important ranking factors in search engine optimization. That’s the CDN. Does that make sense to you?
Amanda Joyce:
I think so. I think so.
Devon Hayes:
Did you get it? Did you get it?
Amanda Joyce:
Kind of. A lot of times even when you’re talking about this stuff, my eyes kind of glaze over. And I’m just so glad it’s not my lane to swim in. Excuse the question, but with the CDN, do you need to access it separately than you would from your host, or from your DNS records? And things like would someone listening need to know how to access their CDN separately, than they would their DNS?
Devon Hayes:
It depends on your host. If you’re hosted with WordPress Engine for example, they already have a collaboration with a CDN. That one is CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a CDN, and they have a whole bunch of other services. But that could be a separate login for the client, if it wasn’t already included in their hosting. If you were with like SiteGround hosting, you would have a separate login with your CDN.
CloudFlare, I think, is one of the most common, most popular ones. But sometimes if you don’t know who your host is you can type in, "Who is my host?" And there’s a bunch of different free tools that will let you pop that in and tell you. And it’ll come up as CloudFlare. You’re like, "Well, CloudFlare, can they be my host?" Well, your name servers are pointed at CloudFlare, so that’s how that sometimes comes up showing as a host. But really it’s just that your name servers are pointed to that CDN. Is that enough acronyms? Did we cover them all in there? Oh, my gosh. Everyone is glazing over.
Amanda Joyce:
This is why we do-
Devon Hayes:
This is why-
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
Tech talk. Tech talk.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. Tech talk. But I do think, again, it’s really important to point out how these can all be confusing, and why.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
But they are all critical. And I know that sometimes we’ve been in those phases, where maybe we’re moving someone onto our server. And then suddenly it’s all hands on deck, trying to track down all of this information. And the poor client is like, "I don’t know, I used a different…" They just depended on whoever built their website or was their former agency.
It’s very uncommon to not know where all these things live, but understanding that it’s critical to have access to them. This can be a really good thing, to reduce stress down the road if suddenly you’re making a switch, and you want to make sure your email doesn’t turn off, or your website doesn’t go down. Or if it does, who’s your host and how to get ahold of them.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
I think it’s really important, even though it’s all kind of confusing,
Devon Hayes:
It’s all overwhelming. If you take nothing else away from today, just take away that you should have access to your host. Because if your website goes down and you can’t get ahold of them for some reason, if you have admin access, that host either has a support team that can help you get the site back up, or you can get access to your backups to get your website back up. If for some reason, you can’t get ahold of your website manager.
If you take nothing else away, know that your hosting is where you would restore your website if it goes down, and pull up a backup. And you don’t have to do it. They have support people at most every host, that will do it for you. You just have to know where it is, and that you have administrative access to it in order to make that happen. If you take nothing else away from our Tech Talk, I feel like I’m from the Valley every time I say it, just take that away from it.
Next on our list, we have WordPress. And this is what, I don’t know, what do you think, 80%, 90% of our clients on here? We’ve got-
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
Oh, yeah. I would say like 99%.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
We’ve got someone on Octane, but we’ve required everyone to switch over to WordPress, our preferred stack. That’s another one we should cover. But our preferred set of technology on a website that our whole team is familiar with working in, it’s WordPress. But Octane is great, it’s superfast, closed sourced, great. But WordPress is what we were defining. And that’s kind of like a framework for your website, that makes you not have to know how to code something from scratch.
Okay. Now the realm that’s a little bit less techie, we’ve talked about this before, some of the common Google tools. But again, gosh, when we’re asking for access with clients when we’re onboarding them, we try to make it as easy as possible. But there is a lot of historical data in some of these tools that we don’t want to get rid of, so we don’t like to start over if we don’t have to. Because that is your asset, that’s your IP. And you should have access to it. And you should be able to have the continuity between agencies, should you move over.
Anyway, that’s why we thought we touch on some of these tools. Because in these onboarding conversations, we end up using these acronyms. And we want to punch ourselves in the face, as much as you want to punch us in the face when you hear them. We’re very self-aware.
