Rob Fellingham

We've got a spare ticket for #BrightonSEO that's no longer needed - happy to give it away super cheap to anyone interested 🎫

Heh 😑

@DarrenShaw_ I'd guess the biggest issue here is that the free website was almost definitely doing nothing for them in the first place - so not really any appetite or desire to replace it?

I am a dirty spammer. I sent 1500 spam messages to local businesses. It did NOT go well. Here’s what happened: First, as a vocal hater of cold outreach, why would I do this? Well, I felt strongly that we had developed a wonderful and helpful solution for all those small businesses that were going to lose their Google Business Profile website, and I thought they’d want to know about it. But if you’re using this free basic 1-page website for your business, then you probably don’t care much about SEO or marketing. So you wouldn’t be following me on social media, you wouldn’t be subscribed to our newsletter, and you wouldn’t have heard that we created the perfect alternative for you. How can I tell these small business owners about our solution to their problem? 💡IDEA! I will develop a script to crawl all the business . site sites, identify the ones with a contact form, and then message them to let them know that we developed the exact same site with the same functionality, and it’s only $1/m. They will probably cry tears of joy when our email hits their inbox. We may even receive some gift baskets to thank us for coming to their rescue. I spent a ton of my personal time programming a script (with some help from ChatGPT and Aleksander on UpWork), and then I enlisted some of our team members to click the buttons and paste in our message 1500 times (my sincere apologies to my team). The outcome? 🔹 15 businesses replied (0.01%) 🔹1 person said, “I would like to try this and see how well it does” - Huge success! 🔹5 of them tried to sell me their services 🔹1 person said, “I am permanently closed” 🔹1 person said, “They better not delete nothing” 🔹The rest replied angrily with “NOT INTERESTED!!!” 🔹But my favorite was the guy who said, “Yes, I know, you are the 107th person to send me an email in the last 10 days” Actual signups from this outreach? ZERO What did this cost me? 🔹Scraping API costs: $75 🔹Upwork programmer: $240 🔹Labour from my team: $250 🔹My time: about 25 hours, and I don’t want to try to calculate what that’s worth. Too painful. So remember kids, don’t do drugs, and don’t do spam. Credit to Graydon Hall on our team for coming up with the perfect image to reflect how I feel.

If the design is bang on, it can be easily dismissed, and the content is a shit-hot offer that's likely to benefit the reader - then sure, do it. Otherwise it's a no from me. Thoughts? 💭

It's worth noting that Google *does* actually say sites that use them won't rank as well (developers.google.com/search/blog/20…)

UX thoughts no-one asked for ➡️Pop-ups on a website - worth it for the potential uptick in conversions or do they just piss your users off? I've historically erred on the side of advising clients against them unless there's a really specific and valid use case.

What's your expertise, why are you best placed to talk about this service? Who is the author, what credibility and trustworthiness do they have? Why should your brand be trusted?

If you've got a page that's not getting any clicks from search engines - ask yourself if it demonstrates each of the 4 criteria. Turn it in to questions, what experience have you got and does your website show it?

Reasons why your website isn't ranking - part 2 ✌️📉 Heard of E-E-A-T? Fear not, you're not alone if that means nout to you. But if you run a business and want to rank better, it's important 👇🧵

@jpj_33 😅 I've come across people who do it!

@robfellingham Thought this suggestion was going to be keep clicking the ads to up your rival's spend 😂

Small business owner: "I don't get why my website isn't ranking for [keyword]😔" OK, first place to start - the basics. Head to Google and type in your keyword. Open the top 3 results in a tab each. 🧵

Use that as your very first port of call to work out the page structure and type of content you need to produce 🤓

🤔 What sort of pages are they and is there a common theme? eCommerce, informational pages, blogs? What this tells you is how Google interprets the keyword. If they're all eCommerce, Google thinks people are searching to shop - your page needs to match that same intent.

VW the first car manufacturer to adopt ChatGPT 👀 I'm a little surprised it's taken even this long... it can't be too long before it's adopted universally. Tangent - I wonder what Amazon are planning with Alexa. Already feeling pretty archaic at times.

Good folks in my network - we've overhauled our website and given it a fresh lick of paint. We've kind of 'soft launched', basically it's live but we're not actively shouting about it just yet. 🚀 I'd value any thoughts or feedback if you have a spare minute, link below ⬇️

Agree with this - never fully understood the desire to have so much protection over personal data or browsing. Use me and abuse me, love me some relevant online shopping.

@fatjoedavies Cookbook

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