Amanda Joyce:
And so everybody knows, in the show notes we’ll have a list of everything that we’ve just defined, including the list of these tools we’re about to go through. If you are working with an agency, you could take the bullets that we have shared below, and reach out to your agency and say, "Hey, could you help me get access to all of these things?" It might take them a minute to get back to you. But if you have this living somewhere in a document, you will thank us later.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. Okay. First one, Google Tag Manager.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
You play in this a little bit more than I. But I with GA4 now, I’m going to just…
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. I know. I was going to say, I almost feel like, let’s talk GA4 first, because they are simpatico, or they need each other to work now. But Google Analytics 4 is the most recent version of Google Analytics that’s been out for quite a long time. It provides data that allows you to understand how users are behaving on your website. It’s a free little toy.
Devon Hayes:
How they got there. Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. The path they’re taking on it.
Devon Hayes:
Sorry.
Amanda Joyce:
Oh, no. You’re good. How they’re interacting with your content, if they’re completing an action, where they’re leaving. It really gives you a good idea of your user experience of your website, and how it’s performing. This is one that’s critical to have access to. You’ve probably had it on your website for years. Hopefully you already know how to log into it. If you don’t, it’s definitely important to get that access.
It’s also important to note that about a year ago in July of 2023, they forced all of us over to G4. There was a previous version of Google Analytics called Universal Analytics, that if you’ve had it running for years it was living in two spots. But all that really matters now, is that GA4 is the version that Google’s forcing us all use.
Devon Hayes:
And as the year’s has gone on, we complained about it. We mourned the loss of UA. But now once you get more familiar with the tool, it really does give you quite a bit more information in a different format than UA did, so it’s good.
But it’s not as easy to have a really optimized setup of GA4. We have a straight GA4 expert, who helps us get everything set up. Because what Universal Analytics inherently did, we need to set it up. For example, page speed was something that it automatically tracked for you on Universal Analytics. And now we have to do some custom setup for every GA4 account, so that we can monitor timing through GA4, not through third party tools. That’s what GA4 is. And the way it’s installed on your site is through GTM, which is Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager, it’s a place for all of your tracking code to live. Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, Facebook Pixel, I don’t know, any sort of tracking pixel lives inside your Google Tag Manager container. And that’s so that you don’t have to update your website, every single time you want to implement a new piece of tracking code. And you don’t have to slow it down.
Your GTM will house all of those tracking codes. But your website only has to have one set of code on there, so it really is better for site performance. And it’s nice, because it’s forced our hand to do it. While you have the capability on your website to go ahead and put every single piece of tracking code in there, don’t. And why? You put it in GTM, it’s way easier, and less risky, and better for site performance.
Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. And it’s one place to log in, and check all of those tags in one spot. Used to, you’d email it over to somebody, and they’d throw it in the head tag, and things were all mixed up and crazy in there. It’s such a cleaner way to manage your tags. And most importantly, it improves site performance. For years we would all roll our eyes when somebody wanted to put a Facebook Pixel on a website, because we were like, "Oh, here we go. It’s going to kill performance." Now that it can just-
Devon Hayes:
You’re like, "Are you done with this yet? Can we turn this off now?"
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. "Are you running ads? If not, can we please turn this off?" It’s really critical. And one other thing, previously in the old Google Analytics you could go in and set up all your conversions, which is anytime someone hits the thank you page after filling out a form, let’s count it as a contact, whatever it may be, you could create all that inside of the old Google Analytics. GA4, you have to make all of those events inside of Google Tag Manager and send them over.
Again, to your point where they’re forcing our hand to use GTM. When they moved us over to GA4, they really forced our hand with GTM. And I think a lot of people that maybe were not excited about embracing that technology, probably now are like, "Okay, I’m glad Google made me do that."
Devon Hayes:
Mm-hmm. Most Google products, they try to make it really easy and really simple for you to use and implement. But some of them really aren’t. And we’re really thorough and very familiar with Google, and their products, and their tools. And most interfaces are intuitive, but GA4 really isn’t. And so as part of our setup and our onboarding with new clients, we do this for you. But people charge for it. We know some other agencies that charge between a $300 to $900, just to get your GA four installed on your site, and optimized properly with the tracking, and event tracking, conversion tracking that is effective and not wasteful.
I think that out of the box GA4, it comes with a few events that are just like, "Who’s tracking?" It doesn’t mean anything to anybody.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly.
Devon Hayes:
Because it was based on a e-commerce shopper versus a service-based, I think, experience.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And I think it’s the easiest universal things, like time on a page, things like that. But if you’re going to stop and look at your site performance, you don’t really care about a lot of the generic ones that come in the box. You’re going to care about who downloaded this form, or downloaded this PDF? Who filled out this form? And you really do have to go in, and GA four is not going to automatically be able to recognize those actions. You’re going to have to go in and define them.
Devon Hayes:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Another reason why you should call Elevation Marketing today, for all your digital marketing needs. Just kidding. Not kidding. But all right, this show is sponsored by Elevation Marketing. Okay. Let’s see what else we’ve got?
Okay, GSC, Google Search Console. And again, this might seem redundant if you listened to our other episode, but we’re I don’t know how many minutes in. That means there’s two people listening at this juncture.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah.
Devon Hayes:
We’ve got Google Search Console, this is how you’re performing on Google itself before people get through to your website. What search queries do you appear for? What pages are the most important? And of those impressions, meaning how many times that page of your website was served, how many times was it clicked on? You can segment this data, funnel it, go date specific, look at date ranges. Really get an idea for maybe how strong the copy is in your short little snippets, that show up below the page title. Those are called meta descriptions.
If you’re not getting any clicks, but lots of impressions, update it. But it’s really great to see what is Google liking you for? What are they trusting you for? What content are they favoring? How do you make more of that content? How are you trending? Look for some seasonality, cyclical trends with your historical data year over year. It’s great to see what you’re being trusted and favored for on Google itself, before they get to your website. That’s juicy.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. The thing I always find so interesting, is if you were just looking at Google Analytics and trying to determine which of your blogs, for example, are performing the best, you would have a very limited idea. Because a lot of times we’ll find really high impression counts, so Google’s liking it, it’s serving it. Maybe we were not getting a ton of clicks through to it, which to your point earlier, you can update your metas to ideally increase that click-through rate.
But sometimes it’s just that continued brand awareness in the search results. If someone’s doing their research, and they keep seeing articles by you on the topic popping up, then they might eventually take action elsewhere. But it gives you a good idea of, to your point, what Google likes.
Devon Hayes:
Yes.
Amanda Joyce:
You’re not flying blind, and creating content, and guessing at what Google’s actually serving up.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. And I think this is one of the most powerful tools, that is free in SEO. This can indicate a lot. You can look at core vitals in Google Search Console, meaning is your site mobile and desktop friendly? How is it viewing the URLs? Do they see them as problematic? Too slow? Is your contrast not good enough for ADA compliance? Are your elements too close together on mobile?
Search Console can tell you everything you need to know for free, without buying an SEO tool. You can really find out a lot of information, about how Google is viewing you. And if you’re not ranking for something that you want to, you can dive in and you can find a lot of information in Google Search Console.
And even if you are performing really well, and you’re being favored for a ton of terms and queries, and they’re all the keywords that you want to be shown for, really consider that before building a new website, I would say. That’s your golden nugget right here. Because you might have an old website, but if Google likes it? It ain’t broke, honey, there ain’t nothing to fix. You leave it alone. Because it trusts you. It trusts you.
And when you stop being favored, it’s time to make some changes. But know that when you do a completely new website, that’s something to consider. Look at how you’re already being favored, and for what terms. And make sure you incorporate that into your keyword strategy for your new website. Golden tip here.
Okay. Google Business Profile. It’s actually like its own little mini website for you, built by Google. We’ve all seen them. You Google a service-based business, and then you see it pop up on the search engine results page or SERPs, has images of the business, their name, posts, products, hours, reviews. Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And if you’re optimizing it properly, it’s going to show up in that really critical local three-pack. Most of you are probably familiar with it. And if there’s one thing you do really keep an eye on, it’s probably your visibility in that particular area of the SERPs. But…
Devon Hayes:
Oh, yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Oh, yeah. We have a lot of clients that-
Devon Hayes:
I was going to say-
Amanda Joyce:
That’s typically the easiest way, real quick, that our clients like to check up and see how they’re performing, is heading straight there.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. There’s nuance to it. But at the end of the day, we all do want to make sure that we’re ranking in those top spots.
Devon Hayes:
Yep. It was formerly known as GMB, is what I was going to say. It popped into my head. You might’ve heard GMB, Google My Business. For a couple of years now, it’s been Google Business Profile. GMB was easier to say, rolled off the tongue a bit better than GBP… Okay. GLSA, Google Local Services Ads. But this is commonly referred to as Google Guarantee, right?
Amanda Joyce:
Yep.
Devon Hayes:
People use them interchangeably.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s that ads that we’ve all seen there at the very top of our search results that you can click on. And it’s a direct phone call, or sometimes you can message the company. It’s taken over that top spot that we all used to see Google Ads hold for many moons. They’ve rolled it out slowly in different markets.
But to gain your Google Guarantee badge, you have to allow them to run a background check on one of the owners of the company, and provide licensure, and insurance. And it’s based upon your local municipality. They make you provide whatever it is that your municipality uses, to allow you to do business in that area.
Once you’ve gone through that whole process and they’ve approved you, first of all, you get that pretty Google Guarantee badge that you can display proudly on your website. But then it allows you to run these ads if you so choose. We’ve talked about these ads in a lot of episodes. They are really the most cost-effective ad medium at the moment for any contractor, if it’s available in your space. In a lot of markets we find it’s really just a matter of everybody’s fighting for that spot. But then there’s some markets where it’s a little bit slower, and it’s your golden goose if you can opt into that. I could go down a really long pathway on this, but I think that basically summarizes it.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. No, I think that’s perfect. And then last but not least, Google Ads.
Amanda Joyce:
Google Ads. Oh, goodness. Google Ads.
Devon Hayes:
Not to be confused with GLSA or Google Guarantee, not the same. Different platform.
Amanda Joyce:
And not AdWords. It was AdWords for many years, and we were called out by a young one one time, and they told us that we sounded like old ladies because we were calling it AdWords. And I will tell you how often I hear our colleagues still call it AdWords, and it makes me laugh. I’m like, "I’m not the only dinosaur out there still practicing in the industry."
Devon Hayes:
You’re not.
Amanda Joyce:
But nonetheless, Google Ads, AdWords, whatever you want to call it, it’s the ads that we’ve all seen since the inception of Google. It’s what made Google profitable for so many years. It’s the ads that you can have a good amount of text plus a bunch of links underneath them. You can bid on all kinds of different keywords. It’s a great way to game the system, and jump in line from an SEO perspective as you’re letting your SEO take off.
It is however very cost prohibitive. And then after COVID, the cost per clicks have only gone up from there. It’s an advertising medium you can consider, but we assure you that it is not a silver bullet that it might’ve been in the early 2000s.
Devon Hayes:
Beautiful. All right, there you have it. Now you’ve recapped on all the Google products. Some other more technical terms, that have to do with your website. But this concludes our episode of Tech Talk.
Amanda Joyce:
Tech Talk.
Devon Hayes:
I want to punch myself, Tech Talk. You try saying it without sounding like… Tech Talk. Oh, my God. All right. That’s it. If you found this helpful, maybe save this one. I think it’s one of those ones. Or just look at the show notes. We transcribe every episode. It’s on our website, so you can do a big fat Ctrl+F to look for what you need. And hopefully you found it helpful.
Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And if you’re still here, thank you for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, thank you. Like, share, comment, follow. What do they say? All right. Until next time. Thank you.
Amanda Joyce:
That was today’s Trades Secrets. Thanks for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.
Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe, and don’t miss our next reveal.
Devon Hayes:
Until next time.
Listen Now
Past Episodes
E51 — Light Em’ Up Website Roast
E50 — The Google Leak: Sandboxin’ Son of A
E48 – The Top 5 Episodes of 2023
E47—Why Google As Is Risky Business
E46—Why SEO Proposals Are Apples To Oranges
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